Posted on 06/18/2005 6:00:44 PM PDT by Piefloater
IN A NURSING home where I once used to work during school holidays, there lay a barrel-chested man with a kind face and thick black hair. He was a Vietnam War veteran and had his own room, though he never seemed to have visitors. He was paralysed and I rarely did more than glimpse him through the door, except when called in to help with some gruesome task or other, such as a manual, which required a nurse with gloves to manually, or more accurately digitally, extract fecal matter from the poor man's backside.
He also had malaria - legacy of a Vietnamese mosquito - which would come on him periodically, soaking his sheets with sweat and causing him terrible torments. The door of his room remained closed on those days and the feverish existence inside seemed to be hell on earth.
I have been paranoid about mosquitoes ever since, and the debilitating, often lethal, diseases they carry.
The paranoia is not entirely irrational, even in Australia, far away from the malaria killing fields of the tropics. Mosquitoes, once brought to heel by the much-maligned pesticide DDT, are on the march.
Last month at a health conference in Darwin, researchers warned of a regional epidemic of such mosquito-borne diseases as malaria, Japanese encephalitis and dengue fever. They also warned that malaria in the Asia-Pacific represented a major impediment to economic growth with about 1.4 million people in the region exposed each year. While Australia was declared malaria-free in 1981, the disease kills about one person a year and infects 800 to 1000.
But worldwide the mosquito death toll is staggering. The World Health Organisation says malaria kills 1.2 million to 2.7 million people each year, most of them in Africa - mostly children and pregnant women - and causes brain damage to many more.
That is one dead child every 30 seconds. Only AIDS is a bigger killer of Africans.
All those deaths are the reason Rachel Carson's seminal 1962 book Silent Spring, about the evils of pesticides, was last week voted among the most dangerous books of the past two centuries. Fifteen American scholars enlisted by conservative magazine Human Events awarded Carson the honour along with Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. Silent Spring, with its scary talk of cancer and dead fish and the mantra that man must not interfere with nature, launched the modern environmental movement. It also demonised DDT.
"We should seek not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides," wrote Carson, "but to find instead a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves."
Which is fine as long as it's not your child dying from a mozzie bite.
The US Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT in 1972, and the rest of the world followed suit. Tens of millions of people have died from malaria since. Almost overnight, what has been described as one of the greatest public health tools of the 20th century became one of its biggest bogymen.
It was only thanks to widespread spraying of DDT in the 1950s and 1960s that malaria was eliminated from all developed countries and controlled in tropical Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa. In 1970 the US National Academy of Sciences declared that, in scarcely 20 years, DDT had prevented 500 million deaths. Advertisements of the time, which today seem preposterous, extolled it as a benefactor of all humanity, with slogans such as "DDT is good for me-e-e".
But malaria's mounting death toll in the decades since is finally prompting a rethink on DDT. In the footnotes of his best-selling anti-green novel State Of Fear, Michael Crichton asserted that the ban on the pesticide "has killed more people than Hitler".
An article in Britain's Spectator magazine last month went further, branding the DDT ban as the worst crime of the 20th century, and blaming environmentalist extremists for the deaths of about 50 million people.
Five years ago, South Africa began spraying small amounts of the dreaded pesticide on the inside walls of houses to arrest a malaria plague. Other parts of Africa are following, despite the reported disapproval of the UN, WHO and other agencies.
Another green-centric organisation, the European Union, even threatened Uganda this year with an export ban if it used DDT to restart a malaria control program.
But even environmentalists from Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, while not admitting any guilt, are doing U-turns on their opposition to DDT, says The New York Times, and are beginning to weigh the benefits (live humans) against the risks (dead fish).
Perhaps the pendulum has swung from the knee-jerk eco-hysteria of Silent Spring to a more realistic approach to sparing human suffering.
ummm, well with the exception of the "millions" in the title, this is right on...
if it really were millions, the world couldn't possibly be over populated as it is....
But ... doesn't DDT cause global warming?
Special Report
DDT, Fraud, and Tragedy
By Gerald and Natalie Sirkin
Published 2/25/2005 12:08:42 AM
"Fraud in science is a major problem." So begins "DDT: A Case Study in Scientific Fraud" by the late J. Gordon Edwards, Professor Emeritus of Entomology at San Jose State University in San Jose, California.
The article was published shortly after his death last July in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Fall, 2004. It is based in part on his 34-page manuscript discussing fraud in acid rain, ozone holes, ultraviolet radiation, carbon dioxide, global warming, and pesticides, particularly DDT.
His publications distinguish Edwards as the leading authority on the environmental science and politics of DDT.
In World War I, prior to the discovery of the insecticidal potential of DDT, typhus killed more servicemen than bullets. In World War II, typhus was no problem. The world has marveled at the effectiveness of DDT in fighting malaria, yellow fever, dengue, sleeping sickness, plague, encephalitis, West Nile Virus, and other diseases transmitted by mosquitoes, fleas, and lice.
Today, the greatest killer and disabler is malaria, which kills a person every 30 seconds. By the 1960s, DDT had brought malaria near to extinction. "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable," said the National Academy of Sciences.
But the handwriting was on the wall when William Ruckelshaus, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, in an address to the Audubon Society in Milwaukee in 1971, clearly stated his position:
As a member of the Audubon Society myself, and knowing the impact of this chlorinated hydrocarbon in certain species of raptorial birds, I was highly suspicious of this compound [DDT], to put it mildly. But I was compelled by the facts to temper my emotions.
"As you know, many mass uses of DDT have already been prohibited, including all uses around the home. Certainly we'll all feel better when the persistent compounds can be phased out in favor of biological controls. But awaiting this millennium does not permit the luxury of dodging the harsh decisions of today.
Rachel Carson began the countrywide assault on DDT with her 1962 book, Silent Spring. Carson made errors, some designed to scare, about DDT and synthetic pesticides. "For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception to death," she intoned.
"This is nonsense," commented pesticide specialists Bruce N. Ames and Thomas H. Jukes of the University of California at Berkeley. (Ames is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, world renowned. Jukes, who died a few years ago, was a professor of biophysics and a leader in the defense of DDT.) "Every chemical is dangerous if the concentration is too high. Moreover, 99.9 percent of the chemicals humans ingest are natural... produced by plants to kill off predators," Ames and Jukes wrote in Reason in 1993.
Carson, not very scrupulous, implied that the renowned Albert Schweitzer agreed with her on DDT by dedicating Silent Spring "to Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who said 'Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.'" Professor Edwards doubted the implication. He got a copy of Schweitzer's autobiography. Dr. Schweitzer was referring to atomic warfare. Professor Edwards found on page 262, "How much labor and waste of time these wicked insects do cause, but a ray of hope, in the use of DDT, is now held out to us."
But Miss Carson's skillful writing was enough to direct a new-born environmental industry looking for a hot issue into a feverish campaign against DDT. "Rachel Carson set the style for environmentalism. Exaggeration and omission of pertinent contradictory evidence are acceptable for the holy cause," wrote Professors Ames and Jukes.
THE FIRST CHARGE AGAINST DDT was that it causes cancer. No search has ever turned up any evidence, despite massive use of DDT in agriculture in the 1950s and 1960s. Wayland Hayes, U.S. Public Health Service scientist, for 18 months, fed to human volunteers, daily, three times the quantity of DDT that the average American was ingesting annually. None experienced any adverse effect, then or six to ten years later.
Workers without wearing protective clothing, with nine to 19 years of continuous exposure to DDT in the Montrose Chemical Company which manufactured DDT, never developed a single case of cancer. DDT caused no illness in the 130,000 men who sprayed it on the interior walls of mud and thatched huts, nor the millions of people who lived in them. Professor Edwards in his classroom occasionally ate a tablespoon of DDT to illustrate to his students that it is not harmful. Indeed, DDT is so safe that canned baby food was permitted to contain five parts per million.
"There has never been any convincing evidence that DDT (or pesticide residues in food) has ever caused cancer in man," concluded Ames and Jukes.
In fact, DDT prevents cancer. "DDT in the diet has repeatedly been shown to enhance the production of hepatic enzymes in mammals and birds. Those enzymes inhibit tumors and cancers in humans as well as wildlife," wrote Professor Edwards in 1992.
Unable to find harm to human health, DDT opponents turned to bird health, alleging a decline of bald eagles and other birds of prey, which they associated with heavy DDT usage. Rachel Carson led the accusation. It has been repeated so often and so passionately that the public is still convinced of it.
The charge is that DDT thinned the shells of eggs. When nesting parent birds sat on the eggs, the shells cracked and no babies hatched. Carson charged that DDT was bringing bald eagles and robins to the "verge of extinction" -- while noted ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson was reporting that the robin was the most abundant bird in North America.
Bald eagles between 1941 and 1960 migrating over Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania, doubled during the first six years of DDT-use. Their numbers increased from 9,291 in 1946 -- before much DDT was used -- to 16,163 in 1963 and 19,765 in 1968.
Professor Edwards reviews how bald eagles died of non-DDT causes. In Alaska, 128,000 were shot for bounty payments between 1917 and 1956. Between 1960 and 1965, 76 bald eagles found dead were autopsied: 46 had been shot or trapped; 7 had died of impact injuries from flying into buildings or towers. Between 1965 and 1980, shootings, trappings, electrocutions, and impact injuries chiefly accounted for their deaths.
Although some birds declined before DDT, they became much more abundant during the years of greatest DDT-use. But facts have not impeded the endless repetition of Carson's bird myth.
Scientists tested the popular shell-thinning hypothesis. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists fed birds for 112 days on a diet with 100 times as much DDT as they were getting from the environment. No thinning of egg shells was found. The DDT had no effect on the birds.
One experimenter, to demonstrate eggshell-thinning, fed quail a diet with DDT but containing only one-fifth of the normal amount of calcium. His experiment succeeded in producing thinner eggshells, but his deception was exposed.
IN 1969, THE ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND (then, three guys with a clipboard; now "Environmental Defense"), Sierra Club, and National Audubon Society petitioned the Secretary of Agriculture to ban DDT, claiming it is carcinogenic to humans. He agreed to partially phase it out by December 31, 1970, which did not satisfy the environmentalists.
The Audubon Society and the Natural Resources Defense Council, to stop exports of DDT to third-world countries, instituted a number of lawsuits, ultimately gaining the support of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1977.
EPA appointed Administrative Law Judge Edmund Sweeney to evaluate DDT. In 1971-2 he conducted a seven-month hearing. EPA actually participated, testifying against DDT!
Judge Sweeney, after 80 days of testimony from 150 expert scientists, ruled that DDT "is not a carcinogenic, mutagenic, or teratogenic hazard to man" and does "not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wild life. There is a present need for the continued use of DDT for the essential uses defined in this case."
The Environmental Defense Fund appealed Sweeney's decision. The appeal should have been passed to an independent jurist, according to Ruckelshaus's general counsel, John Quarles, but Ruckelshaus decided to rule on it himself. Not surprisingly, he upheld his own ban "on the grounds that 'DDT poses a carcinogenic risk' to humans." (In 1994, he was to deny that that was the basis for the ban.) He had banned DDT though he had not attended a day of the 80-day hearing nor read a page of the transcript (as he told the Santa Ana Register, July 23, 1972).
In 1979, on April 26, Ruckelshaus wrote the American Farm Bureau Federation that his ban was imposed for political, not scientific, reasons: "Science, along with other disciplines such as economics, has a role to play, but the ultimate judgment remains political," he wrote. But in 1994 he wrote in a letter to the Wall Street Journal, "The scientific basis for the ban was solid then and still stands. DDT is a highly persistent chemical that moves up the food chain, and it accumulates in the fatty tissue of humans." However, according to Professor Edwards, it does no harm. Professor Edwards says that "DDT residues do not 'build up' in animal food-chains, because they are metabolized and excreted by fish, birds and mammals."
In his March 24, 1994 Wall Street Journal letter, Ruckelshaus wrote that the direct ecological effect, and the basis for his decision, "was its proven impact on the thickness of egg shells of raptors, birds such as the brown pelican and the peregrine falcon. The decision was not based on any claim of human carcinogenicity." But in 1972, he had overridden Judge Sweeney on the ground that DDT does pose a carcinogenic risk to humans.
THE BROWN PELICAN AND the peregrine falcon did suffer declines in population, but not because of DDT, according to Professor Edwards's article, "DDT Effects on Bird Abundance and Reproduction."
Brown pelicans suffered, not from fish they ate but from their catastrophic reproductive failure caused by the great Santa Barbara oil spill surrounding their nesting colonies on the island of Anacapa. Federal and California officials ignored the oil spill and attributed pelican difficulties "solely to DDT in the environment."
In Texas, peregrine falcons declined from 5,000 in 1918 to 200 in 1941, three years before DDT. Around the Gulf of Mexico, they declined from 1918 to 1934 by 82 percent, but the 1935 survey was done 15 years before any DDT appeared.
Likewise, in the East, peregrine falcons declined long before there was any DDT present there, because of egg-collectors and falconers. Falconers "raided every nest they could find" and shot falcons on sight.
Ruckelshaus, besides ruling on the appeal to uphold his own reversal of Sweeney's decision, refused Freedom-of-Information-Act demands for papers relating to the case -- he called them "internal memos" -- effectively preventing scientists from refuting his Opinion. He also refused to file an Environmental Impact Statement on the effects of his DDT ban.
In 1970, in a brief supporting the Secretary of Agriculture in the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Ruckelshaus praised DDT: "DDT is not endangering the public health and has an amazing and exemplary record of safe use. DDT, when properly used at recommended concentrations, does not cause a toxic response in man or other mammals and is not harmful. The carcinogenic claims regarding DDT are unproved speculation."
Subsequently, Ruckelshaus, alleging adverse effects of DDT, signed fund-raising letters on behalf of the Environmental Defense Fund. On his personal stationery, he wrote, "EDF's scientists blew the whistle on DDT by showing it to be a cancer hazard, and three years later, when the dust had cleared, EDF had won."
In a January 12, 2005, letter to the editor of the New York Times, Ruckelshaus rose to the plight of the poor by urging more spending. "If the world were to invest on an annual basis even a small percentage of the funds pledged to tsunami relief toward improving health care systems, transportation, infrastructure and communications systems, we would improve the quality of life for millions of poor people around the world . . ." He said nothing about how his ban on DDT was causing the death of millions from malaria.
FOLLOWING RUCKELSHAUS'S BAN, the USAID, prodded by a lawsuit by the Audubon Society and the Natural Resources Defense Council, undertook to discourage other countries from using DDT by threatening to stop foreign aid to any country using it. Its threat spread Ruckelshaus's ban worldwide.
The effects of giving up DDT were immediately felt in the malarial areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Sri Lanka (Ceylon), reacting to Silent Spring, in the 1960s gave up DDT. Its malarial cases had decreased from 2.8 million down to 17. After Sri Lanka gave it up, malaria shot back up to over 2.5 million.
South American countries gave up DDT and suffered the customary rise in malaria. Ecuador, which manufactures DDT, resumed using it in 1993. By 1995, Ecuador had reduced its malarial cases by 61 percent.
Spraying the inside walls of huts with DDT once or twice a year stops the spread of malaria by repelling mosquitoes from huts. USAID agreed, but it determined that insecticide-treated bed nets are "more cost-effective."
The search for an effective substitute for DDT continues to fail 30 years after the Ruckelshaus ban. The search for a treatment for malaria continues to fail; the mutations of the malaria virus soon make a drug ineffective. The search for a malaria-vaccine continues to fail.
The environmentalists' ideological opposition to pesticides has no basis in science. It is a death sentence to millions.
The title is somewhat misleading; while DDT is highly toxic to many aquatic animals, this isn't really a problem unless you dump a whole lot of the stuff into a lake for some reason. Terrestrial use of DDT poses very little threat to fish. DDT is also largely nontoxic to mammals, including of course human beings. DDT was banned because it was argued that it had deleterious effects on birds; not the birds themselves, but their reproductive systems, leading to higher rates of embryo deaths and egg-breaking. The studies that led to this conclusion are suspect and controversial. It's not hard to argue that the ban on DDT was caused mainly by hysteria and exaggeration; and in fact a leader of the environmentalist movement at the time is on record as saying that their efforts to ban DDT were at least in part intended to be a demonstration of their political power, to establish them as a force to be reckoned with.
ummm, well with the exception of the "millions" in the title, this is right on...
if it really were millions, the world couldn't possibly be over populated as it is....
What the hell are you talking about? The world population of human beings is over six and a half billion. The loss of a few millions here and there is a tragedy... but a minuscule dent in our total population. Almost a million babies are born each day.
You must be an expert on the matter, Poli. I've not heard such a coherent, correct, and concise summation of the matter in my entire life.
Er... oops. Hit the wrong key on my calculator. The actual global birth rate isn't that high, but it is in excess of 300,000 per day. Still means we can replenish the loss of a few million in the blink of an eye.
but if you read the article, it gave me the impression that millions upon millions would be dying in short order here...
how much of that birth rate comes from those areas that are affected by THIS?
Back in the late 50's-mid 60's we used to play outside at night with the neighborhood kids. We lived in a subdivision in Houston so there were plenty of mosquito's around. Seems like it was at least twice a week the fogger truck would drive through the neighbourhood fogging for mosquitos. We didn't go inside when the truck came around. Matter of fact, there were times when we'd get behind the truck and play in the fog. I don't know whether the fog contained DDT but can only guess it did given the times and circumstances.
Neither ABK or I have any health problems that could be attributed to exposure to DDT and we ain't exactly spring chickens anymore.
Like the Ramones say : "DDT keeps me happy"
Wow, thank you kindly for the compliment. I wouldn't call myself an "expert" on this particular matter, but I do try to keep myself informed.
The watershed for the environmentalist movement, leading directly to the banning of DDT, was Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring, which was to pesticides what The Jungle was to meatpacking. The time was ripe; public mistrust of the chemical industry was very high, thanks to highly visible fiascos like Agent Orange and Love Canal. Since then, many if not most of the claims made in Silent Spring have been found to be based on dubious evidence or entirely fabricated.
Where's "here"? The article was published in an Australian newspaper. And it mentions nothing about a risk from malaria in the United States, Australia, or indeed in the industrial world... it specifically says that most of the deaths are in Africa. (I'll wager that the majority of the remainder are in southeastern Asia.) Millions of people are dying; over a million a year, over 50 million since DDT was banned.
how much of that birth rate comes from those areas that are affected by THIS?
A very large part of it, considering that the birth rate is highest in the developing nations, which are also the poorest and hence least able to afford alternatives to DDT, and home to many infectious diseases that have been largely conquered in the industrial world.
You won't. DDT is virtually nontoxic to mammals. In decades of use, there is one recorded death that possibly might be linked to DDT... but was probably due more to the 9-year-old victim's consumption of another pesticide, camphechlor.
I was growing up in Houston the same time as you. My dad had a bag of DDT in our garage and ever so often he dusted it around the outside of our house to kill termites. We didn't have any roaches either and we all are healthy.
Right on. I lived in the Appalacians in Ky in the early 60's. There was a popular local song, "Ain't no flies on Jesus 'cause He's sprayed with DDT."
DDT, the single most effective tool for human health in the entire history of mankind,is anaethema to the antihumans. Let their cause be damned.
A few millions is a drop in the bucket. compared to the 6.45 billion souls who inhabit the planet.
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