[thetruckster]

"Their first court case was to get DDT banned."

Was that a bad thing?

[richardtavor]

The way they set up the experiment was to have 2 separate studies of chickens and the effect on the number of eggs they would produce. Each one had a control group of non-applied DDT--you would think that the number of eggs produced would be about the same, but they varied widely. One group was 16.8 per hen and the other group was 39.2 per hen--obviously something else was involved and they should have found out what it was. In fact they found that the first set of birds had 17% less fertilization than those fed DDT--rather than honest research, they discarded the first control group. This study was called the Paxtuxent Study--I got this information from the book "Trashing the Economy by Ron Arnold and Alan Gottlieb. In answer to your question, I don't think anyone knows if DDT is harmful or not--they never performed an honest study, but this info gave them victory in court. The point is, their study of Global Warming is being performed in exactly the same way. The banning of DDT cost American farmers a lot of money and reduced their productivity. The Kyoto agreement is an attempt to do exactly the same thing--reduce productivity in the better economies....

[WilliamWallace1999]

Yes, banning DDT without proof of causation was a bad thing. As a result of DDT banning, the death rate from malaria is on the rise world-wide. It is another case of the needs of some animal over the needs of man. Can you tell me what it was the DDT did that was so bad?

[backhoe]

West Nile Virus- Bring Back DDT?

100 things you should know about DDT

[dozer7]

"Their first court case was to get DDT banned."

Was that a bad thing?
\
yes it was rachel carson did not know jack.

regards dozer

[jonascord]

DDT was not banned because there was evidence it harmed wildlife or humans. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency administrative law judge who listened to 9,000 pages of testimony over seven months 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."

Despite the findings of the EPA judge, EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus banned DDT in 1972. Ruckelshaus never attended a single hour of the seven months of EPA hearings on DDT. His aides reported he did not even read the transcript of the EPA hearings on DDT. Ruckleshaus was a member and fundraiser for the Environmental Defense Fund -- a group who -- according to a deposition in a federal lawsuit -- conspired to discredit the scientists who defended DDT.

Population control advocates blamed DDT for increasing third world population. In the 1960s, World Health Organization authorities believed there was no alternative to the overpopulation problem but to assure than up to 40 percent of the children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the Agency for International Development stated, "Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing."

DDT should be hailed as one of the greatest achievements in public health. Instead, unscrupulous activists have made it the poster child for the environmental apocalypse.

Let's hope that in the 21st century our society comes to realize that genocide by junk science is no different than genocide by the gas chamber.

[katana]

Over the past couple years I've heard of studies that show huge increases in the spread of malaria and other insect borne diseases since the ban of DDT. Other reports have shown that the data used in the book Silent Spring was deeply skewed and flawed.

To the environmental left, the former effect is desirable since it helps reduce the human population. The latter statement deserves much more investigation than it will ever get in the general press or academia.

I think everybody grew up hearing about paper thin eagle eggs and other nasty effects traced to DDT and the relationship between cancer rates and toxins in the environment is a possibility. Maybe the ban was a good thing but I find myself becoming more and more skeptical of anything these people advocate. On many issues they are proven liars.