by Judi McLeod, Canadafreepress.com
December 27, 2004
Six Canadians, who contracted malaria in the Dominican Republic, became seriously ill after visiting resorts in Punta Cana since mid-October.
In early December, Public Health Canada issued a travel advisory urging people planning to visit the Dominion Republic to take anti-malarial medication before going and to use DEET-based mosquito repellents.
Malaria, spread by mosquito bites, continues to be a problem in many locations of the world.
The people charged with the responsibility of malaria are still in the dark. Indeed, the legacy for the masses from environmental activists like former World Health Organization (WHO) head Gro Harlem Brundtland could be filed: Mobbed by Mosquitoes.
Under Brundtland’s watch came the disastrous failure of the five-plus years Roll Back Malaria initiative.
"Rather than reducing malaria rates, the number has increased by about 10 percent since the World Health Organization put political niceties above medical expediency," says Dr. Roger Bate, director of the health advocacy group, africa Fighting Malaria (aFM). "The WHO will not adopt insecticide spraying which is the cheapest method for reducing the number of mosquitoes that transmit the disease."
Brundtland, replaced at WHO by successor, Korean doctor, Lee Jong-Wook, is former President of Norway.
The first woman to lead WHO, a specialized United Nations agency, her name will long be remembered as bad for the economy by Toronto residents. It was the summer of 2003 t when Brundtland blacklisted Toronto as a travel destination in the SaRS scare.
WHO, which issues communiqués advising that foods ranging from french fries to popcorn are bad for you, could be detrimental to your health.
No bureaucracy can hide that statistics have proven that the mosquito spells death for africa.
Responsible, in part, for large-scale death in malaria-plagued africa, WHO’s anti-pesticide policy crossed continents when environmentalists jumped on the anti-pesticide bandwagon.
Dreaded West Nile virus, transmitted by mosquitoes has plagued North america during the past few summers.
Each year, more than 400 million people in the world become infected with malaria transmitted from anopheles mosquitoes. More than two million people, mostly in africa, die from it.
In 1996, South africa removed DDT from its malaria control program and the result was one of the worst malaria epidemics in the country’s history when hundreds of people lost their lives. The epidemic was subsequently controlled when DDT was reintroduced in 2000 (africa Fighting Malaria).
While DDT goes a long way in saving human life, radical environmentalists argue that it kills the fish in the streams and the butterflies in the fields.
according to aFM’s Dr. Bates, the demonizing of DDT dates all the way back to U.S. President Richard Nixon.
It was the Nixon administration that laid down a blueprint that was to be resurrected decades later by environmentalists.
as Dr. Bate reminds us in February 1970, then President Richard Nixon announced "We have taken action to phase out the use of DDT and other hard pesticides."
In December 1970, the administration created the Environmental Protection agency (EPa) to implement executive environmental policy.
as long as mosquitoes come with wings, the diseases they transmit won’t remain exclusive to africa.
as an aFM communiqué explains: "as more landfills refuse to accept scrapped tires, illegal tire dumps have proliferated across the U.S. and resulted in major sites of mosquito breeding.
"In 1992, authorities located a pile of tires only seven minutes from Walt Disney World in Florida, where billions of mosquitoes had taken up residence. Many were infected with the deadly Eastern equine encephalitis.
In their arguments against pesticides, environmentalists never admit that malaria risks are far greater than those posed by DDT.
and the mosquito is not the only pest playing a major role in heartbreaking human tragedy.
Much less in the headlines are the american children who continue to pay a high health price from exposure to cockroach infestation.
"In less glamourous neighbourhoods, in the tucked-away corners of low-income housing, many thousands of children suffer from a particularly deadly disease at nearly four times the rate of average americans," says Kevin Marchman, executive director of the National Organization of african-americans in Housing.
"That illness is asthma, and the leading cause of those respiratory attacks is allergens, spread by, yes, household pests such as cockroaches.
"It is the housing–often old, deteriorating and surrounded by the grimy conditions that are havens for pests–that create greater opportunities for infestations."
If mosquitoes and roaches were a problem at WHO headquarters, DDT and other pesticides would have made a major comeback by now.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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