Revisionist History - the Very Old Story of DDT

On one of the FB pages that I spend far too much time on, the subject of DDT came up.  One post from "Gary" asserted:  "....and what about the millions and millions and millions of Africans who died for want of DDT?"

Wow!  Where did that come from?  As it happened, I'd just done some reading about DDT, so I answered with the following:

 "I can only imagine what anti-science website that "information" came from, and it would be a tragic situation if it were true, but it's clearly not, as an examination of the facts would tell you. The USA took action against DDT in 1971. The EPA Administrator at the time was William Ruckelshaus. At the time, he made it quite clear that the ban would not apply outside the USA (obviously, it could not). In fact, he said quite clearly that US manufacturers were free to manufacture DDT and sell it to any country that wanted to buy it. So what happened in Africa? A DDT program was used in Sri Lanka, starting in 1948, I believe, when there were 2.8 million cases of malaria. By 1963, there were only 17. By 1968, cases were on the rise again and DDT wasn't able to control it, despite using even more DDT over larger areas. This is called pesticide resistance, well known in science and agriculture, but not, apparently, in the anti-science community. Sri Lanka finally switched to malathion which did bring malaria rates down again, although not as far as previously. The problem with malaria was finally, by the mid-1970s, recognized to be resistance. The hysteria over this is quite simply revisionist history by anti-environmental and anti-science organizations. Names like Dixie Lee Ray, Steve Milloy, the Heartland Institute... We all know how the Soviet Union routinely carried out historical cleansing, revising the facts, eliminating events and people from official histories. We now have right-wing defenders of American liberty doing the same thing. The simple answer to Africa's still-ongoing malaria problem is that insects evolve. True story. Check it out."

This exchange was my first exposure to a concerted campaign to discredit Rachel Carson, to compare Carson to Hitler, to claim that DDT really wasn't a problem and that environmentalists just want to kill the capitalist economy.

Almost immediately, "Collin Sleuth" responded with: "Dude they used DDT all around the world and abolished malaria, then they banned it when Africa was going to use it."

It's hard to see where any facts would convince someone so willfully ignorant of the truth of the matter and with such a poor grasp of the science involved.  "Collin" continued on to assert that "government" was to blame for everything, including the overuse of DDT that led to resistance in the first place and that we should just "let the market decide"..... at which point I logged off and went to bed.

These are the same folk who denied the link between cigarettes and cancer, denied the link between CFCs and the ozone hole, denier the link between secondhand smoke and cancer, denied the link between acid rain and the death of forests and who now deny that anthropogenic climate change is real.  These are free market fundamentalists.  It's a religion to them and, as such, it's impossible to present facts to counter their beliefs.

These people have been on the wrong side of science and history for over half a century now.  It's time we started telling them to either come up with real proof (not just links to the Heartland Institute) or go away.