The Green Death

“Who is the worst killer in the long, ugly history of war and extermination? Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? Not even close. A single book called Silent Spring killed far more people than all those fiends put together.

Published in 1962, Silent Spring used manipulated data and wildly exaggerated claims (sound familiar?) to push for a worldwide ban on the pesticide known as DDT – which is, to this day, the most effective weapon against malarial mosquitoes. The Environmental Protection Agency held extensive hearings after the uproar produced by this book… and these hearings concluded that DDT should not be banned. A few months after the hearings ended, EPA administrator William Ruckleshaus over-ruled his own agency and banned DDT anyway, in what he later admitted was a “political” decision. Threats to withhold American foreign aid swiftly spread the ban across the world.

The resulting explosion of mosquito-borne malaria in Africa has claimed over sixty million lives. This was not a gradual process – a surge of infection and death happened almost immediately. The use of DDT reduces the spread of mosquito-borne malaria by fifty to eighty percent, so its discontinuation quickly produced an explosion of crippling and fatal illness. The same environmental movement which has been falsifying data, suppressing dissent, and reading tea leaves to support the global-warming fraud has studiously ignored this blood-drenched “hockey stick” for decades.”

— Doctor Zero

>http://www.doczero.org/2010/02/the-green-death/

On February 10th, 1970, almost a year before he founded the EPA, President Nixon announced, “we have taken action to phase out the use of DDT and other hard pesticides.” It therefore seems highly likely that the DDT ban was decided by Nixon long in advance of the EPA hearings, which is probably why Ruckelshaus, who Nixon put at the head of the agency he founded “over-ruled his own agency”. Nixon seemed to expect nothing less than absolute loyalty from those he put in high positions. In what became called “The Saturday Night Massacre,” Ruckelshaus and his boss, Elliot Richardson, famously quit their jobs at the Justice Department rather than obey an order from Nixon to fire the prosecutor investigating Watergate.

The conservative myth is that the ban was worldwide. While the ban did affect the price and popularity of DDT donated to poorer countries like Africa, Ruckelshaus’ decision was based on whether the ban was good for America, which it was and still is. We had alternatives that were just as good and the decision is cited by scientists as a major factor in stopping the bald eagle from going extinct. But the ban was a terrible decision for Africa because it caused a very poor country to adopt more expensive chemicals, causing a large number of unnecessary human deaths. This definitely should have been considered by Nixon and Ruckelshaus before they decided to institute the ban, but even today Ruckelshaus doesn’t see the link between his decision and how the DDT ban affected poorer countries.

While foregoing the ban would have saved countless lives, it also goes against one of the prime tenants of medicine: “Don’t make the patient any worse.” DDT is hardly a harmless miracle cure demonized by overzealous environmentalists. A 2006 study says found many children exposed to DDT as fetuses (found in trace amounts in the umbilical cord) had decreased attention and cognitive skills. Studies done in poorer regions that use DDT have found unhealthy levels of it in breast milk. Another study of Chinese textile workers found DDT and early pregnancy loss. A case-control study in Japan supported by several other studies concluded that in utero DDT exposure may affect thyroid hormone levels and be a factor in cretinism.

As for “Silent Spring,” Carson never advocated banning DDT, not in America and certainly not worldwide. She only advocated limiting it because its overuse would cause insects to evolve defense mechanisms against it, and she was right about that. She certainly didn’t manipulate data as that article claims. Her science was vindicated by President Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee and Discover Magazine calls it one of the one of the 25 greatest science books of all time. The conservative claim repeated in “the Green Death” that scientific studies have proved that DDT had no effect on the thinning of eagle and falcon shells is actually technically true: it is a metabolite of DDT, called DDE, that actually causes the thinning of the shells.

There is certainly no comparison to be made between the DDT banning controversy and global warming. The DDT ban was a political decision made by a Republican and was never meant to be globalized by the liberals who supported it. Global warming is an observed scientific fact accepted by every major scientific organization in the world.

Some quotes:

“Critics claim that restrictions on the use of DDT in vector control have resulted in substantial numbers of unnecessary deaths due to malaria. Estimates for the number of these deaths range from hundreds of thousands, according to Nicholas Kristof,^[107] to much higher figures. Robert Gwadz of the National Institutes of Health said in 2007 that “The ban on DDT may have killed 20 million children.”^[108] These arguments have been called “outrageous” by former WHO scientist Socrates Litsios, and May Berenbaum, an entomologist at the University of Illinois, says that “to blame environmentalists who oppose DDT for more deaths than Hitler is worse than irresponsible.”^[81] Investigative journalist Adam Sarvana and others characterize this notion as a “myth” promoted principally by Roger Bate of the pro-DDT advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM) in service of his anti-regulatory, free market ideology.^[109][110]

Criticisms of a “ban” on DDT often specifically reference the 1972 US ban (with the erroneous implication that this constituted a worldwide ban and prohibited use of DDT in vector control). Reference is often made to Rachel Carson‘s Silent Spring even though she never pushed for a ban on DDT. John Quiggin and Tim Lambert have written that “the most striking feature of the claim against Carson is the ease with which it can be refuted.”^[111] Carson actually devoted a page of her book to considering the relationship between DDT and malaria, warning of the evolution of DDT resistance in mosquitoes and concluding:

It is more sensible in some cases to take a small amount of damage in preference to having none for a time but paying for it in the long run by losing the very means of fighting [is the advice given in Holland by Dr Briejer in his capacity as director of the Plant Protection Service]. Practical advice should be “Spray as little as you possibly can” rather than “Spray to the limit of your capacity.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddt

“In one of her last public appearances, Carson had testified before President Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee. The committee issued its report on May 15, 1963, largely backing Carson’s scientific claims.^[56] Following the report’s release, she also testified before a Senate subcommittee to make policy recommendations. Though Carson received hundreds of other speaking invitations, she was unable to accept the great majority of them. Her health was steadily declining as her cancer outpaced the radiation therapy, with only brief periods of remission. She spoke as much as she was physically able, however, including a notable appearance on The Today Show and speeches at several dinners held in her honor. In late 1963, she received a flurry of awards and honors: the Audubon Medal (from the National Audubon Society), the Cullum Medal (from the American Geographical Society), and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson

“Ruckelshaus made the right decision — for the United States. At the time, DDT was mainly sprayed on crops, mostly cotton, a use far riskier than indoor house spraying. There was no malaria in the United States — in part thanks to DDT — so there were no public health benefits from its use. ”But if I were a decision maker in Sri Lanka, where the benefits from use outweigh the risks, I would decide differently,” Ruckleshaus told me recently. ”It’s not up to us to balance risks and benefits for other people. There’s arrogance in the idea that everybody’s going to do what we do. We’re not making these decisions for the rest of the world, are we?”

In fact, we are — the central reason that African nations who need DDT do not use it today. Washington is the major donor to W.H.O. and Roll Back Malaria, and most of the rest of the financing for those groups comes from Europe, where DDT is also banned. There is no law that says if America cannot use DDT then neither can Mozambique, but that’s how it works. The ban in America and other wealthy countries has, first of all, turned poor nations’ agricultural sectors against DDT for economic reasons. A shipment of Zimbabwean tobacco, for example, was blocked from entering the United States market because it contained traces of DDT, turning Zimbabwe’s powerful tobacco farmers into an effective anti-DDT lobby. From a health point of view, of course, American outrage would have been more appropriate if traces of tobacco had been found in their DDT than the other way around.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/magazine/what-the-world-needs-now-is-ddt.html?pagewanted=4

“Most people would consider the June 1972 ban of DDT by the Environmental Protection Agency the beginning of the end for widespread use of the insecticide, the most effective anti-malaria pesticide still in existence. For his role in promulgating the ban in the face of a contrary finding by the EPA hearing, then Administrator William Ruckelshaus has become almost a hate figure amongst the anti-malaria community. Now it appears though that the hate figure should actually be then President Richard Nixon.

In February 10th 1970, President Nixon announced, “we have taken action to phase out the use of DDT and other hard pesticides.” In December 1970, the administration created the EPA to implement executive environmental policy. As a 1975 study out of Northern Illinois University notes, “This is important . . . before the EPA hearings were convened and even before the EPA was created, Ruckelshaus’ boss, President Nixon, had stated that DDT was being phased out. This leaves the hearings themselves superfluous, satisfying only a court requirement. As long as the head of EPA was responsible for the final order, it was impossible for the result to be other than as occurred.” Thus, the exhaustive studies and hearings conducted to “decide” the fate of the chemical in the two years following President Nixon’s statement were nothing but a political farce designed to add ex post science to a political decision. The decision had already been made rendering the hearings, studies and litigation pointless.

…..

Why did Nixon push for a ban? We may never know. A few older Washington DC policy experts have suggested that some of his election campaign supporters were chemical companies that produced alternatives to DDT and so stood to gain handsomely by the DDT phase out. Others say that it is more likely that senior officials in his administration pressured Nixon into the decision given the potential votes he stood to lose in his native and very green state of California. But the why of his decision pales beside what this decision has wrought: two million deaths a year from malaria alone.”

http://www.aei.org/article/20314

“It’s not DDT per se that is thought to do the damage to eggshells, but a DDT metabolite known as DDE. Thus the most persuasive feeding study refers to it: “DDE-induced Eggshell Thinning in the American kestrel: A Comparison of the Field Situation and Laboratory Results.” This groundbreaking study was published in the Journal of Applied Ecology by Jeffrey Lincer in 1975.

Kestrels, commonly called sparrow hawks, are small falcons. Lincer noted that the “inverse correlation between DDE in North American raptor eggs and eggshell thickness is clear but does not prove a causal relationship since other chemicals or factors could be involved.” So to find out what effect DDE might have, Lincer fed captive kestrels a DDE-laced diet and then compared their eggs with those taken from the nests of wild kestrels. Lincer found that dietary levels of three, six, and 10 parts per million (ppm) of DDE resulted in eggshells that were 14 percent, 17.4 percent, and 21.7 percent thinner respectively. “Despite the recent controversy, there can be little doubt now as to the causal relationship between the global contaminant DDE and the observed eggshell thinning and the consequent population declines in several birds of prey,” concluded Lincer. As best as I can tell, he’s right.

Still, there is a piece missing in the full scientific picture. Despite considerable research, no one has ever identified the physiological mechanism(s) by which DDE causes eggshell thinning, according to Anderson.”

http://reason.com/archives/2004/01/07/ddt-eggshells-and-me