DDT Should it be used?

[Michaelangelica]

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3770802a11,00.html

Test food imports, say MPs
20 August 2006
By RUTH HILL

The Green Party is calling on the government to urgently implement testing of all imported foods after a Chinese study found high residues of toxic pesticides, known to cause cancer and birth defects, in some fruit and vegetables.

Last year New Zealand imported $84 million worth of food from China, including meat, fruit and vegetables.

Green MP and food safety campaigner Sue Kedgley said it was "outrageous" that New Zealand -unlike many other countries, including Australia - did not randomly test imported food.

"No wonder so many consumers here want country of origin labelling - that's the only way they can hope to avoid toxic residues," she said.

The tests, conducted by Greenpeace China between last November and April this year on produce grown in Guangdong province, found 86 per cent contained pesticide residues (14 per cent above the national standard), and 25 per cent had traces of illegal pesticides.

One tangerine contained a "toxic cocktail" of eight pesticides, including DDT and two other banned chemicals.

The illegal organochlorine Lindane - a known endocrine disrupter and possible carcinogen - was found in 70% of tomato samples.

[Michaelangelica]

for Science in the Public Interest, a leading consumer rights group, remarked, "'Made from sugar' certainly sounds better than, say, 'made from chlorinated hydrocarbons.' He went on to say, "Splenda's artificiality may present a marketing challenge, but that's not an excuse to confuse consumers and lead them to believe that Splenda is natural or in any way related to sugar."

So if Splenda is made from Chlorinated Hydrocarbons and the way the body deals with these is to wrap them in fat and store them this "Slimming Agent" could be making people fatter.?

[Ganoderma]

It is interesting about countries (new zealand as posted above) not listing chemicals. I know here in Taiwan animal and plant foods are sprayed, fertilized, and druged to the teeth. When I was living in Canada I do not remember seeing any warnings for residues and whatnot. I usually read the labels. from what i see, read, and hear from conversation, south-east asia is a lovely chemical soup. I often wonder if the people that go around looking like a B rate horror movie have such chemicals to blame for their defects.





One thing I noticed was they said that CFC's are four times heavier than air so they dont understand how they can get up into the atmosphere. The paragraph before that said that cfcs, when exposed to UV light, gave off chlorine which is what causes the ozone problem. Seemed like their paper was just like what they were accusing the environmentalists of...

Originally Posted by Michaelangelica

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1 August 2005
Responsible Creation Care II:
Lessons from Past Environmental Crises

by James Sherk| email | print version
Many environmentalists believe human activity and development is morally evil. Consequently, they are predisposed to want to believe these activities also destroy the earth. If they did, that would give them the rationale needed to outlaw these activities. Historically, many environmentalists have embraced scientifically unsound arguments - intentionally or otherwise - without proper skepticism because these arguments reinforce what they already believe: that the government must dramatically curtail human activity. Thus most environmentalists embraced the acid rain, Ozone Hole, and DDT causes without the proper skepticism they should have displayed.

Christians do not share these presuppositions - we do not believe in the moral evil of human development - and so Christians should be skeptical of environmentalist claims which are motivated by profoundly non-Christian moral convictions about the evil of human activity itself. A rush to regulate human development often does nothing to care for God's creation and may interfere with other Christian responsibilities - such as our obligation to help the poor. Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and similar organizations have an agenda that leads them to rush to judgment, no matter how weak the science. Christians do not share this agenda and should not promote it when it conflicts with other Christian duties.

[Michaelangelica]

Originally Posted by Ganoderma

It is interesting about countries (new zealand as posted above) not listing chemicals. I know here in Taiwan animal and plant foods are sprayed, fertilized, and druged to the teeth. When I was living in Canada I do not remember seeing any warnings for residues and whatnot. I usually read the labels. from what i see, read, and hear from conversation, south-east asia is a lovely chemical soup. I often wonder if the people that go around looking like a B rate horror movie have such chemicals to blame for their defects.


One thing I noticed was they said that CFC's are four times heavier than air so they dont understand how they can get up into the atmosphere. The paragraph before that said that cfcs, when exposed to UV light, gave off chlorine which is what causes the ozone problem. Seemed like their paper was just like what they were accusing the environmentalists of...

I had afriend a PHd chemist doing reseach at a local uni. He found some lettuces at his local fruit and veg shope that were covered in white powder. He took them back to the lab tested them and found masses of some chlorinated hydrocarbon.
So he thought he would report it. But just for interest he did it first as a"concerned citizen". He was given the brush off:
"Wash them they will be OK" was the reply by both the Health and Environmental Government Departments.
He then rang again and said he had detected XXX amount of CHs in lettuce he had purchased
"Who are you?" was The agitated reply "How do you know this?".
"I am Dr, J XXX from YYY University"
" I tested the lettuce with my Gas Chromatograph They had Xppm of CHs"
"Where did you buy the lettuces?"
Within 30 minutes all lettuces had been confiscated and taken off sale by the health department.
The "concerned citizen" just didn't cut mustard..

I just think no one wants to know. Especially Government Departments.
There was a recent scare about CH in the fish in Sydney Harbour (Near a Chemical (ICI?)plant that made Agent Orange for the Vietnam War). All fishing in Sydney harbour was banned yet the Health Dept refused to test fishermen for blood or fat pesticide levels. An environmental Dr (Dr Donahue ) arranged for the blood of one fisher family to be sent to Germany for testing. The whole family had shocking levels of CHs in their blood. Now we are told by the health Department that that is not a problem.Fishing is still banned in the Harbour.

I don't think any government dept does regular checks. I have tried to find the analysis of my local lake water on Government web-sites.
I know it has been done but all I can find is a few ocean sites where pollution levels were "acceptable" the raw data is buried.


I came across this article today.
I find it interesting because of the widespread belief among academics and journalists and the public that DDT has been banned. When it hasn't
http://www.theherald.co.za/herald/news/n20_23082006.htm

‘Dirty dozen‘ fear after baboons die of lethal pesticide

By Melanie Gosling

Cape Town – Three young baboons that died here last week were poisoned with dieldrin, a lethal pesticide that is banned in South Africa and in 51 other countries because of its potentially devastating effects on human and environmental health.

Dieldrin, like DDT, is one of the “dirty dozen” poisons banned in countries that have signed the UN‘s Stockholm Convention.

[Ganoderma]

have any policies changed after the lettuce was recalled? I dont know about OZ but i assume it is at least similar to canada in that if you go down to teh government they will, by law, give you any information regarding such tests. I assume they are also liek canada in that they "misplace" some test results

**sorry!

[Chacmool]

Ganoderma, please rephrase, or the sentence containing the expletive may be deleted. These forums are viewed by youngsters as well, so we try to keep the language clean.

[HydrogenBond]

There is some inconsistencies of behavior. Anyone who uses drycleaning, wears cleanly pressed clothes containing chloro-carbons from the cleaning process residues. One may not be eating it, but one is still inhaling it. In this case, one does a personal risk analysis with someone else doing your clothes worth the risk of personal harm The same should be true of DDT. In some countries the risk may be worth it, in the short term. In other countries, the opposite may be true. It is not one size fits all.

For example, during the industrial revolution until the 1950's or so, advanced cultures did everything wrong with respect to the environment. This quick and easy approach may have allowed rapid progress. There was a penalty with respect to human and environmental health. But the easy path also made these cultures aware and wealthy enough to clean up the problem. The net result was an erasing of past mistakes, combined with continued prosperity. Evolving cultures could benefit by the easy path too, until the time they can reach enough prosperity and experience to accommodate the adjustments.

If the US went from 1800 to 2000 and skipped everything in the middle, this country would be far different than today. You can see this affect in fourth world countries, where foreign capitalists and corrupt politians run the countries. The majority have lost the benefit of the learning curve and have become fodder for the few running the show.

[Michaelangelica]

Originally Posted by HydrogenBond

If the US went from 1800 to 2000 and skipped everything in the middle, this country would be far different than today. You can see this affect in fourth world countries, where foreign capitalists and corrupt politians run the countries. The majority have lost the benefit of the learning curve and have become fodder for the few running the show.

Yes. All very true.
(There is a fair amount of corruption and double standards in our own political shows - Human Rights for example).

It must appear to the Under-developed world that the West has double standards. But then we were ignorant about the effects of many new man-made chemicals, such as chlorinated hydrocarbons and ozone depleting gasses.
Can the world environment really cope with all the Chinese and Indians driving gas-guzzling Fords and making the same mistakes we did (again)?

Perhaps we need to foot the bill by paying for bi-degradable pesticides and funding Malaria research.(Surprisingly Bill Gates is helping)
World aid has been steadily decreasing as a % of GDP for decades.

Many Western companies set up in Under-developed countries because Environmental Laws are not so stringent. This sort of amoral corporate behaviour should not be allowed by the world community.

Are CHs used in Dry Cleaning? Seems an overkill.

[Michaelangelica]

Looks like America is happy to pay for the use of a pesticide it has banned it its own country:-
So much for paying for an organic alternative.
I guess they will end up importing it back eventually.

DDT makes a comeback in effort to halt malaria
By Scott Calvert
Sun foreign reporter
Originally published August 27, 2006
MAPHUNGWANE, Swaziland // Men in blue coveralls and white surgical masks began their annual trek into the countryside here last week. Methodically, they sprayed one home after another with a chemical most Americans probably thought disappeared from use long ago: DDT.

As villagers looked on, the workers doused inside and outside walls with a fine mist. It is a yearly effort to repel and kill mosquitoes that carry malaria - a disease that kills more than a million people a year, mostly children in sub-Saharan Africa.

This small kingdom near South Africa is one of a handful of countries still using the pesticide, banned in the United States in 1972 because of its toxic effect on eagles and other wildlife.

But now DDT is poised for expansion in the developing world.

The influential World Health Organization plans to promote DDT as a cheap and effective tool against malaria. And the U.S. government has boosted its budget for malarial insecticide spraying in Africa twenty-fold, to $20 million next year

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nat...home-headlines

[Ganoderma]

her eis a tea shop in a nearby city. they name translated is "DDT Tea Taste/test"