Letter to the ELCA Malaria Campaign

Dear Sir/Madam:

I received your contribution request in church and have been meaning to write. Unfortunately, my time is restricted. I have been dealing with a lung transplant (12/23/13) that has gone bad, been back in the hospital twice for additional surgery and pneumonia, have more surgery scheduled and may not survive. For that reason, I am retired so my ability to contribute to good works is very limited. (My transplant was due to pulmonary fibrosis, which kills more people than breast cancer each year, though breast cancer, being a politically-correct disease, gets 80 times as much research funding. Not all life is equally valuable.)

Nevertheless, I am very concerned about the millions of needless deaths from Malaria in the third world, due to American fecklessness, and would try to contribute something if I thought you really cared about the 200,000 children, mostly black, (91% of which are in Africa) who die each year as opposed to caring about feeling all warm and fuzzy for being for politically-correct things.

If you were really concerned about these deaths, you would campaign to bring back DDT. See this article from a distinguished black economist:

Silent Spring: RIP 2004. By Walter Williams 

http://capitalismmagazine.com/2004/07/silent-spring-rip-2004/

Excerpt: In 1970, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences estimated that DDT saved more than 500 million lives during the time it was widely used. A scientific review board of the EPA showed that DDT is not harmful to the environment and showed it to be a beneficial substance that “should not be banned.” According to the World Health Organization, worldwide malaria infects 300 million people. About 1 million die of malaria each year. Most of the victims are in Africa, and most are children. In Sri Lanka, in 1948, there were 2.8 million malaria cases and 7,300 malaria deaths. With widespread DDT use, malaria cases fell to 17 and no deaths in 1963. After DDT use was discontinued, Sri Lankan malaria cases rose to 2.5 million in the years 1968 and 1969, and the disease remains a killer in Sri Lanka today. More than 100,000 people died during malaria epidemics in Swaziland and Madagascar in the mid-1980s, following the suspension of DDT house spraying. After South Africa stopped using DDT in 1996, the number of malaria cases in KwaZulu-Natal province skyrocketed from 8,000 to 42,000. By 2000, there had been an approximate 400 percent increase in malaria deaths. Now that DDT is being used again, the number of deaths from malaria in the region has dropped from 340 in 2000 to none at the last reporting in February 2003. .. Walter E. Williams holds a bachelor's degree in economics from California State University (1965) and a master's degree (1967) and doctorate (1972) in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles. 

People can’t bear to notice these deaths from Malaria, because to do so would hurt their entitlement to feel good about themselves for saving the birds. Ironically, they now usually support eagle-chopper wind farms that slaughter thousands of these same birds every year, so they can feel good about fighting global warming. The dead birds didn't matter in the end any more than the dead black kids. The Smithsonian Magazine says:

How Many Birds Do Wind Turbines Really Kill?
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-many-birds-do-wind-turbines-really-kill-180948154/?no-ist

Excerpt: In the end, using 58 mortality estimates that met their criteria, they came up with an estimate. According to the current literature somewhere between 140,000 and 328,000 birds die each year from collisions with wind turbines. 

Due to the ban, it is only a matter of time until Malaria re-establishes itself in the US, and our kids start dying as well. And West Nile Virus and bedbugs, which also could be controlled with DDT are a plague, but mostly of poor people, so few elitists care.

I will stay with my current charities: my local church, the Injured Marine Fund and the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation.

Sincerely,

Robert A. Hall