(Rebuke to Rachel Carson) ... These People Took DDT Pills In the 1970s to Prove it Was Safe

In 1971 two people in North Hollywood started eating DDT pills every day. That's right, they willingly swallowed 10mg of poison every single day for three months. In front of witnesses.

- Robert Loibl and his wife, Louise, hold 10-milligram capsules of DDT which they took in front of witnesses for 93 days at lunch time, June 10, 1971. Loibl said their total dosage was more than the average person consumes in 83 years. He said his wife's dandruff disappeared, their appetites perked up and they feel better. Loibl said they just wanted to call attention to the public that DDT was safe. The potential dangers of DDT first came to mainstream America's attention in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. The book jumpstarted the modern environmental movement in the US and helped bring attention to the harmful effects that DDT was having on wildlife. Spraying DDT was not great for birds and marine life. But we now know that its danger to humans was overstated.

DDT became controversial in mainstream American culture during the late 1960s and the EPA banned the use of DDT as a pesticide in 1972. But the stigma attached to the chemical has had negative consequences around the world, especially for the fight against malaria.

In the first half of the 20th century, malaria was infecting millions of Americans a year and killing about 3,000 annually. Despite being synthesized in 1874, DDT wasn't developed as an insecticide until 1939 by Swiss scientist Paul Muller. But DDT then quickly helped wipe out malaria in the Western world. By 1951 the United States was officially rid of the mosquito-transmitted disease. But other countries weren't so lucky.

In 2006 malaria was still infecting about 300 million people worldwide and killing about 1 million people a year. The World Health Organization took another look at DDT in the mid-2000s and controversially promoted it as a way to fight the malaria epidemic in Africa and Asia. Today, roughly a decade later, the number of malaria deaths worldwide have been almost cut in half.

DDT typically doesn't cause health problems in humans after limited exposure. It's the prolonged exposure that scientists are most concerned about. The FDA has classified DDT as a B2 carcinogen, which is to say it's a probable human carcinogen based on tests on animals. That's below a B1 carcinogen, which is based on evidence found in humans, and an A carcinogen, which is a classification reserved for when something is definitively carcinogenic to humans.

Whatever happened to Robert and Louise Loibl who swallowed DDT for three months straight? I haven't been able to figure that one out. They don't show up in any newspaper accounts of the mid-1970s and I can't find death records for either of them. For all we know, they may have died of acute DDT poisoning the following year. But it's a safe bet that however they eventually died, it wasn't from malaria.

A great book that explains the fraudulent hoax by the radicals such as Rachel Carson is "The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know About--Because They Helped Cause Them" by Iain Murray.

Of all the things liberals have done, the banning of DDT should rank right up there with Stalin's starvation of the Ukrainians and Mao's "Great Leap Forward".

DDT was the most environmentally friendly highly effective weapon against malarial mosquitoes, and through the use of DDT, there were places in the world where it was nearly eradicated before it was banned. There was overuse of DDT on crops, but who could blame people for doing that? Against mosquitoes, DDT was the equivalent of penicillin against bacteria.

I live in Massachusetts, and I have the occasional misfortune to walk by this mural on the side of a building on occasion:

This despicable mural highlights one of the fundamental reasons that liberalism is a cancer on society, and that claim isn't based on fraudulent science as Rachel Carson's was. Look at that slogan: "Indication of harm, not proof of harm, is our call to action."

That pretty much encapsulates everything from "Silent Spring" to Anthropogenic Global Warming, and everything that is wrong with those movements. The banning of DDT has resulted in human carnage that ranks right up there with the worst mass murderers in the world. Approximately a million people die worldwide each year from malaria which was banned in 1972. If one assumes for the purpose of a rough estimate that number is somewhat constant, we are talking 40 million deaths.

And the use of DDT to combat everything from lice to to the Elm Bark Beetle (the only thing that worked on THAT was DDT) was curtailed, resulting in human misery and the destruction of the vast majority of Elm trees in North America.

It is a crime. Liberals should be called to account for this blood on their hands, but they won't be. And our country, via arm twisting throughout the world, has made sure that those areas that could use it most...can't. Because we tie foreign aid money to things like not using DDT, it is much the same way the federal government uses the highway funds to force states to toe the line of various legislative things that the individual states would surely otherwise reject out of hand. Of course, the federal government says to these foreign countries and to the individual states here: "It is your choice. We aren't impinging on your sovereignty or rights. You are free to make your choice. But if you reject our mandate, don't expect any of that foreign aid/highway funds. It's up to you..."

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