I wish I had a shilling for every time someone told me spraying homes with DT to prevent malaria is like using Africans in evil experiments. I would be a rich woman.

That claim is a blatant falsehood. Even worse, it hides the many ways poor Africans really are being used in environmental experiments that cause increased poverty, disease and death.

If any people were ever used in DDT experiments, it was Americans and Europeans. During World War II, this insecticide and mosquito repellant was sprayed on tents and around camps to keep American and British soldiers from getting malaria. After the war, millions of concentration camp survivors, and millions of German and Italian citizens were sprayed with DDT (right on their bodies) to prevent typhus.

Then in the 1950s and 1960s, America and Europe sprayed huge amounts of DDT all over, as a critical part of their campaign to eradicate malaria. Yes, they still had malaria in those countries! But not anymore.

Numerous scientific and medical studies found that DDT was safe, and that it did not cause cancer or other health problems worse that skin rashes, even with high levels of exposure. Anti-insecticide activists still say “some experts think” DDT “may be linked” to things such as low birth weights in newborn babies, lactation failure in nursing mothers or slight reductions in mental power. However, they have never been able to prove any of this – and we know malaria clearly does cause these problems.

America and Europe banned DDT anyway, but only after they had used it to eliminate malaria. And in Africa we only want to spray a little on the walls of houses, to keep mosquitoes out, keep them from biting if they do come in the house, and save millions of lives! Nothing else works as well, at any price.

America and Europe used a chemical (DDT) that environmentalists now claim is dangerous. But the chemical got rid of malaria. Nobody got cancer or other health problems from DDT.

Just as important, around the same time, thousands of brave American and Canadian parents let their children be used in another health experiment: they had them inoculated with the Salk vaccine, to see if it would prevent polio. It worked! And it started a worldwide program that has almost eliminated that terrible disease.

If Africans used DDT for indoor residual spraying, they will be using a chemical that America, Europe, India, South Africa, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe have all shown is effective in fighting malaria, and safe for people and the environment.

But environmentalists still say, don’t do it in Uganda, Rwanda and other countries where malaria is still killing our parents and babies. They say we should just use bed nets, ACT drugs and maybe some Icon. These things certainly help. But they only reduce malaria by 30% or so – whereas we could prevent and almost eradicate this disease, if we would also use DDT.

Bluntly put, environmentalists are using African parents and children in anti-DDT experiments. Against all the evidence from decades of using only nets and drugs and maybe other insecticides, they want to keep ignoring DDT as a long-lasting spatial insect repellant. They want to keep us doing what has at best worked only partially, on the assumption that maybe it will work better next year – or that a 30% malaria reduction is good enough.

They are playing with our lives. So are the government agencies, health NGOs and others who support their policies. This is wrong and immoral. And it is only one of the ways they use Africans as experimental laboratory animals. They are also denying us access to other modern technologies that can
improve and save lives.

600 million people in sub-Sahara Africa live on two million shillings ($900 USD) or less per year. Nearly 700 million never have electric power for lights, refrigeration, schools, shops and clinics – or have it only a few hours per week. Millions die from diseases that would be prevented, if they did not have to burn wood and dung, and had safe water, better healthcare and higher living standards that reliable, affordable electrical power would bring.

But environmentalists constantly block coal, gas and hydro-electric power plants. They want us to live in experimental societies where people get whatever limited electrical power can be generated day to day with wind turbines or solar panels. They pressured the World Bank to reject loan applications for power plants in Ghana and South Africa, and support President Obama when he says Africans should focus on wind, solar and bio-fuel power, instead of fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, they live in wealthy countries, with all the electrical power they need. With the health, opportunity and prosperity electrical power brings. With freedom and mobility that cars and fossil fuels bring. With blessings most Africans can only dream of.

Radical greenies also oppose agricultural technologies that would bring a green revolution to Africa. They denounce seeds that have been “touched by corporations” – even hybrid, but especially biotech seeds – that produce bigger, more nutritious crops, resist plant diseases like banana wilt and cassava brown streak, survive droughts, thrive in nutrient-poor or saline soils, and require fewer pesticide applications.

They want us to rely on traditional “open-pollinated” seeds that have lower germination rates and crop yields – seeds that require more land and more backbreaking labor, but generate so little income that farmers stay impoverished for life, and people continue to starve. China and India put up with this immoral eco-colonialism for decades. Finally, they had enough. They refused to be the environmentalists’ experimental pawns any longer. They took charge of their own destinies, charted their own future, financed their own projects, and refused to be stopped again by anti-development green policies, politicians and pressure groups.

Uganda, the Great Lakes Region and all of Africa need to do the same thing. We have the land and natural resources, the bright and hard working people. Let us be brave and bold! Let us become prosperous and healthy together.

Fiona Kobusingye is co-chair of the Congress of Racial Equality Uganda and
Kill Malarial Mosquitoes Now coalition.

© Paul Driessen

 

WesternFront America

Al Gore and the United Nations insist that global warming is the greatest threat facing Africa. Just how ridiculous that claim is can be gauged by the basic facts presented in this article by Ugandan health, prosperity and human rights activist Fiona Kobusingye.

The average African life span is lower than it was in the United States and Europe 100 years ago. Millions of Africans are dying every year from diseases that were eradicated in rich countries long ago. Being poor and not having electricity means millions die from lung infections, because they have to cook and heat with open fires; from intestinal diseases caused by spoiled food and unsafe drinking water; from malaria, TB, cholera, measles and other diseases that could be prevented or treated if Africans had proper medical facilities.

But Africans are being told they shouldn’t develop, or have electricity or cars, because rich country activists now say they are worried about global warming.

Ms. Kobusingye is not about to let her future be dictated by people who would never want to live the way she has most of her life.

Paul Driessen

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Africa’s real climate crisis By Fiona Kobusingye

It’s not global warming. It’s a science, priorities, honesty and morality crisis.

Life in Africa is often nasty, impoverished and short. AIDS kills 2.2 million Africans every year, say WHO reports. Lung infections cause 1.4 million deaths, malaria 1 million more, intestinal diseases 700,000. Diseases that could be prevented with simple vaccines kill an additional 600,000 annually, while war, malnutrition and life in filthy slums send countless more parents and children to early graves.

And yet, day after day, Africans are told the biggest threat we face is – global warming.

Conferences, news stories, television programs, class lectures and one-sided “dialogues” repeat the claim endlessly. Using oil and petrol, even burning wood and charcoal, will dangerously overheat our planet, melt ice caps, flood coastal cities, and cause storms, droughts, disease and extinctions, we’re told.

Over 700 climate scientists and 31,000 other scientists say humans and plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide have minimal effects on Earth’s temperature and climate, and there is no global warming crisis. But their views and studies are never invited or even tolerated in these “climate crisis” forums, especially at “ministerial dialogues” staged with United Nations money. Al Gore refuses to debate any of these experts, or even permit questions that he hasn’t approved ahead of time.

Instead, Africans are told climate change “threatens humanity more than HIV/AIDS.” More than 2.2 million dead Africans every year?

We are warned that it would be “nearly impossible to adapt to the loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet,” which would raise sea levels by “5 to 15 meters.” That certainly would impact our coastal communities. But how likely is it?

The average annual temperature in Antarctica is minus 50 degrees F! Summer in its Western Peninsula barely lasts two months and gets maybe 10 degrees above freezing for just a few hours a day. Not even Mr. Gore or UN computer models talk about raising Antarctic temperatures by 85 degrees F year-round. So how is that ice supposed to melt?

Let’s not forget that sea levels have risen 120 meters since the last Ice Age ended. Do the global warming alarmists think cave men fires caused that? Obviously, powerful natural forces caused those ancient glaciers to come and go – and caused the droughts, floods and climate changes that have affected Africa, the Earth and its animals and people for millions of years.

Just consider northern Africa, where green river valleys, hippopotami and happy villages suddenly got turned into the Sahara Desert 4,000 years ago. Scientists don’t know why, but it probably wasn’t Egyptian pharaohs building pyramids and driving chariots.

However, the real problem isn’t questionable or fake science, hysterical claims and worthless computer models that predict global warming disasters. It’s that they’re being used to justify telling Africans that we shouldn’t build coal or natural gas electrical power plants. It’s that the almost total absence of electricity is keeping us from creating jobs and becoming modern societies. It’s that these policies KILL.

The average African life span is lower than it was in the United States and Europe 100 years ago. But Africans are being told we shouldn’t develop, or have electricity or cars because, now that those countries are rich beyond anything we Africans can imagine, they’re worried about global warming.

The world needs to go on an energy diet, Al Gore and UN climate boss Yvo de Boer tell us. Well, I have news for them. Africans are already on an energy diet. We’re starving!

Al Gore uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year. And those anti-electricity policies are keeping us impoverished.

Not having electricity means millions of Africans don’t have refrigerators to preserve food and medicine. Outside of wealthy parts of our big cities, people don’t have lights, computers, modern hospitals and schools, air conditioning – or offices, factories and shops to make things and create good jobs.

Not having electricity also means disease and death. It means millions die from lung infections, because they have to cook and heat with open fires; from intestinal diseases caused by spoiled food and unsafe drinking water; from malaria, TB, cholera, measles and other diseases that we could prevent or treat if we had proper medical facilities.

Hypothetical global warming a hundred years from now is worse than this?

Telling Africans they can’t have electricity and economic development – except what can be produced with some wind turbines or little solar panels – is immoral. It is a crime against humanity.

Meanwhile, China and India are building new coal-fired power plants every week, so that they can lift their people out of poverty. So even if Africa remains impoverished – and the US and Europe switched to windmills and nuclear power – global carbon dioxide levels would continue increasing for decades.

Even worse, the global warming crusaders don’t stop at telling us we can’t have electricity. They also campaign against biotechnology. As American, Brazilian and South African farmers will tell you, biotech seeds increase crop yields, reduce pesticide use, feed more people and help farmers earn more money. New varieties are being developed that can resist droughts – the kind Africa has always experienced, and the ones some claim will increase due to global warming.

Environmental radicals even oppose insecticides and the powerful spatial insect repellant DDT, which Uganda’s Health Ministry is safely using (along with bed nets and modern ACT drugs) to eliminate killer malaria. They claim global warming will make malaria worse. That’s ridiculous, because the disease was once found all over Europe, the United States and even Siberia.

Uganda and Africa need to stop worrying about what the West, the UN and Al Gore say. We need to focus on our own needs, resources and opportunities.

We don’t need more aid – especially the kind that goes mostly to corrupt officials who put the money in private bank accounts, hold global warming propaganda conferences and keep their own people poor. We don’t need rich countries promising climate change assistance (maybe, sometime, ten years from now), if we promise not to develop.

We need to stop acting like ignorant savages, who thought solar eclipses meant the gods were angry with them, and asked witch doctors to bring the sun back. We need to stop listening to global warming witch doctors, who get rich telling us to keep living “indigenous,” impoverished lives.

We need trade, manufacturing, electricity and transportation fuels to power modern industrial economies. We need to do what China and India are doing – develop – and trade more with them.

That is how we will get the jobs, prosperity, health and environmental quality we deserve.

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Fiona Kobusingye is chairman of the human rights and economic development group CORE Uganda. In the coming months, CORE will present both Al Gore’s movie and another film, “The Great Global Warming Swindle,” at colleges and other events. It will do what Al Gore and the UN never permit: let people ask questions, debate the films and decide for themselves who is telling the truth, and what Uganda and Africa should do to make life better for their people.
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WesternFront America