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162 Comments
- GlennLThompson, on 03/27/2008, -2/+93I wish the entire internet was one big page.
- kidendless, on 03/27/2008, -1/+55Excellent thumbnail choice.
- jstem1994, on 03/27/2008, -3/+40No SARS?
- anoneng, on 03/27/2008, -1/+37the radiation that leaked at three mile island... meaning measured outside the plant, where people were.... matched the levels on commerical jets. moving women and children did nothing other than give the kids a few days out of school and having a lot of guys go hungry for a few days.
like it or not, nuclear power is safe. - codemonkeysteve, on 03/27/2008, -8/+40"And to this day, the mosquito remains the deadliest killer Mother Nature has to offer, with a confirmed 2 million kills per year."
2 million dead per year times 35 years equals ...
How many people has DDT killed, again? - anoneng, on 03/27/2008, -1/+28Build nuclear power plants
- SarahSue, on 03/27/2008, -2/+28Thanks to this article, I no longer fear DDT, asbestos, and most importantly, robot attacks.
- mewoot10, on 03/27/2008, -4/+303 mile island really was unfortunate. It was one of the main reasons nuclear power plants aren't used today. It is proven that there is much less waste from a nuclear power plant then there is from gas. A human in his entire life time uses about a test tube amount versus the hundreds or thousands of gallons of gas.
- inactive, on 03/27/2008, -0/+25"It's considered academically responsible to include your source when providing a quoted reference."
- Rikkochet, 2008 - EatingPie, on 03/27/2008, -26/+47I realize Cracked is comedy, but this list is pretty bogus.
In several of the cases, the loss of life was mitigated because we took measures to do so. Evacuating Three Mile Island, getting the kids out of the schools, discontinuing the use of DDT. Also, the effects of these "disasters" would have been long term, not immediate.
Many people exposed to radiation in Chernobyl didn't show effects until they had kids with birth defects (I have family in Poland, and many Poles believe birth defects *there* have increased because of Chernobyl). Asbestos causes cancer, it's not an immediate killer. The children would start developing trouble in the 30s/40s/50s due to exposure. And DDT actually effected animals. One particular bird was driven nearly extinct because the DDT caused it to lay eggs with shells too thin to protect the embryo.
Yeah, it's Cracked, and I'm probably taking this far more seriously than it was meant. But there it is.
-Pie - GoKings, on 03/27/2008, -0/+20I dunno... They acted like the Avian Flu could wipe out that planet at one point... I remember turning on TV and they were talking about how it would only take one person in the US to get it, and the whole nation would be in peril.
- HeDiggMe, on 03/27/2008, -7/+26You think they write this ***** for charity? Welcome to the real world. Damn naive kids.
- studdenfadden, on 03/27/2008, -3/+21They left out SARS, madcow, and avian flu.
- krellor, on 03/27/2008, -7/+24All three of you are being stupid. The problem with DDT wasn't that it was being used to stop mosquitoes and malaria. The problem was that as it became popular American farmers and joe blow with the perfect lawn all decided that they all needed to dump a ***** ton of DDT on their land. If you look at global usage of DDT when it was still in use, usage sky rocketed because of consumer and commercial use, not in protecting people from malaria. So there is a compromise someh were in the middle, like usual.
Oh, and as to the retarded math? Look up endocrine disruptor's you ignorant tool, and how they become concentrated in apex predators, and how increasing amounts are being found in human food sources such as salmon, etc... Oh, sorry, there goes my college education talking again, let me dial back to inbred redneck and say DDT==BAD in high amounts. Amounts that exceeded what was used to control malaria. - inactive, on 03/27/2008, -1/+18"I don't care if 2 million die every year"
Just what the hell is wrong with you, you sociopathic freak. What you're talking about is tantamount to mass-genocide. But no, let's keep it up, for... what, exactly? Some vague, half-formed fear about the environment? - staxofmax, on 03/27/2008, -9/+24Yes, a few tens of millions of cases of malaria and a few million otherwise avoidable deaths are worth saving a handful of wild bird populations.... Can someone explain the retarded math behind this?
- staxofmax, on 03/27/2008, -0/+15There goes my robot insurance business....
- dunnylovehun, on 03/27/2008, -4/+19Seriously, what's up with making me click my mouse four times!?!? Sure it was their funniest article in a month, but the fact that I had to click my mouse after reading an entry totally ruined that. Come to think of it, I'm going to have to click my mouse to post this comment. DAMNIT! It's a huge internet wide conspiracy! I'd type more but I'm quaking with rage over here.
- Adamness, on 03/27/2008, -0/+15Well wait, that's a false choice we don't have to make. If you watch the old videos of how DDT was used, they sprayed it in massive amounts over crops, in swamps and other places where mosquitoes and insects were a nuisance or were breeding. We've probably all seen the videos of children getting DDT sprayed right into their hair. Yes, maybe DDT killed stuff and caused problems, but anything used in the massive amounts DDT was used would cause damage.
It's been shown that DDT is quite effective if used in small but strategic amounts like around windows and doorways of a home. Using these chemicals in a smart way would have negligible impact on the environment, but could still save millions of lives. - gerrylazlo, on 03/27/2008, -0/+13Nuclear power plants are being used today. The real effect was the impact it had on new facilities being built in the USA. This has been changing rapidly in the past couple of years.
- DoubtingThomas, on 03/27/2008, -3/+16Well, the whole "dead birds" thing was pretty much debunked also. Damn dirty hippies.
- Jareth86, on 03/27/2008, -0/+13"Within five days, the Governor had ordered the evacuation of all children and pregnant women (***** you, dad!)"
Yeah, seriously. Why do fathers (and men in general) constantly get tossed under the bus during emergency situations? Can someone explain this? Why are women and children lumped together? Are they still both considered helpless? - PwncakesFTW, on 03/27/2008, -0/+12I was expecting to see Y2K :( The loss of life from that would have been brutal!
- VeroAvitar, on 03/27/2008, -1/+12whats annoying is some days all the funny is brought to you on one page and then some days some short arse article is spread over 5....consistency.....meaning one big page!
- chilipeppers4u, on 03/27/2008, -2/+12One of the big problems with DDT is that it accumulates in fatty tissue over time and is not eliminated by the body. This means that it gets concentrated as you go higher in the food chain (its commonly talked about in intro ecology classes). DDT is also especially toxic to fish, and is easily accumulated in their tissues. I don't know about you but I'd rather not be slowly poisoned by eating fish that contain DDT.
- tech42er, on 03/27/2008, -0/+10Did you RTFA? The asbestos was easily expelled from lungs, the DDT experiments were bunk/tainted, and the level of radiation at TMI was equivalent to flying on a commercial airliner. They were all harmless!
- jbmcb, on 03/27/2008, -0/+10DDT happens to work phenomenally well on mosquitoes as it was designed specifically to fight mosquito-borne diseases. There are alternatives, but they may be more expensive or less effective.
The arguments for DDT that I've heard advocate using it in limited circumstances, when an acute outbreak occurs, for example. Non-pesticide measures can work very well, but they take time to come into effect. If an outbreak occurs, especially in remote areas without access to modern, non-pesticide based techniques, DDT would be very valuable as a stop-gap measure until a more permanent solution can be enacted. - DeathMote, on 03/27/2008, -1/+9Wait what? Do you have any idea of what you're talking about? O_O
That's not how antibiotics work... They're not radioactive..
And the reason why you should take all the antibiotic medication and not stop halfway is because if some bacteria are left alive, they have a better chance of developing immunity and reproducing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic - AWBoy666, on 03/27/2008, -0/+8All of these things killed fewer people than Ted Kennedy.
- thedinomeister, on 03/27/2008, -1/+9SARS, Avian Flu, Global Warming, and basically 90 percent of all "scares". But yeah, I guess those are good for TOP 5.
- peagle, on 03/27/2008, -0/+7It is at www.zombo.com. Everything is there that ever will or has been.
- inactive, on 03/27/2008, -0/+7Suzy, is EVERY comment you make stupid, or just every one I see?
- inactive, on 03/27/2008, -1/+8And these are more important than the lives of millions of humans, why?
- Narcism, on 03/27/2008, -0/+6anthrax also mysteriously absent.
- MrKrinkleDude, on 03/27/2008, -1/+7Two items missing.
1. SARS
2. Bird Flu - bxblox, on 03/27/2008, -1/+7We were constantly showed images of people wearing what we came to know as sars masks... only to later find out that in some asian countries people wear those things every other day..
- mille716, on 03/27/2008, -0/+6As someone who considers himself an enviromentalist, I totally agree.
- hokie47, on 03/27/2008, -3/+9There are other pesticides that work against mosquitoes, and I really question the logic of the author in saying just because we baned DDT then two million people die each year because of this. Cracked.com did not cite any sources and this site is nothing than a humor site, so to take what they said as fact is very absurd.
- sgtpppr, on 03/27/2008, -1/+6Or so the media said. It was basically a bad cold. Pneumonia kills thousands more, but no one was flipping out about that. Maybe because pneumonia doesn't sell newspapers and advertising space.
- sentinel106, on 03/27/2008, -1/+6Double check your facts, there are dozens upon dozens of nuclear power plants in America today, let alone the world.
- djbon2112, on 03/27/2008, -0/+5Where it does nothing. It doesn't kill people when it's sprayed, and it won't after 10 years in the soil.
- Pulch, on 03/27/2008, -1/+6Dugg for sarcasm. What's with all these comments about having articles across pages? I've been reading cracked for a long time, mostly pointed there from digg, and all this complaining seems to be popping up a lot recently.
- krellor, on 03/27/2008, -1/+6As a real quick and dirty summary to everyone who keeps arguing let me say this. DDT could probably be used in small quantities to control malaria with a small probability of severely worsening the current problem with endocrine disruptor's. Whether that alone would really save "2 million people a year" which so far is just a figure taken from a humorist site I dunno. I don't know whether further use would be appropiate or not, but blindly saying it is ok is foolish. Why?
Because we already have a large amount of DDT in the environment causing problems. You don't even have to care about animals to have this bother you. You can be eating bald eagle eggs for breakfast and wiping your ass with spotted owls, and not give one damn about the environment, but I feel confident that you will care once humans start experiencing more problems because of endocrine disruptor's. Increasing levels of DDT are being found in human food sources (humans are apex predators) such as salmon. The damage done to predatory birds is a warning flag to humans to be careful. Personally, I care that we as a species have hurt a bunch of other species, not protecting us against malaria, but because DDT was cheap so farmers and consumers dumped it on their crops and lawns. The DDT from preventing malaria was small compared to those usages.
A few years ago a dead killer whale washed up on the coast of Oregon, and as part of the testing done on it, they tested the levels of DDT in the whale. Well, the lab reran all the tests because the levels were so high. This is worrisome because that killer whale was getting DDT from the same salmon that you'll be finding at your store. Ultimately they had to dispose of the carcass like toxic waste because of the levels.
DDT, and endocrine disruptor's in general cause problems with a species reproductive systems. In the eagles it mad their egg walls too thin. In humans it is decreasing out sperm count. Feel free to look all of this up. So the question that you all keep asking, is 2 million human lives a year worth savign a bunch of birds? I'm not going to answer that, because it is irrelevant. Personally, we can save both by walking the middle ground and being innovative. But people don't want logic and reason, they want to say birds be damned, save the humans, all the while poisoning their own food supply. The truth of the matter is that the question should read, do we save 2 million people this year and kill off 100 million in 50? So really, before you all go and formulate opinions that you will be spouting off to all of your friends and family, why don't you do some research and formulate an opinion that isn't a knee-jerk reaction. Because honestly, the arguments that many of you are making sound very much like arguments I get from religious fundamentalists. And we all know how much diggers hate those. - anoneng, on 03/27/2008, -0/+5im not an enviromentalist at all. most of the time im on the opposite side of you guys, but its hard to be against something that makes us energy independant and is cheap.
- laserblazer, on 03/27/2008, -2/+6No mention of Anthrax, aka the Free Day Off for Federal Workers? Talk about ***** terror-mongering.
- tech42er, on 03/27/2008, -0/+4Absolutely.
- bxblox, on 03/27/2008, -0/+4I was waiting at home with a baseball bat next to the door, hoping for a mad max style post-apocalyptic world where I could drive my car around and fight land pirates... disappointing to say the least.
- kiiwii, on 03/27/2008, -0/+4What about MRSA in schools?
Sure, it should be addressed and the public educated, but there's no reason there has to be a newspaper article every time there's a new case diagnosed. - djepik, on 03/28/2008, -0/+4Yes, they are both helpless and 100% equal to men.
- djepik, on 03/28/2008, -0/+4The only thing stopping us from all being shot by autonomous guns is their inability to aim and shoot themselves.
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