Posted on 08/19/2003 8:57:23 PM PDT by enviros_kill
Weekly cases of West Nile Virus are being reported from around the country. These media reports often mention that only the very old may die from the dreaded virus. Is this meant to reassure us – only Grandma and Grandpa may die? Taken in a larger context it is apparent that the human death toll from environmental policies continues to mount while the "Fort Worth Star-Telegram" and "Dallas Morning News" lecture us on riding the train and the bus. The US is in the midst of a nationwide virus epidemic from disease-carrying mosquitoes because misinformed or timid politicians refuse to implement the most effective insecticide -- DDT.
The discovery of DDT by scientist Paul Muller, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948, was regarded as a major public health success because DDT kills mosquitoes and other insects that carry more than 20 serious diseases. These include the bubonic plague, typhus, yellow fever, encephalitis, malaria and the West Nile Virus. In 1970 the National Academy of Sciences stated: "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. ... In a little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable.”
DDT was thoroughly investigated for cancer and other effects in 1971. After seven months of hearings and 125 witnesses an EPA administrative law judge, Edmund Sweeney, concluded, “DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man. ... DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man ... the use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife." But William Ruckelshaus, EPA Director with ties to the radical Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), overruled Sweeney and banned DDT in 1972. His decision had nothing to do with science or concern for people’s health -- Ruckelshaus never attended a day of the hearings and admitted that he never read the transcripts. Instead, the same emotional rhetoric, environmental religion and activist lawsuits that have stopped power plants and transmission line construction motivated Ruckelshaus’ decision.
When your elderly parents are sick or dying in a hospital bed from West Nile Virus remember this - environmental policies in this country are heavily influenced by an extremist ideology that harbors a death wish for humans. Unless you wish to be part of it demand that Congress "promote the general welfare" by rescinding the DDT ban and enable our local communities to eradicate the killer mosquitoes.
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