This entry was posted on Thursday, September 15th, 2016 at 5:57 pm and is filed under DDT, Disease, India, Malaria, Public health, Science.	You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Problem with DDT is it doesn't work. It no longer kills mosquitoes the way it did in 1955. Every mosquito on Earth has alleles of resistance, and many populations are completely immune, almost as immune as bedbugs.
So, using DDT defeats the purpose. It still effectively kills mosquito predators who cannot evolve nearly so fast as mosquitoes, and it does NOT kill mosquitoes, leaving them free to breed, multiply and spread disease.
So far, there is not an antivirus to fight Zika. Prevention is the best we can do. Even there, our current defenses are, at best, primitive.
In India, a country where even "Developing" would be a stretch, there is untold poverty, a lack of sanitary conditions and even potable water, there solution seems to be: DDT is cheap and, with 1.3 billion people, the poor are expendable.
We are an advanced society, a wealthy economy and should be working harder to eradicate the Aedes Aegypti mosquito. We should be setting the standard, and yet we're not. Why does political idiocy always have to get in the way?