Extracts from Ofcom Complaint, by Category: Misrepresentation of People’s Views

The narrator implies here that as a general rule, mosquitoes are as active and long-lived in cold temperatures as in warm ones, which is entirely untrue. Reiter’s own papers make the point that general statements of the kind made by the narrator are inaccurate. See for example the following paper which Reiter co-authored: Patz J et al, The potential health impacts of climate variability and change for the United States, Environmental Health Perspectives, April 2000, http://tinyurl.com/34gd5j (PDF), which states (on page 7 of the PDF file):

High temperatures can increase the rate at which mosquitoes develop into adults, the rate of development of pathogens in the mosquitoes and feeding and egg-laying frequency. The key factor in transmission is the survival rate of the vector. Higher temperatures may increase or reduce survival rate, depending on the vector, its behavior, ecology and many other factors.

Indeed the narrator is misrepresenting Reiter here: Reiter does not claim that mosquitoes “thrive” in the cold: he simply makes the points that some mosquitoes are able to survive low temperatures and that malaria is not necessarily restricted to the tropics (although malaria transmission has now been eradicated from Europe and North America) – see his actual statements below, and Reiter’s email to Professor Curtis at http://tinyurl.com/2rklxc.

Although the narrator does not specify whom he thinks is suggesting that “even a mild rise in temperature would lead to the spread northward of … malaria”, in the context of the statements about the IPCC, both by the narrator and by Reiter, that precede and follow this claim (Comment 22, Comment 112, Comment 113, Comment 115), the viewer is left with the clear and completely false impression that the IPCC has suggested this. It has not.

For example, the IPCC 3rd Assessment Report Working Group II, 2001, states (http://tinyurl.com/2xmwx4):

Malaria was successfully eradicated from Australia, Europe, and the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, but the vectors [i.e. the mosquitoes] were not eliminated (Bruce-Chwatt and de Zulueta, 1980; Zucker, 1996).

Continued …