How Enviromental Activists Brought Back Malaria

Salt Lake Tribune ^ | 15 December 2002 | STEVEN BROCKERMAN

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

Theirs is the disease you don't hear about on the nightly news. Newspaper editorialists, too, are silent about the death toll from this ailment -- nearly 9 million people since 1999, of which 8 million were pregnant women or children under the age of 5.

No, the disease isn't AIDS. It's mosquito-borne malaria, and we've had the means for wiping out this affliction for over a century now. However, thanks to environmentalist mythology, the tool, DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), has all but been banned worldwide.

The ban on DDT, like the modern environmentalist movement itself, sprang from the book, "Silent Spring," by Rachael Carson. As almost any school child today can parrot, Carson claimed DDT thinned the eggs of birds.

Pointing to a 1956 study by Dr. James DeWitt published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, Carson wrote: "Dr. DeWitt's now classic experiments [illustrate] that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction."

Not. DeWitt instead found that 50 percent more eggs hatched from DDT-fed quail than from those in the control group.

Following Carson's lead while ignoring the facts, hippie environmentalists began claiming that raptor populations -- eagles, osprey, hawks, etc. -- were declining due to DDT. They failed to note that such populations had been declining precipitously for years prior to DDT use.

Indeed, the yearly Audubon christmas bird counts from 1941-1960, when DDT use was greatest and most widespread, indicate that eagles actually increased in number, along with 26 other species of birds. A 40-year count by Hawks Mountain, Penn., ornithologists also found population increases for ospreys and most kinds of hawks.

Finally, after years of study, researchers at Cornell University "found no tremors, no mortality, no thinning of eggshells and no interference with reproduction caused by levels of DDT which were as high as those reported to be present in most of the wild birds where 'catastrophic' decreases in shell quality and reproduction have been claimed."

Carson, her book's affected prose designed to create optimum public panic over DDT, heralded, along with the decimation of bird populations, a coming cancer epidemic among humans. Her assertion was based on the high incidences of liver cancer found in adult rainbow trout in 1961 -- a result, not of DDT, but of a fungi-produced carcinogen, aflatoxin.

Once again, environmentalists followed Carson's lead, ignoring the facts. In 1971, William Ruckelshaus, a member of the Environmental Defense Fund and, incidentally, head of the newly established Environmental Protection Agency, banned DDT. He did so while refusing to attend any of the EPA's administrative hearings being held at the time on DDT.

Later, Ruckelshaus refused to read even one page of the 9,000 pages of testimony, rejecting, too, the findings of the hearings' judge, who declared: "DDT is not a carcinogenic . . . a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man."

Since 1971, environmentalist organizations like the International Pesticide Action Network have succeeded in getting DDT banned in country after country. People in those countries, forced to rely on pesticides that are neither as effective nor as safe as DDT, are now also forced to live, and to die, with the consequences of such environmental activism. Today, where cases of malaria once constituted only a handful of people, in Sri Lanka, Zanzibar and other tropical Third World countries throughout Africa, the Asian subcontinent and South America, deaths from malaria are skyrocketing into the millions.

Heedless of this silently rising death toll, environmentalists are now pressuring governments worldwide to also preserve wetlands, i.e., swamps, the foremost breeding grounds of mosquitoes. One would have to conclude, given all the facts, that environmentalists are either insane or murderously misanthropic. At a United Nations-sponsored earth summit in 1971, a delegate's remark gives us the answer: "What this world needs is a good plague to wipe out most of the human population."

When the death toll from malaria begins to mount in this country, we'll certainly hear about it on the evening news. Malaria will be blamed, of course, but the real culprit will be environmentalist mythology, which has been killing us softly for decades.

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Steven Brockerman lives in Sandy and writes on environmental issues.

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

In the world of the liberal, snap judgements based on emotion are always right.

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

Ping!!

[Southack]

But, but, but, isn't "disease" natural?

Isn't everything "natural" good?

Isn't DDT manmade? Isn't everything manmade bad?

< /MOCKING >

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

Ping!!

[thinktwice]

This story is true.

DDT was, however, being overused to the point it was showing up in bird egg shells and thought to be sending some birds into extinction due to DDT "weakened" shells. The weak shell theory proved false, but too late to save DDT from the bad name environmentalist propaganda gave it.

The anopheles mosquito (THE vector carrying malaria to humans) was almost made extinct by DDT. We almost did away with that human killing critter.

[Mark]

Look, just as long as their intentions were good, that's all that is important. If a few million people die, it's for a good liberal democratic murdering cause.

[DaGman]

All I know is that for the first time in my 48 years I'm seeing hawks in the city and hawks in the country like I've never seen before. My relatives that live in rural areas say they've noticed less field mice and other varmints too.

[Kerberos]

""Dr. DeWitt's now classic experiments [illustrate] that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction."

And then again it may not, hard to say really, but what the heck. That's close enough to say it needs to be banned.

[Mark]

And then there was "alar" the evil product sprayed on apples in the '70s. If you fed a couple of pounds of it to a mouse every day for a year, the damn thing up and dies on ya! BANNED!

[Ditter]

I just sent this to my Green CA cousin. He thinks the sky is falling, looks like he is right when it comes to mosquito borne illnesses.

[Fiddlstix]

BTTT

[Pushi]

I have believed for a long time that the environmentalist wackos have as their primary and overriding goal control of the world population. Most are pro-abortion; most do not want technological advancement, especially in third world countries--like running water and flush toilet, for goodness sakes; they seem to turn their heads the other way when one group is exterminating another group (they would rather get on the case of the US about fighting terrorism or opening the national forests to recreation); and they don't even do anything about the poverty in Africa and Asia where I guess that tens of thousands starve to death every day. They know they can easily get by with this crap in Africa and parts of Asia where the people are poor, ignorant, and powerless. They feel that birthrates are declining sufficiently in most industrialized nations where in some countries people are not even replacing themselves. Someone tell me I am wrong.

[lizma]

. At a United Nations-sponsored earth summit in 1971, a delegate's remark gives us the answer: "What this world needs is a good plague to wipe out most of the human population."

Wonder if Mr. or Mssss. delegate care to donate his or her children and grandchildren to the cause? These people are just sick.

If the death of millions is such a good thing to these people, why are they concerned about AIDs? Must be "a follow the money" kinda thing.

[dead]

I always thought that DDT did thin egg shells, but I still thought it insane that the environmentalists murdered millions of humans just to save some stupid birds.

Now I know that they didn't even save any birds.

Scum.

[fatidic]

To an environmentalist mosquitoes have a greater right to live than humans. All amimals have more right to live than humans. Environmentalists want all us humans dead and their policies reflect this belief.

[John Valentine]

Here is a fact for you:

The "study" if you want to credit it to that degree, pretendding to document the thinning of egshells in birds exposed to DDT relied on the use of a mechanical thumb-twist micrometer to measure the egshell thickness.

Now this is a reasonably accurate tool for many uses, but there are a couple problems using it on eggshells. First the eggshell is not flat, so it cannot contct the two faces of the micrometer evenly as the faces of the micrometer jaws are closed.

Second, the eggshlls are rather compressible, so any variation in the amount of pressure applied as the micrometer jaws are closed and the vernier turned will be reflected in differences in the measure thickness of the shell, This is doubly troublesome as there will be a collapse of the tiny "dome" of the curved shel under the pressure of the micrometer jaw faces as they are closed.

Now, considering all this, one would thingk that the precision claimed for these measurements would be rather low. But this is not the case. In fact, the study claimed a precision in these measurements that the micrimeter used was in the study not capable of achieving even under ideal conditons, measuring relatively incompressible substances like sheet steel.

The truth is that the entire book, Silent Spring, was based on a fraud. The open question is why so many refuse to face the fact that they have been snoockered.

[Kerberos]

"If you fed a couple of pounds of it to a mouse every day for a year, the damn thing up and dies on ya!"

I know what you mean. I had occasion to work for a pharmaceutical company for a few years and during that time became aware that many studies that are cited are based on giving the test subjects huge amounts of the material in question.

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

The open question is why so many refuse to face the fact that they have been snoockered.

I'm not sure of the reasons. I'm guessing that the enviralists don't care because it advances their agenda and they think it's okay to lie to advance their cause. As for the other people, they were ashamed to admit that they got suckered by a scam.

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

Yeah, like when they were testing sacharin. Maybe it is bad for you, but the studies were totally biased. I remember the warning labels on the soft drinks. The amount that they gave the mice was equivalent to you drinking 4 cases of pop every single day for at least a decade.

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

They're definitely scum.