REAL DDT EXPERTS DISAGREE WITH DDT "EXPERT" TIM LAMBERT

Anti-DDT activist computer programmer Tim Lambert will be disappointed with two Australian academics with actual expertise in public health opposing an imminent ban of the chemical:

A lot of the ban that came about from the late '60s through the '70s was because of quite a legitimate concerns in relation to environmental contamination associated with its use in agriculture, where there was widespread distribution of DDT.

And it does have long persistence and I'm not sure that all the claims about it are necessary valid, but there were legitimate concerns about that.

However, in public health usage particularly in malaria control, the amount of insecticide that's actually used is very small, and it applied to the inside of houses… inside walls of houses, as I mentioned. So the potential for environmental contamination almost doesn't exist.

And:

There's a lot of concern that if we don't have a couple of other insecticides up our sleeves in addition to pyrethroids, that we'll very quickly get resistance to one of the few insecticides we have that we can use against the anopheline mosquitoes.

Many specialists have said that it has been the indoor residual spraying [with DDT] that really turned around South Africa from being a malaria endemic country to being able to now one of the countries identified as being on the road to eliminating malaria from its disease profile.

Lambert rejects the notion that DDT is indispensable, with pyrethroids and bed-nets able to control malaria unassisted. The experts disagree.