More academic attacks

In a recent post, lefty Australian academic and blogger Tim Lambert takes to task two pundits who perpetuate what he sees as the DDT ban hoax. Techincally he's right, there was no actual DDT ban; there was, however, an effective ban in some parts of the world, which he fails to note:

In the early 1990s, for example, the United States Agency for International Development stopped the governments of Bolivia and Belize from using DDT. In Madagascar, the United Nations Development Programme tried to persuade the government to replace DDT with Propoxur, a less effective pesticide. To its credit, Madagascar refused. In Mozambique, both NORAD, the Norwegian development agency, and SIDA, its Swedish counterpart, said that they could not support the use of DDT, as it was banned in their own countries. That the problems of a desperately poor malarial country in Africa might be somewhat different from those of wealthy, non-malarial Scandinavia seems not to have occurred to them.

It's usually best to let people decide what's best for them.

Lambert also fails to note that only minute quantities of DDT are used in the house spraying programs, which are thought to repel mosquitos rather than kill them:

Only 3 percent as many mosquitoes entered the DDT-sprayed hut as the other two. Of those few mosquitoes that did venture in, most exited without biting.

One more thing, in taking the erring pundits to task, Lambert calls them "lazy and ignorant". Hmm, the same words might be applied to Lambert himself.

Anyone wanting to know what Lambert does for a hobby should go here. For an excellent list of links to DDT - malaria articles, go here.