Small kids told by schools to write letters to legislators to ban DDT.

I have noticed a common trait among educators with their own personal environmental agendas. They like to use small school kids who do not even understand the issues to write letters to government representatives to promote their own often misguided views. Quit abusing and brainwashing our kids to promote your own views or get out of our schools! You are free to debate the issues yourself but when you use small kids that get their views from you to promote your own environmental social agenda you are contemptible.

Henry I. Miller on DDT & Schools on National Review Online

It’s springtime, and political correctness is blooming in Iowa. It takes the form of new Core Curriculum “standards” proposed by the Iowa Department of Education which misinform and manipulate kids.

Application B on the same page, which instructs students to use what they’ve been taught “and other research, [to] write a letter to your legislator arguing against the sale of DDT to Third World countries when it is banned in the U.S.”

This requirement is both stupid and cruel.

Malaria, which is transmitted by the bite of mosquitoes, is one of the worst scourges on the planet, particularly for the inhabitants of poor tropical countries. Forty-one percent of the world’s population live in areas where malaria is transmitted (e.g., parts of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Central and South America, Hispaniola, and Oceania), and each year 350–500 million cases of malaria occur worldwide. More than a million people die, most of them young children in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2002, malaria caused 10.7 percent of all children’s deaths in developing countries. Those who survive are often terribly debilitated.

n 1972, on the basis of data on toxicity to fish and migrating birds (but not to humans), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned virtually all uses of the pesticide DDT, an inexpensive and effective pesticide once widely deployed to kill disease-carrying insects. Not only did government regulators underplay scientific evidence of the effectiveness and relative safety of DDT, but they also failed to appreciate the distinction between its large-scale use in agriculture and more limited application for controlling carriers of human disease. Although DDT is a (modestly) toxic substance, there is a world of difference between applying large amounts of it in the environment — as farmers did before it was banned — and using it carefully and sparingly to fight mosquitoes and other disease-carrying insects. A basic principle of toxicology is that the dose makes the poison.

Since the banning of DDT, insect-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue have been on the rise. Even the United States has not been immune: In 2007, there were 3,623 cases and 124 deaths from mosquito-borne West Nile virus infections, including 30 cases and 3 deaths in Iowa.

The huge toll of diseases spread by mosquitos has caused some bureaucrats to rethink DDT’s use. In 2005, the United States Agency for International Development endorsed DDT for malaria control, following the lead of the World Health Organization.