April 22 is not a moment to celebrate the wonder of this unique planet. It’s an opportunity to recognize what next steps we need to take to secure a better future.
In light of the fuss over Robert Di Niro and the movie Vaxxed; if anyone needs reminding of the value of vaccines, take a look at this diagram of 20th Century Death. These are estimates as they say but even so the numbers are humbling. I won’t go into the story behind the movie and its writer, director and one-time (now unlicensed) doc, that has been covered plenty (instead here is an interesting NYT article about the developer of the measles vaccine, Dr. Maurice Hilleman.
Facts about the water quality crisis in Flint, Michigan are in the paper almost every day and the chemistry and toxicology of what went wrong, at first blush, appear to be fairly straightforward and easy to understand.
Mosquitoes, along with their disease-causing hitchhikers like West Nile, Equine encephalitis, Dengue, and now Zika, are on the move, finding new habitats and naïve populations ripe for infection. Just as Lyme has made tick experts out of us all (no, that one is just a dog tick), we are on a first-name basis with mosquitoes like Aedes and Culex.
The proposal to bring DDT out of the retired arsenal of chemical weaponry to control mosquito vectors carrying the Zika virus is a Pandora’s Box of problems. And these are not hypothetical problems. The mosquitoes and the virus are biological threats that have emerged because of disruptions to the broader environment, all of which are connected to human population growth and simplification of the ecosystems humans live in. While the Zika virus is a very real threat to human health, the answer to this threat is not DDT.
Have you ever been to a community that was exposed to inland flooding, hurricane surge, and future sea level rise? A community that is exposed to such poor air quality that a 2005 Houston Chronicle report compared it to "sitting in traffic 24/7"? Welcome to the super neighborhoods of Manchester, Harrisburg, and Magnolia Park, adjacent to oil refineries and the Houston Ship Channel in East Houston, Texas.
This post originally appeared at Emily Monosson's blog: Evolution in a Toxic World
We live in an age of pesticide and antibiotic overuse. One outcome is resistance, increasing pesticide use and contamination and fears that we are entering the “post-antibiotic era”. We are addicted to all sorts of commercial chemicals.