Shocking statistic from "Idol Gives Back" - and completely avoidable???

[Little-Acorn]

Watching "American Idol Gives Back" tonight. They went to Africa, and are doing some sort of expose' on how rough people have it there. Doesn't take much producing or acting - they DO have it very rough.

And the most shocking statistic is one they recited near the beginning of the show: Every 30 seconds, someone dies from malaria in Africa. And 90% of all malaria deaths worldwide, occur in Africa.

A death every thirty seconds, is more than a MILLION deaths per year.

And it's not from something like cancer, which no one knows how to prevent or cure. It's from malaria... a disease that has been all but eradicated in many parts of the world. It's spread by the Anopheles mosquito, which carries the germ, and infects a human when the mosquito bites him.

That mosquito has been all but eliminated in the United States and most other modern countries. Thorough spraying with the insecticide DDT has effectively eliminated the threat of malaria in all those countries. Various environmental whackos tried to stop it, naturally, predicting disasters of various magnitudes, but none of their predictions ever came true (this is always the outcome of the whackos' predictions).

But now we find that DDT has been banned, when countries like Africa have people dying by the millions from a disease that DDT could control! And why? Because of fears that a few birds might be harmed! And not even the birds, really - the whackos are worried that the shells of their egg might be the wrong thickness, and a greater percentage of baby birds die than ordinarily do.

Let me get this straight.

These people think that millions of people dying, men women and children, is not too great a price to pay for keeping birds' egg shells the right thickness???

I haven't studied this as much as I usually study things, and I have to believe I missed something that justifies the withholding of a known cure for malaria, with relatively mild side effects, from people who are literally dying for it.

Someone PLEASE tell me what I've left out here.

PLEASE.

[Mr. P]

Watching "American Idol Gives Back" tonight. They went to Africa, and are doing some sort of expose' on how rough people have it there. Doesn't take much producing or acting - they DO have it very rough.

And the most shocking statistic is one they recited near the beginning of the show: Every 30 seconds, someone dies from malaria in Africa. And 90% of all malaria deaths worldwide, occur in Africa.

A death every thirty seconds, is more than a MILLION deaths per year.

And it's not from something like cancer, which no one knows how to prevent or cure. It's from malaria... a disease that has been all but eradicated in many parts of the world. It's spread by the Anopheles mosquito, which carries the germ, and infects a human when the mosquito bites him.

That mosquito has been all but eliminated in the United States and most other modern countries. Thorough spraying with the insecticide DDT has effectively eliminated the threat of malaria in all those countries. Various environmental whackos tried to stop it, naturally, predicting disasters of various magnitudes, but none of their predictions ever came true (this is always the outcome of the whackos' predictions).

But now we find that DDT has been banned, when countries like Africa have people dying by the millions from a disease that DDT could control! And why? Because of fears that a few birds might be harmed! And not even the birds, really - the whackos are worried that the shells of their egg might be the wrong thickness, and a greater percentage of baby birds die than ordinarily do.

Let me get this straight.

These people think that millions of people dying, men women and children, is not too great a price to pay for keeping birds' egg shells the right thickness???

I haven't studied this as much as I usually study things, and I have to believe I missed something that justifies the withholding of a known cure for malaria, with relatively mild side effects, from people who are literally dying for it.

Someone PLEASE tell me what I've left out here.

PLEASE.

Common sense maybe? 1 million a yr? Right, I believe that as much as I do the 100 acres a day the South American rain forest loses. They've been saying that since the first earth day, about 40 yrs ago. There shouldn't be any rain forest now..but there is and I think they still make the same claim.

Edit: One more thing ya may have missed..It's a fund raiser. :poke:

[PostmodernProphet]

Common sense maybe? 1 million a yr? Right, I believe that as much as I do the 100 acres a day the South American rain forest loses. They've been saying that since the first earth day, about 40 yrs ago. There shouldn't be any rain forest now..but there is and I think they still make the same claim.

Edit: One more thing ya may have missed..It's a fund raiser. :poke:

actually, I just did some quick math....based on the information here...
http://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/
if they cut down the rain forest at a rate of 100 acres a day it would take 59,000 years to eliminate the rain forest in Brazil alone.....(1.3 million square miles of rain forest in Brazil)

[Gaffer]

When I was a kid they use to have a fogging truck that drove up and down the neighborhood streets spraying DDT to kill the mosquitoes. There was a real thick fog behind the truck and us kids would ride our bicycles right behind it. It was cool to be riding blind in a fog. And the fog had a good smell to it. We could also stay out later in the evening without skeeter bites. If they would spray the areas of africa with DDT they could rid the area of malaria in the first year.

More people die in Africa from machetes and bullets then malaria. But the wackos don't care about that either.