Tuesday, December 30, 2008

The Debate over DDT and Malaria continues

Picture source www.waterwereld.nu/muggelarveeng.html
DDT-dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane

The debate over using DDT to control Malaria has continued since the insecticide was banned in the USA in Dec. 1972. However, the 2006 controversial decision of WHO to actively support the use of DDT in Malaria control stirred a heated debate. Since the popular book Silent Spring of the environmentalist Rachel Carson in 1962, the DDT got a reputation as one of the most infamous chemicals.
Environmental groups and activists expressed strong reservation and concern over the WHO's change of policy that "DDT has been found to cause cancer, endocrine disruption, adverse effect on the immune system and is very problematic from the standpoint that it is persistent" as reported by the executive director of Beyond Pesticides.
In Sudan, Professor Abadi's research study in the 1970s found that traces of DDT present in human milk exceeded five times the Maximum Allowable Concentrates (MAC). In another study, Elgadi found in 1993 that several soil samples taken from a site close by the Blue Nile banks had contained more than 1000 times the MAC of DDT.
The contamination was attributed to the large quantities of DDT that were dumped after the ban of the chemical in all agricultural activities in Sudan in 1980.
The case for the DDT use is represented by a researcher in this link:
"DDT residual house spraying is an inexpensive, highly effective, practice against malaria, and it has been approved by the World Health Organization. In it, trained sprayers apply a small quantity of DDT on the interior walls and eaves of homes in endemic regions. The quantities involved are minimal (2 g/m2) and, unlike agricultural uses which inject tonns of DDT into the outdoors; indoor house spraying results in little harmful release to the environment. For the amount of DDT used on a cotton field, all the high risk residents of a small country can be protected from Malaria."
The case against DDT is supported by many reserachers beside Rachel Carson. A recent Canadian study from 2007 found a positive association between DDE and non-Hodgkin Lymphoma ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Effects_on_human_health)
The debate will continue, and we will continue at this Blog to bring all viewpoints until the world finds a cure to this deadly Malaria disease...

Monday, October 20, 2008

Welcome to 'Freedom and Wellness' blog

This site is under construction...
Please visit us soon...
A welcome word from the board of directors:
Dear friend,
Welcome to our website that was established in
October
2008. We appreciate your taking time to visit and hope you find useful information here and share your comments. When we thought of the idea of our website; our main goal was to create a window through which we can support the promotion of health and human rights. We commit to our belief in the concept of liberation medicine and that health-care is a right for all who need it. Through activism on the web and in actual, we plan to run educational programs to raise awareness about human rights and the well-being of humanity and do all we can to help people deal with their health problems.
Our concern is also about teaching tolerance, a main issue in societies where a variety of cultures, ideologies, races, ethnic and religious groups meet and mix together to deal with daily life matters. An issue that we strongly believe should be considered in school educational programs from the
early school years.

Our board of directors includes:
- M. M. Elgadi, President
- Mohamed Ibrahim, Secretary
- Rasheed Ali, Treasurer

We are grateful to those who helped bring this site to reality to spread the word and
let our mission reach to everyone.

Truly,
M. M. Elgadi
for the Board