Saturday, June 20, 2009

Science guy provides iffy links


From Jeff Beck:

Sage advice from Tim Lambert: always click on the links. When reading Lambert always click on his links; you'll likely find they don't support whatever argument he's making. The following is typical:
The use of DDT against malaria is not banned. The LD50 (quantity that kills half of test subjects) for DDT is 200 mg/kg for monkeys (closest analogue to humans). So for a 75 kg person that's 15g, or one tablespoon. A 50% chance of killing you does not, to me, seem to be the same as "no harm at all". And DDT does thin bird shells...

The first link above is to an earlier Lambert post with further links to other Lambert posts. These address not the general use of DDT but rather Sri Lanka's use of DDT in the 1960s and '70s.

The second link is to the Pesticide Action Network's pesticide database -- apparently Lambert could find no reputable science sources providing the information he needed.

Full post here.


Posted via email from Garth's posterous

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