The same article's claim that Clinton's EPA banned 2 pesticides useful against bed bugs was easier for me to believe. Can you confirm that part?
As a Dermatologist I'm tasked to identify itchy folks who need to contact their exterminator. I can calm them, but it's up to the exterminator to cure them. Alas differentiating bedbug bites from other insects' isn't an exact science. I haven't seen a lot of cases here in the Iowa Quad Cities.
I did receive confirmation of another case from a patient yesterday. He said the exterminator told him the increase was due to them being imported by immigrants, especially from Africa, who weren't very sensitive to their bites. I have no idea whether that very non-PC third hand claim is correct. Personally I'd been blaming Clinton and the liberal EPA. Increased travel by people clearly aids bedbug's spread; Obama and his liberals crashing the economy might actually reduce the spread by reducing travel. However Obama's 40 vehicle motorcade, less the one drunk secret service agent, spent last night in town. If I find an uptake over the next month I'll blame them.
Thank you for your response.
I will answer it tomorrow. I didn´t sleep too well last night and need to turn in early....
It gets a tad complicated, which I need to research again (with pleasure), because I need to update myself on the subject.
One thought, though, before I turn off. This DDT thing could all be put to rest by taking a room full of bedbugs and spraying the room and bugs with DDT. I bet not one bug would be found the next day. But the naysayers don´t dare.
I apologize for my late, late, late answer about DDT which I had promised the next day.
After about 3 hours of research the next day….No, the dog did not eat my homework. My computer did. I was too upset to try again for several days.
But this worked out for the best. The second time around, I was able to concentrate on Michael Crichton’s lecture to a group of young folks, and an excellent paper he wrote which covers the subject.
Michael graduated from Harvard medial school. He never wanted to be an M.D. It was pressure from his parents. He tried to quit medical school a couple of times. For one thing, he couldn’t stand the sight of dead folks much less cut them open.
When he graduated, he refused to take his medical boards. That assured him he would never have to practice medicine.
Medical school served him well though. He did endless research before writing a new novel. As he was researching material for a future novel, he ran across the following information: Only 50 people died in the initial explosion for Chernobyl. This does not include those who died later of complications. (You can find all this in google under Michael Crichton and much, much more great information on other subjects.) The anti nuclear energy folks have made folks believe half the world died too during the initial explosion. In fact, the number of those who died afterwards is also quite low in comparison to what they want us to continue to believe.
Here we go:
1.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSYla0y9Wcs
2.
http://www.sullivan-county.com/immigration/e2.html
Environmentalism as Religion: Michael Crichton
In 2003 Michael Crichton sent the Ecology industry into a rage by exposing them as a religion. He can get away with it because he has both the science background and enough money not to be silenced by the eco-lobby. In fact environmentalism is as much a fundamentalist’ religion as that of Pat Robertson. He is correct about the religious undertones, but it’s also a political movement as he points out.
In 2008 global warming has fallen off the radar as the presidential election, high energy costs, and the Wall Street meltdown have dominated the news. But this one article seems to have been left out of the discussion. Besides reports of such record cold in Mongolia killing people and livestock, the December 19, 2007 Washington Times reports:
“In Buenos Aires (Argentina), snow fell for the first time since the year 1918. Dozens of homeless people died from exposure. In Peru, 200 people died from the cold...(in 2007) Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia...New Zealand...weather turned so cold...”
To quote former Vice President Al Gore, in his book entitled Earth in the Balance,
“The richness and diversity of our religious tradition throughout history is a spiritual resource long ignored by people of faith, who are often afraid to open their minds to teachings first offered outside their own systems of belief. But, the emergence of a civilization in which knowledge moves freely and almost instantaneously through the world has spurred a renewed investigation of the wisdom distilled by all faiths. This pan religious perspective may prove especially important where our global civilization’s responsibility for the earth is concerned.”
Remarks to the Commonwealth Club by Michael Crichton San Francisco September 15, 2003 (Extract)
I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we’re told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.
As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism. And in order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is important to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will always be a need, carrying into the future. I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why.
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people-—the best people, the most enlightened people-—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday-—these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.
Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not. Because we know a lot more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago. And what we know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet the myths do not die. Let’s examine some of those beliefs.
There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?
...In short, the romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things... If Eden is a fantasy that never existed, and mankind wasn’t ever noble and kind and loving, if we didn’t fall from grace, then what about the rest of the religious tenets? What about salvation, sustainability, and judgment day? What about the coming environmental doom from fossil fuels and global warming, if we all don’t get down on our knees and conserve every day?
Well, it’s interesting. You may have noticed that something has been left off the doomsday list, lately. Although the preachers of environmentalism have been yelling about population for fifty years, over the last decade world population seems to be taking an unexpected turn. Fertility rates are falling almost everywhere. As a result, over the course of my lifetime the thoughtful predictions for total world population have gone from a high of 20 billion, to 15 billion, to 11 billion (which was the UN estimate around 1990) to now 9 billion, and soon, perhaps less. There are some who think that world population will peak in 2050 and then start to decline. There are some who predict we will have fewer people in 2100 than we do today. Is this a reason to rejoice, to say halleluiah? Certainly not.
Without a pause, we now hear about the coming crisis of world economy from a shrinking population. We hear about the impending crisis of an aging population. Nobody anywhere will say that the core fears expressed for most of my life have turned out not to be true...
Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake. They got one prediction wrong; they’re human. So what. Unfortunately, it’s not just one prediction. It’s a whole slew of them. We are running out of oil. We are running out of all natural resources. Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand species become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000. And on and on and on. With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it’s a religion. Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn’t quit when the world doesn’t end on the day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets. One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts.
...I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigeous science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won’t impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependant on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.
Fundamentalism
Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good. On the contrary, they believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view. In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.
I want to argue that it is now time for us to make a major shift in our thinking about the environment, similar to the shift that occurred around the first Earth Day in 1970, when this awareness was first heightened. But this time around, we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.
There are two reasons why I think we all need to get rid of the religion of environmentalism.
First, we need an environmental movement, and such a movement is not very effective if it is conducted as a religion. We know from history that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It’s not a good record. Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible...
How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There’s a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren’t true. It isn’t that these “facts” are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way. Not at all-—what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false...At this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over. What we need is a new organization much closer to the FDA. We need an organization that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will fund identical research projects to more than one group, and that will make everybody in this field get honest fast...So it’s time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that.
(Unfortunately, Michael Crichton is no longer with us.)
3.
August 30, 2006
Lest We Forget DDT’s Benefits, Bedbugs Remind Us
By Harold S. Stein, Jr.
A sidelight to the recent epidemic of bedbugs that appears to be blossoming all over the country is how it calls to mind a fundamental axiom of toxicology, namely, that it is important to weigh “risk vs. benefit.”
Prior to the U.S. ban on DDT, the incidence and significance of bedbug infestations was so inconsequential that my company charged the grand sum of $18.00 for a single treatment of a hotel room, with a thirty-day guarantee. I do not recall a single incidence of having to schedule a second treatment. The key was the ability to treat not only the usual cracks and crevices but also the mattresses (especially the piping and little buttons) and bed frames without any fear of dermal irritation. We insisted then as now that the bed clothing, etc. be removed and cleaned, but since there would probably be some time delay before that was accomplished, the chemical treatment was having its effect.
DDT did not cause dermal or topical irritation. Remember its early use during World War II when it was liberally applied as a dusting powder to delouse infested civilians and military alike. In fact, DDT even was a recognized “drug” listed in the U.S. pharmacopeia with an accepted external and even internal oral dose!
Its beneficial uses, of course, were drowned out by the emotional crescendo that accompanied a long and politicized federal hearing prior to the ban. Recall, though, that the final verdict of the hearing was that DDT was relatively safe, a verdict that was administratively overturned — after the fact — by EPA’s Administrator. The scientific community then and now recognizes that a strict adherence to the rule of judging the risk of an agent vs. the benefit of its careful use was totally abandoned here.
And during our current battle with what should in effect be a minor and easily removed incursion of bedbugs, there are few alternate substances registered for use with such efficacy and dermal safety; ergo, success is profoundly influenced by and dependent upon the thoroughness and speed of the housekeeping staff in tearing apart bed frames; perhaps disassembling furniture; bagging, removing, and sterilizing bed linens; and other inefficient and costly measures.
Granted, this all fades into inconsequence when compared to how this agent was removed from the arsenal for attacking diseases like malaria and fly-borne encephalitis, but the irony is the same: the public blames industry for problems caused by activists who, in their ignorance and fervor, were ostensibly acting in the public interest.
Harold S. Stein, Jr. is a past president of the National Pest Management Association.
Oh..and here is something at which you can have a laugh:
My best to you…