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6.06.2006

Fox News Science Expert is *way * off base

Bogus science reporting from FOX NEWS
I was making a list of websites that had outright wrong and damaging content and was examining junkscience.com and Steven Milloy.

It turns out he is Fox's science expert.

He is an advocate for the use of DDT against Malaria because it kills lots of innocent children. Milloy says nearly 2.7 MILLION a year! (DDT is a proven carcinogen.) There are simply volumes of crap written about how great DDT is and how it was "demagogued" out of use. Unfortunately none of them address carcinogic effects except to deny it. DDT is also legal under WHO rules, so undeveloped countries can and do use it to kill mosquitoes and control malaria.


junkscience.com:
It is believed that [malaria] afflicts between 300 and 500 million every year, causing up to 2.7 million deaths, mainly among children under five years.
[Africa News, January 27, 1999] (I suppose citing an African publication is his way of getting out of being a responsible journalist.)


Here is what the CDC says:

The malaria mortality rate, from an analysis of field studies, was applied to these malaria-risk populations to produce an estimate of about 766,000 deaths among African children less than 5 years old for the year 1995. This model was recently refined to account for variations in malaria transmission intensity, and about 742,000 malaria deaths were estimated for the year 2000 [2].


NOW we know where Michael Chrichton got his figures. In fact it was this particular inaccuracy that launched me into the frenzy over the global warming denial issue.
Will you EVER believe anything Fox news has to say about science again?