FuzzNJ wrote:A pro DDT post? #wtf
yes a pro DDT post...
Why The Insecticide DDT Should Never Have Been Banned
'Green errors began with DDT' by Christopher Pearson
The Weekend Australian, January 24, 2004
To many, the green movement still seems a harmless enough nature cult, not to be taken too seriously. But evidence and arguments have been emerging to suggest otherwise with increasing momentum and effect. The environmental lobby now stands charged with direct responsibility for millions of needless deaths, mostly of children in the Third World, from malaria.
At issue is the banning of DDT. Bjorn Lomborg, of The Skeptical Environmentalist fame; puts the basic science briskly.
"Our intake of coffee is about 50 times more carcinogenic than our intake of DDT before it was banned...the cancer risk for DDT is about 0.00008 per cent."
Ted Lapkin insists in November's edition of Quadrant that it's "still widely regarded as the single most powerful weapon at our disposal in the war against malaria" and that its disuse has been a scandal of public policy. Author Michael Crichton, in an address to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, claimed that
"banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the 20th century history of America".
The junkscience.com website sees the ban as a tool for First World bureaucrats to pursue the goal of zero population growth in the developing world.
DDT was banned after Rachel Carson, in Silent Spring (1962), accused it of a range of dangers to human health (notably cancer), to the ecosystem and to thinning the eggshells of bald eagles. Lapkin cites plausible authority that
"no scientific peer-reviewed study has ever replicated any case of negative human health impacts from DDT".
He asserts that of all Carson's charges "the only contention that has been scientifically proved is the thinning effect DDT has on the eggshells of predatory birds".
The scientific and moral crux is that the relative harmlessness of DDT has long been established. One late-1950s study involved researchers feeding a man 35mg of DDT a day for two years with no ill effects. Lapkin quotes Donald Roberts, an eminent professor of tropical medicine, as saying:
"You could eat a spoonful of it and it wouldn't hurt you".
Why then did the US Environmental Protection Agency ban DDT in 1972? The simple answer is that the environmental movement spawned by Carson's catastrophic predictions prevailed over empirical research. Far worse is Crichton's terrible charge:
"We knew better and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn't give a damn."
According to junkscience.com, a population control official at the Agency for International Development blithely summed it up as "rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing".
A suggestive irony is that the industrialised world had eradicated malaria at home, and got the benefits of DDT, before banning it and campaigning to have it banned elsewhere. As well, the leadership of Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund unconscionably turned a blind eye "to an African malaria catastrophe that was a direct outgrowth of their own advocacy.
"millions of human lives each year...a completely preventable epidemic...Greenpeace is currently campaigning to shut down the only facility in India that still manufactures DDT".
Non-government organisations worked hand in glove with nation states. The international development agencies of Norway and Sweden, where the anopheles mosquito has never posed a problem, refused to fund programs using DDT because they had banned its domestic use. How many Mozambicans and citizens of other aid-dependant African countries died as a result is not precisely known. Perhaps the governments in question should fund investigative research.
It's not as though there weren't instructive examples which should have caused reasonably well-informed activists to recognise that, in the Maoist formula, "error has been committed". Lapkin cites two.
1. When Sri Lanka banned DDT in the mid 1960s, malaria cases rose from 29 in 1964 to more than half a million five years later.
2. Ecuador, which expanded its use of DDT in the 1980s and 1990s, experienced a 60 per cent drop in infection rates.
