Dear Editor,
I refer to a letter by Mr Victor Pires captioned “Malathion is used in the USA and is not harmful to man in general” (07.12.06). Not because Malathion is used in the USA does it mean it is safe!
The USA still uses a lot of products that are banned in Europe, which by the way has a far better record of being concerned for human health than the US. For example, the US still uses harmful flame retardants with PBDEs on almost everything including baby clothes, while it has been phased out in Europe for health reasons. I could go on with a host of vivid examples of why it not wise to blindly follow the example of the US, but I think it unnecessary.
This being the case it was still classified as potentially carcinogenic by the US EPA.
In Guyana houses are built differently allowing more air circulation than in the average US home, meaning that here the chemical can enter homes more readily where it may later break down into maloxon. Also in the US people don’t rely on rainwater which they chlorinate then drink, in Guyana they do. Chlorination can accelerate the transformation of malathion into maloxon which is at least 40 times more toxic (other sources say 60 times more toxic). So I hope you can see how not everything in the US applies to us here in Guyana. The US also has better health facilities to more efficiently treat any long or short term side effects.
It was also claimed that the US EPA withdrew their documentation to ban the chemical for political reasons, we know how almost anything can pass through the US system for political reasons!
These days people have more access to information so I invite people to research it for themselves, they should however look at independent sources such as wikipedia.org, and not at US government sites or sites influenced by chemical companies. (One should know about the lobby by big companies to influence widespread use of harmful substances – one example is tobacco.)
Nevertheless to look at it from a layman’s perspective: this fogging seems to have no effect on the mosquito population in Georgetown. It is known for mosquitoes to become resistant to Malathion. If this is the case, are we being fogged for nothing?
Yours faithfully,
M. Schanzenbacher
