From the second article: However, studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States have since shown that DDT didn’t cause the human diseases Carson had claimed. Indeed, the only type of cancer that had increased in the United States during the DDT era was lung cancer, which was caused by cigarette smoking. DDT was arguably one of the safer insect repellents ever invented—far safer than many of the pesticides that have taken its place.
There is some recent evidence of connection to breast cancer:
That said the studies in question ask about very high usage, it's likely that more controlled sprays would be less damaging. That's the point I'm making, using chemicals responsibly can mitigate overall risk while maintaining their benefits. You don't have spray it in buckets everywhere (the procedure during the study period above) to do a good job of mosquito control. Plus you may save far more lives due to less malaria.
EDIT: In re. non-humans, I'm less familiar with that, but I'm an unabashed species-ist, I care that more humans live. If that has some environmental harm, then lets mitigate or try to reduce harm, but humans come first.
"DDT was arguably one of the safer insect repellents ever invented—far safer than many of the pesticides that have taken its place."
Thats missleading, because we don't really use pesticices against mosquitos anymore.
Main "pesticide" today is a living bacteria which targets Mosquitos directly and apparently with not much side-effects to the nature besides reducing mosquitos and totally non-toxic to mammals.
Not sure where you got the idea we don’t spray pesticides for mosquitoes anymore. There are large vector control districts all over the country that do exactly that. You may be interested in the NPIC page.
That does not make sense about the species-ist part because damage or loss to one particular species has all sorts of context-specific ripple effects to everything else.
One would need to assess what if any damage the decrease or extinction of a particular species would cause to the ecology as a whole and the other life forms in it, humans included.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-rachel-carson-cost-million...
From the second article: However, studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States have since shown that DDT didn’t cause the human diseases Carson had claimed. Indeed, the only type of cancer that had increased in the United States during the DDT era was lung cancer, which was caused by cigarette smoking. DDT was arguably one of the safer insect repellents ever invented—far safer than many of the pesticides that have taken its place.
There is some recent evidence of connection to breast cancer:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4524999/
And the WHO has a few concerns:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-cancer-insecticide...
CDC Has a balanced view (though article is old): https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/clusters/fallon/ddtfaq.htm
That said the studies in question ask about very high usage, it's likely that more controlled sprays would be less damaging. That's the point I'm making, using chemicals responsibly can mitigate overall risk while maintaining their benefits. You don't have spray it in buckets everywhere (the procedure during the study period above) to do a good job of mosquito control. Plus you may save far more lives due to less malaria.
EDIT: In re. non-humans, I'm less familiar with that, but I'm an unabashed species-ist, I care that more humans live. If that has some environmental harm, then lets mitigate or try to reduce harm, but humans come first.