Updated Aug. 16, 2007 12:01 am ET

Last year, the World Health Organization reversed a 25-year-old policy and recommended using the pesticide DDT to fight malaria in the Third World. A new study published in the public health journal, PLoS ONE, provides more evidence that the decision was long overdue.

The U.S. and Europe solved their malaria problem a half-century ago by employing DDT, but the mosquito-borne disease remains endemic to the lowland tropics of South America, Asia and Africa, where each year a half-billion people are infected and more than a million...

This is the only existing photo of Chernobyl taken on the morning of the nuclear accident. The heavy grain is due to the huge amount of radiation in the air that began to destroy the camera film the second it was exposed.

The primary source for the infamous Steele dossier was a business analyst from Russia who lived in Washington, the source’s attorney confirmed to The Epoch Times on July 26.

Following the lead of open-source reporting by internet sleuths, The Epoch Times identified and contacted the analyst, Igor Danchenko, on July 19, but received no response and refrained from publicizing his identity.

“Igor Danchenko has been identified as one of the sources who provided data and analysis to Orbis Business Intelligence,” March Schamel, Danchenko’s attorney, wrote in an email.

Orbis Business Intelligence is the company co-founded by former British intelligence office Christopher Steele. //

While Schamel did not say his client was Steele’s primary source, the confirmation that Danchenko is one of the sources is sufficient to establish that he is the primary source based on the recently declassified record of Danchenko’s January 2017 interview with the FBI.

Steele claimed that he based the vast majority of his dossier on reports from Danchenko, who in turn had a network of sub-sources. The dossier played a central role in the FBI’s decision to secure a warrant to spy on Trump campaign associate Carter Page in October 2016.

The Department of Justice inspector general determined that the FBI’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications were riddled with errors, some of the most egregious of which had to do with Steele falsifying and overhyping what he had learned from Danchenko. Steele also presented rumors Danchenko had passed on as credible claims.

The FBI interviewed Danchenko for three days in late January 2017. During the interview, Danchenko disputed some of the claims attributed to him in the dossier and told agents that allegations Steele had presented as credible were merely bar rumors.

She died within the following month.

All of this is nonsense. Humans have forever been “subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals”: literally thousands of dangerous chemicals are ubiquitous in nature – hydrogen cyanide, oxalic acid, carbon monoxide, lead, hydrogen sulphide, aflatoxin, the soup of toxins in smoke from fires for warmth and cooking, and many more natural nasties can cause illness or death.

Contrary to Carson’s suggestion, no amount of DDT can cause leukemia or any other form of cancer to develop in a matter of months, if ever, and the chemical is not acutely toxic: no one is known to have died of DDT poisoning. The massive quantities of DDT dispersed into the environment caused no silent springs or cancer epidemics.

Carson’s suggestion notwithstanding, DDT was not a product of World War II weapons research, having been first synthesised in 1874. The much more acutely toxic parathion, suggested as a suitable alternative upon the banning of DDT, is a close relative of the chemical warfare agents (so called nerve gases) sarin and VX, however.

In any event, DDT and other commonly encountered synthetic pesticides are no more dangerous to the average human’s health than are the natural chemicals in our food, eminent cancer researcher Bruce Ames estimating that “99.99% (by weight) of the pesticides in the American diet are chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves.” Many of these chemicals are known to cause cancer in laboratory rats. Cooking food also produces dangerous chemicals, some of which are carcinogenic and also found in tobacco smoke.

According to Ames, a single cup of coffee contains more potential natural carcinogens than a human will consume of potentially carcinogenic synthetic pesticide residues in a year. This doesn’t mean that we should stop drinking coffee and eating fruits and vegetables in order to avoid the carcinogens they contain.

The point is that the tiny amounts of the synthetic and natural chemicals we encounter continuously throughout our lives generally pose a vanishingly small threat to our health. Many on the left do not see it that way, Paul Ehrlich warning that DDT and related chemicals "may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945" predicting that American life expectancy could drop to the low 40s by 1980. With the chemical “threat” failing to materialize the left now tells us we must fear a new “threat” to our health: genetically engineered foods.

Norman Borlaug, widely credited as the father of the Green Revolution, which saved upwards of a billion developing world lives, was contemptuous of anti-chemical “fear-provoking, irresponsible environmentalists”, publicly calling their efforts to ban DDT and other agricultural chemicals “vicious” and “hysterical”. Given that the modern environmental movement was built on Rachel Carson’s fear-provoking, irresponsible and at times hysterical cornerstone – Silent Spring – it’s only natural that the movement shares these characteristics. The viciousness? It’s the left’s traditional tool for silencing opposition. If that doesn’t work there’s always violence.

curated by Marilyn M. Singleton, M.D., J.D. Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 Note: A COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) particle is 0.125 micrometers (μm); influenza virus size is 0.08 – 0.12 μm; a human hair is about 150 μm. *1 nm = 0.001 micron; 1000 nm = 1 micron; Micrometer (μm) is the preferred name for micron (an older term) […] //

Conclusion: Wearing masks will not reduce SARS-CoV-2.
N95 masks protect health care workers, but are not recommended for source control transmission.
Surgical masks are better than cloth but not very efficient at preventing emissions from infected patients.
Cloth masks will be ineffective at preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission, whether worn as source control or as personal protective equipment (PPE).
“Masks may confuse that message and give people a false sense of security. If masks had been the solution in Asia, shouldn’t they have stopped the pandemic before it spread elsewhere?” //

Advice to decision makers on the use of masks for healthy people in community settings

As described above, the wide use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not supported by current evidence and carries uncertainties and critical risks.”

How times have changed.

Top photo circa 1989 -- typewriters

bottom photo circa 1998 -- computers