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US Beekeepers Fear For Livelihoods As Anti-Zika Toxin Kills 2.5M Bees (theguardian.com)
A new report suggests that an insecticide sprayed from airplanes to kill mosquitos carrying the Zika virus may in fact be killing bees, since the "fine mist" is "beaded with neurotoxin." Earlier this week, one beekeeper posted a video showing thousands of dead bees heaped around hives. Meanwhile, South Carolina hobbyist Andrew Mache wrote in another Facebook post that he had lost "thousands upon thousands of bees" and that the spraying had devastated his business. The Guardian reports: "The program head, Dr Mike Weyman, said that though South Carolina has strict rules about protecting pollinators, country officials were using the neurotoxin, Naled, under a clause exempting them in a 'clear and public health crisis.' South Carolina's protocol for Zika infections is to alert local officials of a carrier's residence, which they 'consider a ground zero,' Weman said. Local authorities then target the local mosquitos in a 200-yard radius, in this case with spray. Experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and independent universities say Naled is far safer than other chemicals. It breaks down rapidly and, in the very low doses at which it is prescribed, should not pose a risk to humans. 'In Louisiana, we use these products quite frequently to reduce mosquitos, but we don't see many non-target effects, because the doses are really small,' said Dr Kirsten Healy, a public health entomologist at Louisiana State University. 'A lot of people don't realize that we always have the environment in mind. We try to have products that have the lowest possible impact.'" The report adds that bees and other pollinators "contribute an estimated $29 billion to farm income" around the U.S.
It could, but it won't and it wouldn't have. At the time it was stopped, it was already mass sprayed to the point where the mosquitoes were developing immunity.
Even now you can look at post-2000 research in places like Brazil that shows there's a fuck ton of DDT in the environment, which tells us one of two things: the pro-DDT people are lying when they say it breaks down and is harmless, or Brazilians don't give a shit about what some woman in the US says about how loud it gets in the spring and kept spraying, in which case it doesn't seem to be doing jack shit against Zika in Brazil.
Personally, I'm leaning towards the second.
Nothing shaky about it. The science was well done and replicated all over the world many times.
That is thoroughly debunked right wing nonsense. DDT was never banned for vector control, not even in the U.S. It is still used in malaria endemic regions for indoor residual spraying, which, unlike aerial spraying with adulticides, is actually effective for mosquito control. Spraying Naled is theater.
well, the article does mention "aerial spraying".
There's also this quote "It’s aerial bombing without any sense of being able to lay the chemical down on the target,” but that comes from a lwayer and not a scientist.
My guess is they hit the targeted mosquitoes just fine, but they also hit the bees and who knows what else.
Sure, did you tell yourself that about lead in gasoline and smoking cigarettes too? What else do you believe is "shaky science" that really isn't.
DDT is shakey science because indoor spraying in smaller concentrations has since been shown to have no ill effects on the environment. The initial science was wrong, overblown by the hippie movement, and poor application of DDT in mass outdoor spraying.
Maybe we should just keep our women indoors.
And wrapped in a burqa.
Learn to love Alaska
The whole concept of trying to contain Zika in the first place is ludicrous. We're seeing dead bees now and who knows what tomorrow... and stopping Zika? It's simply not going to happen. We can't wipe it out in any of the countries it has now established itself and we're just going to keep getting reinfected. It may be stopped temporarily in one place, but then it will pop up in another. It's not going away. Are we going to spend billions every year doing goodness knows what to our environments to try and stop an inevitable threat.
Here's the deal with Zika. IF you're not a pregnant woman- it's really not that bad. Not only should we let it spread- we should probably introduce it to our children (if we can come up with a vaccine even better, but as mild as Zika is, it may not even be necessary). Let them build up resistance before they get to child-bearing age themselves. In Zika's native range there is no problem with microcephaly because everyone has exposure to the disease before they get pregnant. We need to be working on doing the same rather than spraying pesticide like crazy in a region every time Zika appears.
It's far cheaper and much more common sense to inoculate the populace one time rather than spend billions each year trying to contain it. Yeah, sucks if you're trying to get pregnant now- we need to take special care of our pregnant women, extra education, extra shielding from potential infection- but it makes far more sense to deal with Zika just one time rather than battle it continuously from now until the end of time or it overruns us naturally and perhaps in ways we're not prepared to deal with it.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch