Re: email list suggestion - organic or not .....
>And there's my second "rub". They know all about the 'cides and
>how "safe" they are. But history is proving that some/much of what
>education/research has "tested and proved safe" is not. NOT in the
>long run. DDT. Dioxin. Dieldrin. Lindane. Etc.
+++++---------------------
Yes, I', a chemist. Safety often becomes political, not
scientific. We tend to blame the bottles of chemicals rather than the
ignorami that won't or can't read a label and follow instructions.
DDT probably saved more lives than any other chemical. It
almost eliminated malaria! I remember pictures of whole villages in
Italy being treated with DDT in a barn. They had blowers and blew the
stuff down their necks, up their sleeves, up their pant legs.
Pictures showed a column of people moving through a barn between
people with the blowers. There was such a white fog that you could
hardly make anything out.
Now, if you remember, DDT was banned because the brown
pelican eggs were too fragile to survive incubation. I don't know of
any human problem with it. The problem was that it appeared so safe
that people grossly overused it. And the excess got washed into the
streams and thence to the ocean.
We thought of the ocean as an infinite dump. DDT is insoluble
in water, but it is fat-soluble. So the particles floated around
until they encountered a moving piece of fat we call a fish. It would
then dissolve in the fish which in turn got eaten by the brown
pelican.
The knee-jerk reaction. BAN DDT! No one said , "Let's use it
according to instructions, maybe even license people to use it
correctly!". No, no, no, it must be banned. In my opinion,that's was
not very clever!
*****---------------
>
>What is worse, the insects are adapting - because of insect numbers
>and anatomy and their short life spans - to the 'cides. Are humans ?
>who knows which human survivors are surviving the "safe, tested"
>University products being applied to our foods and adapting to them,
>and which are still operating on inherited good genes ?
+++++-------------
I don't think the insects are "adapting" to the insecticides.
Those that are susceptible are not reproducing, leaving the resistant
ones to reproduce. So, yes, the gene pool does a shift, but I don't
think they are "developing" any resistance that wasn't already there!
I'm confident that since there is money to be made and there
are millions of chemists, we will keep ahead of the gene pool shift.
---Chas---
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It's possible to disagree without being disagreeable.
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