Welcome to the third world, in the USA

It is an advantage to be just old enough to have caught the end of one trend, lived through another trend, and now be at the beginning of a third trend. This is about health care and public policy. It is about the mosquito and all the bad diseases that come with mosquitoes. It has been a quiet issue in the USA thanks to our older ancestors. Now it is a noisier issue thanks to our more immediate ancestors. It is noisy because people are becoming sick, and dieing, because of their public policies, today. Until one gets sick from malaria, or west nile virus, it may seem like an academic issue. For thousands, soon to be millions, it is not.

For the uninitiated, mosquitoes breed in warm stagnant waters in the equatorial areas, and this includes the coastal plain of the USA. And they bring diseases like malaria, and west nile virus. In the USA, malaria was a terrible disease in the South until recently, like the 1930’s. Then our government had an aggressive campaign to drain the wetlands in order to stop mosquito breeding. In one local area in South Carolina, 17,000 acres of upland had 63 miles of ditches cut to drain the wetlands. Incredibly, our government is now paying money to landowners to restore these same wetlands. Enough deaths should bring this policy to an end.

A very big complicating factor was Rachel Carson’s 1960’s book “Silent Spring”. Well it turns out her science was poor, and it has been superceded by the advantages of time; and bottom line, DDT is back in. Even the World Health Organization (WHO) promotes DDT in Africa, and I hope soon, in the USA.

So where does this all lead. As long as environmentalists promote wetlands the future from a disease point of view is dim. Thousands in the USA, and maybe millions, will begin to suffer and die from malaria and even west nile virus. And the environmentalists still want to take away our DDT option already recommended by WHO. Are we stupid or something?