Changes

Brignell retired in the late 1990's from his academic career and now devotes his time to his interest in debunking the use of what he claims to be false statistics common in much of today's media. He presents his views on his website ''Numberwatch'', which was launched in July 2000, and is "devoted to the monitoring of the misleading numbers that rain down on us via the media. Whether they are generated by Single Issue Fanatics (SIFs), politicians, bureaucrats, quasi-scientists (junk, pseudo- or just bad), such numbers swamp the media, generating unnecessary alarm and panic. They are seized upon by media, hungry for eye-catching stories. There is a growing band of people whose livelihoods depend on creating and maintaining panic." [http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/number%20watch.htm]

The author of the ''Deltoid'' blog, Tim Lambert, took issue with Brignell and others claims. "Now when you think about it, the story that they tell just isn't credible. If DDT spraying had almost eliminated malaria, and they got a new outbreak, then no environmentalists would be able to stop them from resuming spraying," he wrote. On investigationg investigating Lambert found that Sri Lanka did restart spraying with DDT but found that the target mosquito had grown resistant to DDT.

It is noteworthy Brignell and his ideological supporters believe that that the use of DDT in Sri Lanka, by reducing the number of deaths per year from malaria from 2.8 million in 1948 to 17 18 in 1963, had by 1970 saved about 56 million lives. It must be assumed that if it hadn't been banned it could have resulted in similar savings of life in other countries where malaria is a problem. Brignell states that the number of deaths due to malaria "makes The Holocaust look like a dress rehearsal." However, their argument willfully omits a number of important facts. For starters, Rachel Carson herself was not opposed to all pesticide use. Prophetically, she worried that widespread agricultural use of pesticides would ''endanger'' efforts to control malaria, typhus and other diseases. In ''Silent Spring'', she wrote, "No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored. The question that has now urgently presented itself is whether it is either wise or responsible to attack the problem by methods that are rapidly making it worse. The world has heard much of the triumphant war against disease through the control of insect vectors of infection, but it has heard little of the other side of the story - the defeats, the short-lived triumphs that now strongly support the alarming view that the insect enemy has been made stronger by our efforts. Even worse, we may have destroyed our very means of fighting." Carson noted that the widespread use of DDT created selection pressure that led to the emergence of DDT-resistance mosquitoes and flies. As science writer Laurie Garrett notes in her 1994 book, ''The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases In a World Out of Balance'', the early success of efforts to control malaria contributed to the disease's later resurgence. The effort to control the disease was led by malariologist Paul Russell, who promised in 1956 that a multimillion-dollar effort could eliminate the disease by 1963: "Thus, in 1958 Russell's battle for malaria eradication began, backed directly by $23.3 million a year from Congress. Because Russell had been so adamant about the time frame, Congress stipulated that the funds would stop flowing in 1963. ... It was a staggering economic commitment, the equivalent of billions of dollars in 1990." By 1963, however, malaria "had indeed reached its nadir. But it had not been eliminated. ... But a deal's a deal. Russell promised success by 1963, and Congress was in no mood to entertain extending funds for another year, or two. As far as Congress was concerned, failure to reach eradication by 1963 simply meant it couldn't be done,in any time frame. And at the time virtually all the spare cash was American; without steady infusions of U.S. dollars, the effort tied abruptly." Worse yet, :Thanks to the near-eradication effort, hundreds of millions of people now lacked immunity to the disease, but lived in areas where the ''Anopheles'' [mosquitos that carry the disease] would undoubtedly return. Pulling the plug abruptly on their control programs virtually guaranteed future surges in malaria deaths, particularly in poor countries lacking their own disease control infrastructures. As malaria relentlessly increased again after 1963, developing countries were forced to commit ever-larger amounts of scarce public health dollars to the problem. India, for example, dedicated over a third of its entire health budget to malaria control. ... :At the very time malaria control efforts were splintering or collapsing, the agricultural use of DDT and its sister compounds was soaring. Almost overnight resistant mosquito populations appeared all over the world. ... By the time the smallpox campaign was approaching victory in 1975, parasite resistance to chloroquine and one is obliged mosquito resistance to agree with himDDT and other pesticides were so widespread that nobody spoke of eliminating malaria. (''The Coming Plague'', pp.46-52)