The “Green Movement” and DDT – death to tens of millions.

How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain (Truth)!

Samuel Adams

Science is analytical, descriptive, informative. Man does not live by bread alone, but by science he attempts to do so. Hence the deadliness of all that is purely scientific.

Eric Gill

It’s not easy being green

Kermit the Frog

In my last post I looked at numbers that are indisputable. Maybe global warming is “bad,” maybe it isn’t. But dead people are easy to count and there are large numbers of Africans, many under the age of five years, who have died because global warming activists preclude the development of fossil-fueled-powered electrical plants in Africa. As devastating as this is, it pales in comparison to the havoc wrought by the “anti-DDT green movement.” Indeed, as much as anything, DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) can be attributed as the beginnings of the “green movement.”

The good of DDT is unassailable. DDT’s insecticidal properties were not discovered until 1939, and it was used with great success in the second half of World War II to control malaria and typhus among civilians and troops. The Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology in 1948 for his discovery of the anti-malarial vector properties of the agent.

Many of the statistics and summaries of the scientific studies I will employ come from the following: Malaria Victims: How Environmentalist Ban on DDT Caused 50 Million Deaths found in the website Discoverthenetworks.org A guide to the political left:

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1259

And from: History of Global Killer – Malaria, by Dr. Nitish Priyadarshi.

http://amchron.soundenterprises.net/articles/view/96458

Malaria is the oldest disease known. Fossils of mosquitoes 30 million years old show signs of malaria, suggesting even prehistoric man likely suffered from this lethal infection. It has killed more people than any other disease. By one estimate, malaria has killed half the people who have ever lived on this planet. Malaria remains a deadly disease. The World Health Organization estimates deaths per year world wide at about 1.272 million (2004 estimate).  However, due to various measurement difficulties that result in under reporting and deaths from malaria related complications, the actual number is likely to be higher than 3 million deaths per year. Indeed, malaria has killed more people than all wars totaled together. The economic devastation of the disease is remarkable, as well, but not a subject for today.

Malaria was endemic nearly worldwide. According to Dr. Robert Desowitz, professor of tropical medicine at the University of North Carolina: “From colonial times until the 1940s, malaria was the American disease”—annually afflicting as many as 7 million Americans (US population in 1940 was only 132,164,569) and killing thousands. That would be equivalent to 16.5 million afflicted annually today. In 1936, for instance, some 3900 US residents died of malaria. But these casualty figures were dwarfed by those of other countries. In India during the 1930s, for example, approximately 100 million people contracted malaria each year, and at least a million of them died as a result. In Africa, hundreds of millions of people per year became infected, and several million of them lost their lives. Then, along came Paul Hermann Müller and the miracle of DDT. Malaria was eradicated from the US and millions lived who would otherwise have perished. Millions. It is no wonder he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine (possibly even as great an accomplishment as the Nobel Prizes given for making an inaccurate movie – Al Gore – or giving a speech about peace while sending out the drones and ramping up the war in Afghanistan – Barrack Obama).

DDT protected millions of Allied troops from contracting malaria and other infectious diseases like typhus and the plague during World War II. Moreover, the pesticide saved innumerable lives among the recently liberated concentration-camp survivors by killing off typhus-carrying lice. Wherever DDT was used in significant quantities, the incidence of malaria declined precipitously. In South America, for example, malaria cases fell by 33% between the years 1942 and 1946 – just 4 years. In 1948, there was not a single malaria-related death in all of Italy. After DDT was sprayed widely in India’s Kanara district (where some 50,000 people had typically contracted malaria in any given year during the pre-DDT era), the number of newly diagnosed malaria cases dwindled to about 1,500 per year by the late 1940s –a 97% decrease. Throughout India the number of malaria cases fell from about 75 million in 1951 to 50,000 in 1961. Sri Lanka initiated DDT spraying in 1946, at which time approximately 3 million new cases of malaria were being diagnosed each year. By 1956, that figure had fallen to 7,300; eight years after that, in 1964, a mere 29 Sri Lankans contracted malaria, a decrease of more than 1000%.

The National Academy of Sciences summarized the efficacy of DDT as follows: “To (virtually no other chemical) does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. It is estimated that, in little more than two decades DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that would otherwise have been inevitable.”

So what happened? Why is malaria rampant in sub-Saharan Africa?

Tragically, the use of DDT was derailed by a series of events that were triggered initially by the September 1962 publication of biologist Rachel Carson’s bestselling book, Silent Spring, which warned of the dangers that DDT allegedly posed to all manner of plant, animal, and human life. These threats were so great, said Carson, that on balance they more than negated whatever benefits were to be gained from using the pesticide to prevent malaria (a bold statement for a chemical so honored by the National Academy of Sciences and down a road that already saved 500 million lives – the population of the entire North American continent). Her book received intense media coverage and spent 30 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It was the subject not only of congressional discussion and debate, but also of consideration by the presidential Science Advisory Committee. In Silent Spring, Carson stated that the overall rise in U.S. cancer rates between 1940 (the dawn of the DDT era) and 1960 proved that DDT was a carcinogen. She predicted that DDT and other pesticides would spark a cancer epidemic that would wipe out “practically 100 percent” of the human population within a single generation. Carson predicted all sorts of catastrophes. The details of the manifold doomsday scenarios can be found in the Discoverthenetworks.org website, noted above, for my readers with a deeper interest.

Activist organizations like the Sierra Club and the World Wildlife Fund quickly jumped aboard Carson’s bandwagon of doom; within a few years, they would be joined by other, likeminded groups such as Greenpeace and the Environmental Defense Fund. Suffice it to say that these organizations won out despite an August 31, 1970 U.S. Court of Appeals hearing that stated unequivocally that “DDT has an amazing and exemplary record of safe use, does not cause a toxic response in man or other animals, and is not harmful. Carcinogenic claims regarding DDT are unproven speculation.”

The head of the EPA, William Ruckleshaus, refused to agree with the court ruling and ordered a hearing to consider an appropriate course of action.

 After seven months of hearings in 1971, which produced 125 witnesses and 9,362 pages of testimony, EPA Judge Edmund Sweeney concluded that according to the evidence: “DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man… is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man … [and 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.” So what did Ruckleshuas, a Sierra Club member, do, ask you? In light of all the evidence against a deleterious effect he did the only thing a eco-vigilante could do. He outlawed DDT.

Sixty million people have died needlessly of malaria since the imposition of the 1972 ban on DDT, and hundreds of millions more have suffered from this debilitating disease. The majority of those affected are children. Of the 300 to 500 million new cases of malaria each year, 200 to 300 million are children, and malaria now kills one child every 30 seconds. By the time you read the next sentence another child will be dead.

Of course the debate rages on, but here is a conclusion of a recent panel of scientists: indoor residual spraying can result in substantial exposure and that DDT may pose a risk for human populations. Did you get that… may pose a risk! Oops. Thirty seconds just went by. Another African baby died in its mother’s arms. The is no “may” about that. Think about it – oops, again, another thirty seconds just went by.

Roy Filly