At 08:29 AM -0700 9/1/07, Paul Cherubini wrote: >until (and if) new, comparably cost-effective anti-malarial drugs or >pesticides for mosquito control are ever developed.
On the issue of cost-effectiveness, and the argument that there are no cost-comparable treatments out there, where DO prices come from? The idea that "the market" sets these prices is only true in a very limited way, in very special circumstances. Pharmaceutical companies make all sorts of decisions about profit and about production volumes that are much more influential in setting prices than the magical supply and demand curves of a "free market". When you have a few suppliers, and many buyers, you do not have a free market. So the argument that DDT is the "cheapest" solution available is at least specious, if not downright horrid. People ARE dying, and yet pharmaceutical companies in the West are able to use patent laws to make profit first? The argument that they have to recover their R&D investment is made a lie by Henry Ford's argument that sales volume makes up for exorbitant pricing. Do we sell a hundred units at a thousand bucks or a thousand units at a hundr! ed bucks? As for this business of "limited spraying," where do you think antibiotic drug resistance comes from? How did human pharmaceuticals come to be ubiquitous in the ecosphere? Put a biochemical remedy out there, and it WILL be abused. People are neither smart nor responsible in their use of harmful substances. We will consistently assume that if a teeny bit is good, then a lot must be great. To the extent that there is a vote being made, I vote firmly against substances like DDT. (And I challenge anyone to tell me that I am indifferent to the cost in human lives.) Read Crawford Holling's article at http://www.csun.edu/~vasishth/Holling+Ecology_and_Planning.pdf. Cheers, - Ashwani Vasishth [EMAIL PROTECTED] (818) 677-6137 http://www.csun.edu/~vasishth/ http://www.myspace.com/ashwanivasishth -------------------------------------------------------- >Kelly Stettner wrote: > >> For some reason, I thought that Rachel Carson's allegation >> about sea bird eggshells had been disproven? > >Kelly, whether or not Rachel Carson's allegation was correct >is not relevant to the DDT indoor house wall treatment issue. > >Why? > >a) Because on a landscape scale, the amount of DDT used per >acre of land per year for malaria control (house wall >treatments) in developing countries is many >thousands of times LESS than the amount of DDT >that was used per acre per year in the USA on >agricultural crops in 1950's. Therefore indoor house wall >usage of DDT could not conceivably result in significant >outdoor biomagnification, bioaccumulation, demasculinization, >etc. environmental effects. > >b) DDT wettable powder is also relatively insoluble in water, >so even when a house collapses and decays, DDT will >not easily move from the house site. > >c) DDT mostly repels rather than kills mosquitoes from >treated homes, hence acquired resistance is not a big >problem either. Meanwhile, DDT buys time and could >save hundreds of thousands or millions of lives until (and >if) new, comparably cost-effective anti-malarial drugs or >pesticides for mosquito control are ever developed. > >Paul Cherubini >El Dorado, Calif.
