I've scrupulously avoided the list-itis that plagues editors at the end of the year. But an editorial in today's' Detroit News spurred me to make one end-of-the-century selection. The Detroit News commented,"Rachel Carson, a media icon for her book Silent Spring, which led to a ban on the pesticide DDT, is making many 'Persons of the Century' lists this week. Unspoken in these tributes, however, is that mosquito-borne malaria is actually one of the few diseases on the rise at the dawn of the new millennium - in large part due to the Carson-inspired ban on DDT."
For my money, the attack on DDT, from Carson's Silent Spring to the ban by the Environmental Protection Agency, is the mother of all junk science and, therefore, "junk science of the 20th century." Here are a few reasons why. More info on DDT can be found in "100 Things You Should Know About DDT."
- A committee of the National Academy of Sciences wrote in 1970, "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT... Indeed, it is estimated that, in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that would otherwise have been inevitable."
- 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.
But it gets even more sinister.
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.
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