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The World Health Organization is trying to ease concerns about spreading Zika as a result of this summer's Olympics in Rio de Janiero.
"Based on current assessment, cancelling or changing the location of the 2016 Olympics will not significantly alter the international spread of Zika virus," a statement released Saturday reads.
This comes a day after more than 150 scientists released an open letter to the head of WHO calling for the games to be moved or postponed, citing new research. "We make this call despite the widespread fatalism that the Rio 2016 Games are inevitable or 'too big to fail,'" the letter says.
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World Health Organization Spurns Calls to Cancel or Move the Olympics Due to Zika
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(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Monday May 30 2016, @04:10PM
We know DDT is effective, yet harmful to wildlife in the near term. Why not use it just for the games, starting a bit before, and minimize the harm?
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(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 31 2016, @01:04PM
Actually not. Its not harmful in the near term to birds AFAIK but in the long term it bioaccumulates and totally Fs them up. There would be no effect next month but in 20-30 years looking at decade scale graphs you'd likely see an inflection point on the graph.
There are problems.
The first is that when applied with 1st world discipline and intense regulation it was very effective in the 1950s and 60s until resistance evolved mostly due to improper overuse. Its like antibiotics where industrial scale overuse makes it completely useless. So DDT was incredibly effective in the united states in the 1950s. Not so much in Brazil today.
There is a common belief that the USA is the world but many countries have NOT banned DDT. For awhile it was a very signally white new englander progressive student cause type of thing to ban DDT in the 70s and 80s, you can guess the other countries that did it. But its not banned in India or most of the world really, and see above its useless now due to evolved resistance. I don't know the situation in Brazil but I'd assume a plantation owner who wanted to spray DDT could and probably does plus or minus some bribes here and there. They'd probably spray something that actually works. Which is whats being officially proposed anyway.
In the very long run if it were actually banned worldwide, maybe in 40 years mosquitos would lose resistance at which time spraying DDT would work REALLY WELL for 20 years or so until resistance redeveloped.
Another common belief is that DDT is banned and yes you can't dust your corn crop with it or buy five gallon buckets of it at home depot, but there are exemptions and its used today in the USA. Admittedly at annual levels many thousands of times lower than the 1950s.
Much like all photocopiers are Xerox machines and any pill that Fs you up is ecstasy, no matter what it actually is, your comment is OK in spirit in that industrial bug spray would work and is being proposed. Although specifically DDT is pretty useless.
Much like programmers daydream about weird programs I was once going to become a chemist and a high school daydream topic was stuff like, if we pretend the EPA doesn't exist, and given what unlicensed pharmaceutical bucket chemists can successfully accomplish in other fields, what could I do about bugs if I was really pissed off and had a reasonable budget, could I kill any bugs? Could I kill all the bugs on my land? How about my entire city? And my research led me to consider the DDT idea to be pretty useless, although in a similar spirit there are some interesting things to make in the lab that kill bugs. Its a fun daydream challenge to come up with the labware design such that I'd kill bugs and not the chemist, anyone who works with poisonous stuff knows about this level of "fun". DDT is relatively simple, which moth to flame style makes people think it would be an awesome homemade bug spray, but it wouldn't actually work well, which takes the fun away. I suppose if you are tired of birds crapping on your car, a few decades of high DDT exposure would take care of that problem permanently, although a BB gun works too and is faster.