DDT and Other Pesticide Scares

If you or your kids contract malaria or yellow fever as a result of an encounter with mosquitos, or if there is a West Nile Virus outbreak in your neighborhood, I predict you will no longer care how Canada's bald eagle and peregrine falcon populations might be affected by DDT.1  Mosquitos also carry equine encephalitis, canine and feline heartworms, and other diseases, so they are also a threat to your pets and livestock.

The extremists in the environmental movement (and many vegetarians) consider people to be no more important than animals and plants.2  And "activists" are the people most likely to appear on television, because television thrives on controversy more than truth.  However, God intended man to "have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth."3  That doesn't mean that we shouldn't care about the welfare of plants and animals, but it does mean, in my humble opinion, that people are more important than animals, especially disease-carrying parasites.

Rachel Carson has her own little subsection at the bottom of this page.



Overview articles:


"Green" Dreams Kill People.  How many people have died, or will die, as a result of the Left's "green" fantasies?  To begin with, who has taken responsibility for the hundreds of thousands — maybe millions — of Africans who have died because of the Left's insane banning of DDT?  No one, of course.  Will there ever be an accounting?

The Top 50 Liberal Media Bias Examples.  [#4] DDT Ban:  The biggest example of the media coming to the aid of environmentalism is, of course, is the worldwide ban of DDT.  In 1962, a book titled Silent Spring written by American biologist Rachel Carson was published.  The media pushed Carson's work as settled science.  It later came to light that much of Carson's "evidence" was simply manufactured and the ban has been responsible for untold millions of deaths in places like Africa.  Still, the media continues to cite Carson's work as fact.

Mosquito Population Skyrockets Due to DDT Ban and Urbanization, Not Climate Change.  Mosquito populations have exploded in parts of the United States, but not because of global warming, according to a recent study published in Nature Communications.  The research indicates urbanization and the ban on the insecticide DDT are likely responsible for the surge in mosquito populations.  According to the researchers, some types of mosquitoes, including those that commonly spread diseases, have adapted to human-created habitat; urbanization has created fertile ground for mosquito populations to expand.  This doesn't augur well for city dwellers, who are already feeling the brunt of mosquito-borne tropical diseases such as chikungunya, dengue fever, West Nile virus, and Zika virus.  Tracking mosquito populations in California, New Jersey, and New York, the researchers found mosquito populations have increased as much as 1,000 percent over the past five decades.

DDT: A Case Study in Scientific Fraud.  The chemical compound that has saved more human lives than any other in history, DDT, was banned by order of one man, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  Public pressure was generated by one popular book and sustained by faulty or fraudulent research.  Widely believed claims of carcinogenicity, toxicity to birds, anti-androgenic properties, and prolonged environmental persistence are false or grossly exaggerated.  The worldwide effect of the U.S. ban has been millions of preventable deaths.

DDT ban — not global warming — to blame for U.S. mosquito eruption:  Study.  The U.S. mosquito population is on the rise, but don't blame climate change.  Blame the ban on the insecticide DDT.  A study published this week in Nature Communications attributed the decay of DDT concentrations as well as urbanization to an increase in mosquitoes over the past 50 years.  "Mosquito populations have increased as much as tenfold, and mosquito communities have become two- to fourfold richer over the last five decades," the paper said.  "These increases are correlated with the decay in residual environmental DDT concentrations and growing human populations, but not with temperature."  The analysis, conducted by researchers from Rutgers, the University of California, Davis and the University of California, Santa Cruz, flies in the face of statements by environmental groups linking warmer temperatures to mosquito-borne ailments like the West Nile and Zika viruses.

A Young Person's Guide to the Greenhouse Effect.  How did it all it start?  It really started not long after the Second World War when Rachel Carson wrote a book called The Silent Spring.  She used that title to tell us that one year, when spring arrives, there may be no birds singing because they have all been killed by pollution.  People started to realize that the environment was very important and that Mankind could destroy it or stop it from working properly.  A wonderful new insecticide had been discovered during the War called DDT.  It was very cheap to make and very effective.  It was soon being used everywhere to kill malaria-carrying mosquitos and insects that ate farm crops.  Then scientists began to notice side effects.  Some wild birds had stopped breeding properly because small amounts of left-over chemicals from DDT in the food-chain made their eggshells too thin and the eggs broke before their chicks had hatched properly.  DDT chemicals were even found in birds in Antarctica tens of thousands of miles away from where it had been used.  At the same time people were also worried about nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear war.  For the first time the idea of wiping out all humans or all life on Earth appeared to be a real possibility.

DDT: A Case Study in Scientific Fraud.  The chemical compound that has saved more human lives than any other in history, DDT, was banned by order of one man, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  Public pressure was generated by one popular book and sustained by faulty or fraudulent research.  Widely believed claims of carcinogenicity, toxicity to birds, anti-androgenic properties, and prolonged environmental persistence are false or grossly exaggerated.  The worldwide effect of the U.S. ban has been millions of preventable deaths.

5 environmentalist ideas that have spectacularly backfired.  [#4] DDT: In 2000, 460 people died from malaria as part of a larger outbreak that shook South Africa.  In 2012, only 70 people died.  South Africa credits this health miracle to the use of a chemical that it had banned prior to 2000:  DDT.  There's no question that DDT, a highly potent and controversial insecticide, has had serious side effects.  It's been linked to environmental destruction and higher cancer rates.  When Rachel Carson published her book Silent Spring in 1962, awareness of DDT's downsides increased and in 1972 the United States enacted a prohibition on DDT, followed by many other countries.  But DDT was also a miracle drug when it came to curing malaria, and as a result of the environmentalist crusade against DDT, malaria rates skyrocketed.

Why Environmentalism Became Both a Religion and a Con Game.  This notion that people are parasites really got started in the 1960's.  A couple of highly promoted bad actors started this environmental heresy.  The first was Rachel Carson with her hysterical polemic about DDT and its purported harm to birds and other wild life.  Her ideas proved to be, at best, problematic, but millions of people have died as a consequence of the resulting international banning of DDT.


Timely news and commentary:


Chemical giant Monsanto forced to pay out over $1.5 billion in Roundup verdict.  Three former users of Roundup weed killer have won more than $1.5 billion in a judgment against Monsanto, now a unit of Bayer AG, that a Missouri jury says must pay its victims for the glyphosate-based herbicide giving them cancer.  Jurors in state court in Jefferson City awarded James Draeger, Valerie Gunther and Dan Anderson a total of $61.1 million in actual damages along with another $500 million each in punitive damages over claims that using Roundup on their lawns and gardens caused them to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma.  The suit is one of many in recent days in which juries have ruled against Monsanto over claims concerning the carcinogenic properties of its Roundup formula.  This latest suit is one of the largest to be handed down against a U.S.-based corporate defendant this year.

Somewhat related:
Why is malaria suddenly back in the U.S. after a 20-year hiatus?  It has been around two decades since the last localized cases of malaria were detected in the United States.  And now, suddenly, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is warning that the infectious disease is back, having recently reemerged in Florida and Texas.  We are told that four people in the Sunshine State and one person in the Lone Star State were recently treated for malaria, though the agency says the cases between the two states are unrelated.  So, where did this new outbreak of malaria come from, and how is the government planning to deal with it?  Since 1951, malaria has been considered eradicated from the U.S. Spraying operations involving DDT that commenced in 1947 are credited with ridding the country of this plague.  Prior to 1947, there were about 15,000 cases of malaria in the Southeast alone.  After the spraying operations, there were none to speak of, and most people ended up forgetting the word malaria entirely.  Fast-forward a number of decades and here we are once again dealing with malaria in America.  Had DDT not been banned in the 1970s, some say malaria could have been eradicated globally, but now it is back.

This stuff might be a real problem:
Kennedy is right — Atrazine and Gender Fluidity.  Atrazine is one of the most commonly used herbicides in the world, and is often used to control weeds in commercial crops.  It is also available on Amazon for home use.  Atrazine is applied to corn, sorghum and sugarcane as well as on turf, such as golf courses and residential lawns.  Atrazine is an endocrine disrupter, which is able both demasculinize (chemically castrate) and completely feminize adult male frogs as well as other aquatic life.  It has been documented to affect murine (mouse) reproductive systems.  That endocrine disruptors found in this herbicide will make its way into puddles, ponds, lakes, streams, rivers and even ocean is well proven.  That these herbicides are feminizing aquatic life is well proven.  That is well established in the scientific literature.

New Research Links Glyphosate to DNA Damage, Cancer and Oxidative Stress.  New research by top U.S. government scientists has found that people exposed to the widely used weed-killing chemical glyphosate have biomarkers in their urine linked to the development of cancer and other diseases.  The study, published last week in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, measured glyphosate levels in the urine of farmers and other study participants and determined that the presence of high levels of the pesticide was associated with signs of a reaction in the body called oxidative stress, a condition that causes damage to DNA.  Oxidative stress is considered by health experts as a key characteristic of carcinogens. [...] Glyphosate is the most heavily applied herbicide in history, both in the U.S. and globally.  One of the best-known glyphosate-based products is Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller.  Roundup has been used by farmers as well as consumers for more than 40 years.

Banning Modern Agriculture and High Crop Yields?  In just seven decades, America's conventional (non-organic) farmers increased per-acre corn yields by an incredible 500% — while using steadily less water, fuel, fertilizer and pesticides — feeding millions more people.  Among the many reasons for this miracle is their ability to control weeds that would otherwise steal moisture and nutrients from this vital food, animal feed and fuel (ethanol) crop.  Long-lasting herbicides don't just control weeds.  They also promote no-till farming, which helps farmers save costly tractor fuel and avoid breaking up soils — thereby reducing erosion, retaining soil moisture, safeguarding soil organisms, and locking carbon dioxide in the soil (reducing risks of "dangerous manmade climate change," some say).  In the United States, the second most widely used herbicide after glyphosate (Roundup) is atrazine, which is critical to controlling invasive and hard-to-kill weeds impervious to other herbicides.  Atrazine is used on 65 million acres of corn, sorghum and sugarcane.  That's equivalent to Colorado or Oregon, on croplands scattered across a dozen Midwestern states.  It's also used on millions of acres of golf courses, lawns and highway medians nationwide.

This stuff appears to be far worse than DDT:
MIT Senior Researcher Warns Glyphosate Is a Slow Kill.  A "systemic catastrophe" is senior researcher Dr. Stephanie Seneff's verdict on glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup, warning that the chemical is a slow kill for humans and other lifeforms.  Seneff, a senior researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been studying this toxic chemical for around 10 years.  She believes that the pervasive use of glyphosate in the United States and around the world in agriculture is the reason behind the dramatic increase in autism, diabetes, cancer, allergies, as well as many other chronic conditions.  Glyphosate was first used in Roundup, a herbicide developed by Monsanto in 1974.  Upon its release, Monsanto marketed glyphosate as harmless to humans and other mammals.  The company reasoned that glyphosate kills weed by disrupting the shikimate pathway, which is not present in animals and therefore would not be harmful.  "However, this pathway is present in gut bacteria," Seneff wrote in her first study on glyphosate.

Bring Back DDT, and Science With It!.  The 1972 U.S. ban on DDT is responsible for a genocide 10 times larger than that for which we sent Nazis to the gallows at Nuremberg.  It is also responsible for a menticide which has already condemned one entire generation to a dark age of anti-science ignorance, and is now infecting a new one.  The lies and hysteria spread to defend the DDT ban are typical of the irrationalist, anti-science wave which has virtually destroyed rational forms of discourse in our society.  If you want to save science — and human lives — the fight to bring back DDT, now being championed by that very electable candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., had better be at the top of your agenda.  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.

Pareto Speaks to Us About Environmentalism.  The emotional core of the belief [in global warming] is fear of modern technology.  Global warming is only the latest of a string of, doomsday scenarios, justified by dubious scientific claims, dating back as far as the 1940's. [...] These scares have in common the theme that modern technology is backfiring.  The scares play to and promote this emotional belief.  To many people, technology is an object of suspicion and fear.  There is romantic nostalgia for an idealized simpler time in the past.  For example, the organic food movement basically advocates growing food by restricting technology to that used prior to about 1930.  This is based on the idea that pesticides and synthetic fertilizer is harmful, a belief that is scientifically not supportable.  Plants don't care whether they get nitrogen from synthetic fertilizer or chicken manure.  Pesticides used to kill insects are not passed into the food product except in microscopic, harmless quantities.  The advocates of organic farming don't mention that half the world population would starve if their less productive farming schemes were universally adopted.

Financing Poverty, Malnutrition and Death — Part 2.  It's easy to farm organically in the wealthy EU and USA, where consumers can afford to demand much more expensive organic meats, eggs, fruits and vegetables.  It's much harder if you have to deal with the insects and crop diseases that plague African farmers on constant massive levels and locusts that bring true catastrophes every few decades — and then sell your meager crop yields to impoverished families.  That modern pesticides might save billions of dollars of crops every year and stop locusts before they can swarm by the tens of billions — or that bioengineered crops might feed more people, from less land, with less water, with greater resistance to insects, with less need for chemical pesticides (natural or manmade) — never seems to occur, or matter, to those who demand nothing but organic for Africa.

EPA Science Could Torpedo Roundup Lawsuits.  The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently issued a finding that could — and certainly should — undermine some of the most outrageous lawsuits and jury awards in American history.  Bolstered by San Francisco area juries that have given multi-multi-million-dollar awards to clients who claim glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup weedkiller) caused their cancer, jackpot justice lawyers have recruited some 20,000 additional "corporate victims" who hope to reap their own fortunes.

Who's Afraid of Roundup?  In May 2019, a California jury awarded $2 billion to a husband and wife who claimed that the weed-killer Roundup caused their non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.  The defendant in the suit was Bayer AG, which had recently acquired Monsanto, Roundup's manufacturer.  Crucial in determining the judgment was Alameda County Superior Court judge Winifred Smith's denial of a request by Bayer's lawyers to share with the jury the US Environmental Protection Agency's recent determination that the active ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate, is not carcinogenic and poses no risk to public health when used as directed.  "What is the relevance?" the judge is reported to have asked.  Instead, the judge allowed the plaintiffs' lawyers to base their case on the International Agency for Research on Cancer's (IARC) 2015 determination that glyphosate is a "probable carcinogen."  Deprived of the opportunity to hear any countervailing evidence, the jury found for the plaintiffs.

Bayer to Waste $5.6 Billion Trying to Appease Anti-Pesticide Activists.  Trial lawyers have managed to bamboozle three American juries so far into showering billions of dollars onto their suffering clients based on the scientifically bogus claim that exposure to Bayer's glyphosate (sold as Roundup here) weedkiller gave them cancer.  These jury awards are made despite the fact that the vast majority of the scientific literature and most of the world's regulatory agencies find that glyphosate is safe to use.  That includes the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Joint FAO/WHO Meeting on Pesticide Residues (JMPR).  And also the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other regulatory agencies in Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia, and Korea have consistently reaffirmed that glyphosate does not cause cancer.

Kale rejoins the 'Dirty Dozen' list as one of the most contaminated with pesticides.  For the first time in a decade, kale, the popular green leaf cabbage adored by health enthusiasts worldwide, has rejoined the 'Dirty Dozen' list of fruits and vegetables with the most pesticide residues.  On Wednesday [3/20/2019], the Environmental Working Group released its annual Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce, which analyzes Department of Agriculture test data to identify which supermarket produce have the most — and least — contamination.  Researchers said they were shocked that kale made the list this year.

Climate Science, Red in Tooth and Claw.  DDT was banned because it supposedly thinned birds' eggs and perhaps because some people screamed cancer.  But DDT is highly effective against mosquitos that cause malaria.  The World Health Organization finally lifted the ban on DDT because thousands of children were dying in Africa.  DDT will never be rehabilitated in the U.S. because the propaganda has been permanently imprinted in the minds of the populace.

The Biggest Junk Science of 2018.  [#6] Jury Finds That Glyphosate Caused Man's Lymphoma.  Glyphosate is one of the most widely used herbicides in the world, in part because it is highly effective at killing weeds while at the same time being less acutely toxic than table salt.  However, the chemical's ubiquity coupled with the fact that it was created by the much-maligned company Monsanto have made it a target of fearmongering and litigation.  In August, a California jury awarded $289 million to a man who claimed that the weedkiller caused his non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, though a judge later drastically reduced the punitive damages to $39 million.  The jury's conclusion is not in keeping with available scientific evidence, which has not found a link between glyphosate and cancer.

Toxic pesticides found at most illegal California pot farms.  Nine of every 10 illegal marijuana farms raided in California this year contained traces of powerful and potentially lethal pesticides that are poisoning wildlife and could endanger water supplies, researchers and federal authorities said Tuesday [8/28/2018].

Environmentalist Scare Stories — Never Mind!  The Sierra Club and "invertebrate-protecting" Xerces Society recently had their own Emily Litella moment, over an issue they both have been hyperventilating about for years: endangered bees.  For over half a decade, both organizations have been raising alarms about the imminent extinction of honeybees and, more recently, wild bees — allegedly due to the widespread use of neonicotinoid pesticides.  These are advanced-technology crop protection compounds, originally developed and registered as "reduced-risk" pesticides.  Applied mostly as seed treatments, neonicotinoids get taken up into the tissue of crop plants, where they control pests that feed on and destroy the crops, while minimizing insecticide exposure to animals, humans and beneficial species like bees.  But not according to the Sierra Club!  It campaigned incessantly for years on the claim that neonicotinoids would drive honeybees into extinction.

Landmark lawsuit claims Monsanto hid cancer danger of weedkiller for decades.  At the age of 46, DeWayne Johnson is not ready to die.  But with cancer spread through most of his body, doctors say he probably has just months to live.  Now Johnson, a husband and father of three in California, hopes to survive long enough to make Monsanto take the blame for his fate.  On 18 June, Johnson will become the first person to take to trial on allegations that it has spent decades hiding the cancer-causing dangers of its popular Roundup herbicide products — and his case has just received a major boost.  Last week Judge Curtis Karnow issued an order clearing the way for jurors to consider not just scientific evidence related to what caused Johnson's cancer, but allegations that Monsanto suppressed evidence of the risks of its weed killing products.  Karnow ruled that the trial will proceed and a jury would be allowed to consider possible punitive damages.

NYT Pesticide Exposé Only Exposes Foolish Reporting.  Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency rejected a petition from two environmental activist groups to ban the longtime, widely-used pesticide chlorpyrifos.  Last week, the New York Times published an ostensible exposé on that decision by reporter Eric Lipton, but despite a lot of dark hints, the story exposes nothing new or noteworthy about the Trump Administration's decision.  The Environmental Protection Agency decision, announced by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt last March, was wise, as I detail [elsewhere].  Nonetheless, Lipton maintains that emails the Times obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request show that the Trump EPA consulted with "the farm industry" in making this decision, as if that's a shocking revelation.

The Courts against Proposition 65.  Around 1.8 million tons of glyphosate has been used across the U.S. since 1974.  Such a commonly used chemical has obviously demanded a rigorous health and safety assessment.  It has repeatedly been certified as non-threatening to humans from regulatory bodies all over the world, including in the U.S., Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.  The controversy over the substance arose when IARC — a semi-autonomous branch of the World Health Organization (WHO) based in Lyon, France, which was recently slammed by House Science Committee members for its "manipulation of scientific data" and "shoddy work" — found it "probably carcinogenic" to humans.  Despite the fact that this remains the only major study to reach such a conclusion, IARC's ruling meant that glyphosate was automatically added to California's Proposition 65 list, a lengthy catalogue of supposed carcinogens.

Government Scientist Withheld Evidence Popular Herbicide Doesn't Cause Cancer.  The Reuters news agency uncovered evidence a study by a World Health Organization scientist concluding the popular herbicide Roundup is a probable carcinogen is wrong.  Reuters' investigation found the lead scientist involved in the research withheld key data indicating the weed killer is safe, as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and European Food Safety Authority concluded in the 1970s when they approved Roundup for use.  The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a division of the World Health Organization, declared glyphosate (Roundup) a probable carcinogen in December 2015.  Since then, citing the IARC's findings as evidence, hundreds of plaintiffs have filed suit against Monsanto, Roundup's manufacturer, saying the company failed to warn them about the risks from Roundup or that it caused their cancers.

Another Left-Wing Science Scandal.  Glyphosate is the active ingredient in RoundUp, the most widely used herbicide in the world.  Glyphosate is a non-selective herbicide, meaning it will kill just about any plant.  Since it would kill the crop as well as the weeds, for quite a few years it couldn't be used over the top of an emerging crop.  Instead, its use was restricted to lower-value burndown situations, where weeds in a field would be killed prior to planting, or, e.g., to keep down weeds on railroad rights of way.

Three Charleston fire stations stressing caution to firefighters amid bedbug infestations.  Over the past three weeks, Charleston Fire Department officials across three stations relocated to shelters and tents due to multiple reports by firefighters of sightings and bites.  Firefighters from station 20 on Daniel Island have been relocated to Station 18 following three unsuccessful attempts to eradicate the building of the blood-sucking pests, the department said.

Anthropogenic Impacts on Mosquito Populations in North America Over the Past Century.  The recent emergence and spread of vector-borne viruses including Zika, chikungunya and dengue has raised concerns that climate change may cause mosquito vectors of these diseases to expand into more temperate regions.  However, the long-term impact of other anthropogenic factors on mosquito abundance and distributions is less studied.  Here, we show that anthropogenic chemical use (DDT; dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) and increasing urbanization were the strongest drivers of changes in mosquito populations over the last eight decades in areas on both coasts of North America.  Mosquito populations have increased as much as tenfold, and mosquito communities have become two- to fourfold richer over the last five decades.  These increases are correlated with the decay in residual environmental DDT concentrations and growing human populations, but not with temperature.

Mosquito Population Skyrockets Due to Urbanization and DDT Ban, Not Climate Change.  Mosquito populations have exploded in parts of the United States, but not because of global warming, according to a recent study published in Nature Communications.  The research indicates urbanization and the ban on the insecticide DDT are likely responsible for the surge in mosquito populations.  According to the researchers, some types of mosquitoes, including those that commonly spread diseases, have adapted to human-created habitat; urbanization has created fertile ground for mosquito populations to expand.  This doesn't augur well for city dwellers, who are already feeling the brunt of mosquito-borne tropical diseases such as chikungunya, dengue fever, West Nile virus, and Zika virus.  Tracking mosquito populations in California, New Jersey, and New York, the researchers found mosquito populations have increased as much as 1000 percent over the past five decades.

Regulation of Monsanto's 'Roundup' Called Into Question.  The European Chemicals Agency on Wednesday said glyphosate, the key chemical in Monsanto Co.'s flagship herbicide, doesn't cause cancer, but the agricultural giant is facing new questions over the safety of the weedkiller. [...] Glyphosate, which Monsanto invented and has marketed since 1974 under the brand "Roundup," is the world's most widely used herbicide.  Its use proliferated with the advent of corn and soybeans genetically engineered to survive the spray.  It has been deployed to destroy everything from illegal coca crops in Colombia to weeds sprouting among railroad tracks.  Monsanto generated $3.5 billion in sales last year from its agricultural-productivity division, which largely reflects its Roundup business.

Bureaucrat Tells Trump How to Run EPA.  [William D.] Ruckelshaus, let it never be forgotten, was the EPA administrator responsible for probably the blackest moment in the institution's history: the man who banned DDT in the U.S. with consequences which resulted in millions of unnecessary deaths around the world from malaria.  Sure Ruckelshaus didn't deliberately murder all those people.  But the fact remains that DDT was — still is — one of the most effective killers of the malarial mosquito; and that by banning it in the U.S., Ruckelshaus helped create a knock-on regulatory effect which deprived the world of one its best defences against one of its biggest health problems.

Zika Emergency Crisis Due to Enviro Wackos.  Every time I read about another mosquito bred epidemic I am reminded of the time I met the late author Michael Crichton in 2005 when he was given the Sound Science Award by the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH). Based in Manhattan, the ACSH publishes enlightening books and pamphlets that are invaluable in sorting out hype and hysteria from bona fide scientific research.  It was Crichton's novel, "State of Fear" that provided me with information on the deadly results of the DDT ban in Africa, which has resulted in the deaths of millions of malaria victims.  I am amazed that there is still so much ignorance about the harm that junk science can render on a fearful nation.

The answer to Zika is obvious:  Bring back DDT.  The Zika virus outbreak makes it clearer than ever:  It's time to end the ban on DDT — a ban that was never sensible in the first place, but now is downright unjustifiable.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that Zika has infected nearly 300 pregnant women in the United States, putting their babies at risk for a devastating birth defect.  This summer, as many as 40 million Americans will visit regions where carrier mosquitoes thrive, including large swaths of the South.  There's also a moderate risk of Zika-carrying bugs in New York City, and parts of the city offer Zika mosquitoes the perfect conditions in which to thrive.

Cancer-stricken farmers sue Monsanto over Roundup.  Three cancer-stricken Nebraska farmers and an agronomist are suing Monsanto, alleging that the company misled consumers about the safety of Roundup, the most widely used herbicide around the globe.  The World Health Organization labeled glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, as a likely carcinogen last year.  The four Nebraskans suing all have non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, one of the types of cancer glyphosate is most associated with, the Lincoln Journal-Star reports.

EPA immediately yanks study showing weed killer doesn't cause cancer.  Before jumping into this rather odd story, one quick question: is the EPA really the appropriate agency to oversee a study on whether or not some product causes cancer?  I mean, if the Center for Disease Control wants to be in the business of studying gun violence instead of the Department of Justice in general or the FBI in particular, I suppose it fits in with the "logic" of the federal government, but their main mission seems to be rather far afield from medical work.  We'll leave that mystery for another day and get on to the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency recently did, in fact, release a study which shows that glyphosate — the primary ingredient in general purpose week killers like Roundup — is not carcinogenic.

Mosquito-Borne Diseases.  Mosquitoes cause more human suffering than any other organism — over one million people worldwide die from mosquito-borne diseases every year.  Not only can mosquitoes carry diseases that afflict humans, they also transmit several diseases and parasites that dogs and horses are very susceptible to.  These include dog heartworm, West Nile virus (WNV) and Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE).  In addition, mosquito bites can cause severe skin irritation through an allergic reaction to the mosquito's saliva — this is what causes the red bump and itching.  Mosquito vectored diseases include protozoan diseases, i.e., malaria, filarial diseases such as dog heartworm, and viruses such as dengue, encephalitis and yellow fever. [...] Approximately 40% of the world's population is susceptible to malaria, mostly in the tropical and sub-tropical areas of the world.  It was by and large eradicated in the temperate area of the world during the 20th century with the advent of DDT and other organochlorine and organophosphate mosquito control insecticides.

Bed bugs are getting tougher 'skin,' scientists warn.  Using high-tech scanning equipment, scientists in Australia have discovered that in the battle between bed bugs and humans, some of the insects wield thicker exoskeletons, making them more resistant to insecticide.  Bed bugs are a source of itchy misery and expense for those whose homes are infested, and the number of such infestations have increased in a "dramatic" way since 2000, according to a new study in the journal PLOS ONE.

White House: $589 million to go to fight Zika virus.  Most of the $589 million would be devoted to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for research on the virus and Zika-related birth defects, as well as the creation of response teams to limit its spread.

The Editor says...
It would be far less expensive and more effective to remove the ban on DDT and/or temporarily prohibit two-way travel to Central and South America.

Let's hear it for DDT.  [Mosquitoes] are presently doing their egregious harm in a new, emphatic way in Brazil and more than 20 other Latin American countries and territories.  They are biting people and infecting them with a pathogen called Zika.  The virus has been around for decades but for the first time is believed to be causing a birth defect shrinking the skulls and damaging the brains of babies.  It may also cause a syndrome that paralyzes people and it has even sneaked into the United States.  [...] Time to use DDT maybe?  Absolutely.  As the scientist Robert Zubrin has noted, here is a pesticide that was used during World War II and later to kill mosquitoes and wipe out malaria and other diseases in the United States, Europe, Latin America and Asia, saving hundreds of millions of lives.  Mosquitoes, fighting back, managed to develop resistance to it in some areas, but then something more dramatic happened, giving them an enormous break.

This was completely avoidable:
Five star hotels 'infested' with bed bugs after major surge in blood-sucking insects across New York City.  Tourists visiting some of New York's most prestigious hotels have reported being bitten by bed bugs despite their five star surroundings.  Guests at the Waldorf Astoria and Marriott Marquis hotel are among those to have been affected by the infestation.  Reports of bed bugs in the city's hotels have jumped by 44 per cent over the past year.  According to the Bed Bug Registry, which lists reports of alleged incidents, there are almost 6,000 incidents in their databases relating to New York.

Obama asking Congress for $1.8 billion in emergency funding to combat Zika.  President Barack Obama is asking Congress for more than $1.8 billion in emergency funding to help fight the Zika virus.  In an announcement Monday [2/8/2016], the White House said the money would be used to expand mosquito control programs, speed development of a vaccine, develop diagnostic tests and improve support for low-income pregnant women.

The Editor says...
It would cost only a small fraction of that money to supply truckloads of DDT to South America, Central America, and the southern United States.  It is far better (and cheaper) to proactively kill every mosquito on the face of the earth than to try to repair the damage once the mosquitos spread some disease we've never heard of.

With Zika, Time to Bring Back DDT.  The Zika virus is spreading by mosquitos northward through Latin America, possibly correlated with birth defects such as microcephaly in infants.  Stories and photos of their abnormally small skulls are making headlines.  The World Health Organization reports that four million people could be infected by the end of 2016.  On Monday [2/1/2016], the WHO is meeting to decide how to address the crisis.  The international body should recommend that the ban on DDT should be reversed, in order to kill the mosquitoes that carry Zika and malaria, a protistan parasite that has no cure.  Zika is in the news, but it is dwarfed by malaria.  About 300 million to 600 million people suffer each year from malaria, and it kills about 1 million annually, 90 percent in sub-Saharan Africa.  We have the means to reduce Zika and malaria — and we are not using it.

Zika is latest mosquito-borne virus knocking on Texas' door.  Another mosquito-borne illness is rapidly spreading across South and Central America, one that may be linked to disturbing birth defects in Brazil.  The Zika virus is confirmed in cases from Brazil to Mexico, including one reported near Monterrey, less than 150 miles from the Texas border.  Puerto Rico just reported its first case in December.  State officials say they don't believe that the Zika virus, discovered in Uganda in 1947, is an immediate threat to Texas, but many questions remain unanswered.

Weeds will prevail in Maryland lawn care ban.  Few things are as precious to the stereotypical upper-middle-class suburbanite as their pristine green front lawns.  And those stereotypes have been proven true in Montgomery County, Maryland, where homeowners are in a tizzy over a proposal that would ban many common lawn treatments and pesticides like the well-known Scott's Miracle Grow and Monsanto's Round-Up.

Radical Environmentalism's Death Campaigns.  By denying people access to abundant, reliable, affordable electricity, modern fertilizers and biotech seeds, and especially DDT to prevent malaria and other insect-borne diseases, they are killing millions every year.  Many of my articles have documented this.  Now a new film written, self-financed and produced by Dr. D. Rutledge Taylor, MD graphically presents powerful new evidence of how the Audubon Society, Sierra Club, other predominantly white environmentalist pressure groups and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conspired to hide and discredit scientific evidence, and wage a campaign of disinformation and outright lies, to ban the most effective weapon yet devised to prevent malaria and other vicious diseases.

This could have been avoided:
Virus-transmitting 'yellow fever' mosquitoes discovered in L.A. County.  A new aggressive daytime-biting mosquito capable of transmitting debilitating and possibly deadly viruses has been found in the Los Angeles region, officials announced Wednesday [10/15/2014].  Known as yellow fever mosquitoes, the insects were found Oct. 7 and 8 in Commerce and Pico Rivera, respectively, according to the Greater Los Angeles County Vector Control District.

Anti-Science Environmentalists Ban 'Neonic' Insecticides, Imperiling Global Health.  Two recent pesticide bans in the EU — one fully in effect, the other in the process of being phased in — could create massive new disincentives for further development in this area.  Both bans were politically motivated and instituted over the objection of independent scientists, and similar bans are now being pushed by activists in the U.S.  Should the EPA cave to political pressure, the long-term effect on global public health could be devastating.

The Editor says...
The way I see it, the EPA is applying political pressure, in order to prolong its existence.  They aren't about to "cave to political pressure."

Is the NYTimes reverting to the bad old days of DDT denial?  Over the 51 years since Rachel Carson's poetic attack on DDT in her "Silent Spring" novel, the chemical pesticide became the poster child for the nascent environmental movement's inchoate wrath.  The victims:  millions of African and Asian children and pregnant women who succumbed to malaria in the absence of DDT.  However, over the past decade, when the toll of malaria seemed to be ever-increasing at a rate of one-million dead each year, and the actual studies of DDT continued to show no evidence of harm to humans, animals or the environment at small levels of exposure, most scientists free of immersion in the anti-DDT fringe came around to accepting its highly effective power against the death-dealing anopheles mosquito.

Does Environmentalism Cause Amnesia?.  [Scroll down]  What does hurt people is bad public policy.  Exhibit A is the U.S. ethanol mandate — justified in part as a response to global warming — which diverted the corn crop to fuel production and sent global food prices soaring in 2008.  Exhibit B is the cult of organic farming and knee-jerk opposition to [genetically modified crops], which risk depriving farmers in poor countries of high-yield, nutrient-rich crops.  Exhibit C was the effort to ban DDT without adequate substitutes to stop the spread of malaria, which kills nearly 900,000 people, mostly children, in sub-Saharan Africa alone with each passing year.  The list goes on and on.

Bees, pesticides, more green lies.  [Scroll down]  Various neonicotinoids are widely used in Canada to protect its vast canola fields, and Canadian bee populations are thriving, notes science writer Jon Entine.  Varroa-free Australia is likewise one of the world's prime users of these pesticides, and its bee colonies are among the planet's healthiest.  By contrast, bee populations have been severely impacted by Varroa mites in areas of Switzerland where neonics are not used.  Multiple studies point to still other factors that explain why bees are struggling.  They include bees developing resistance to antibiotics, funguses like Nosema, multiple bee viruses and parasites, bacterial infections like foulbrood, exposure to commonly used organophosphates, bee habitat loss, and even long-term bee inbreeding and resultant lack of genetic diversity.

The Top 50 Liberal Media Bias Examples.  [#4]  DDT Ban:  The biggest example of the media coming to the aid of environmentalism is, of course, is the worldwide ban of DDT.  In 1962, a book titled Silent Spring written by American biologist Rachel Carson was published.  The media pushed Carson's work as settled science.  It later came to light that much of Carson's "evidence" was simply manufactured and the ban has been responsible for untold millions of deaths in places like Africa.  Still, the media continues to cite Carson's work as fact.

The EPA: The Worst Of Many Rogue Federal Agencies.  The political nature of the EPA became clear not long after President Nixon established it in 1970.  In 1972 the first administrator of the EPA, William Ruckelshaus, banned the insecticide DDT after his own hearing examiner concluded, on the basis of several hundred technical documents and testimony of 150 scientists, that DDT ought not to be banned.

Environmentalism and Human Sacrifice.  [There are] people who are more devoted to nature than to human life.  And who might such people be?  They are called environmentalists.  These are the people who coerced nations worldwide into banning DDT.  It is generally estimated this ban has led to the deaths of about 50 million human beings, overwhelmingly African children, from malaria.  DDT kills the mosquito that spreads malaria to human beings.  US News and World Report writer Carrie Lukas reported in 2010, "Fortunately, in September 2006, the World Health Organization announced a change in policy:  It now recommends DDT for indoor use to fight malaria.

Mosquito repellent Deet 'losing its effectiveness'.  The mosquito repellent Deet, which is widely used by holidaymakers and residents in warm climates, is losing its effectiveness, scientists say.

The Editor says...
Nobody makes such claims about DDT.  DDT kills mosquitoes, while Deet just diverts them to someone else.

War On Poverty As Senseless As War On Drugs.  Thanks to the ban on DDT, malaria has resurfaced and millions of Africans have died.  Within two years of restarting DDT programs, South Africa, Mozambique, Zambia, Madagascar, and Swaziland slashed their malaria rates by 75% or more.  Other countries want to launch similar programs, but they are facing opposition from Europe.  The E.U. is warning of possible agricultural export sanctions against Uganda, Kenya, and other countries that use DDT to save lives.  Now why on earth would the E.U. object to this life-saving measure for the African nations who rely greatly on their exports to Europe?

Genocide in Green.  [Scroll down]  In World War II, U.S. troops used to lather up with DDT.  Years ago, Dr. J. Gordon Edwards wrote:  "[In 1944,] I was ordered to dust every soldier in our company with [DDT].  For two weeks I dusted the insecticide on soldiers and civilians, breathing the fog of white dust for several hours each day.  The body lice were killed, and the DDT persisted long enough to kill young lice when they emerged from the eggs...  Fortunately, no human beings have ever been harmed by DDT."

More about the history of DDT:  In 1972, EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus banned the use of DDT on the scientifically unsupported claim that it may cause cancer in humans.  By then, malaria was no longer a health issue in the US.  Using this claim, certain US government agencies and environmental nongovernment organizations (NGOs) demanded the banning of all use of DDT in other countries, including indoor spraying, as a condition for receiving US governmental aid.  In countries that did so, malaria rates soared, millions died, and hundreds of millions suffered from preventable malaria.

Earth Day co-founder written out of history.  [Scroll down]  DDT was banned for agricultural use in the United States in 1972, and its use was greatly reduced worldwide after the publication of Rachel Carson's 1962 scare book, "Silent Spring,"which warned of DDT and other chemicals in food and water.  It's nice that bald eagles are making a comeback, but on the list of things ravaged, add millions of people dead of malaria in the Third World since DDT was banned for agricultural use.  In 2010, more than 600,000 people, mostly children, died in Africa of malaria, according to the World Health Organization.

Green is Taking Us for a Ride.  While malaria is no longer a concern for America, such is not the case for developing countries.  Since DDT was banned in 1972, malaria has become Africa's largest killer — billions have been stricken by malaria and tens of millions have died.  The science that caused DDT to be banned is spotty at best, the decision to ban DDT was admittedly political, and many who originally opposed DDT now acknowledge that it is the most powerful, long-lasting mosquito repellant ever invented and has been proven to virtually eliminate malaria — yet environmental groups still oppose its use.

EPA is Binge Gambling with US Economy.  Since DDT was used in WWII to successfully control typhus and malaria, it has gone from winner to loser and back to winner again.  In 1948, Dr. Paul Muller, the scientist who discovered the insecticidal properties of DDT, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.  The tables turned when Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring in 1962 and referenced experiments done that claimed DDT thinned birds' eggshells.  Ultimately, through the work of EDF, DDT was banned in 1972.  Because of that decision, malaria has spread, and millions have died from it.  Instead of eliminating the disease's vector, the mosquito, drugs have been developed to treat the disease, and those drugs are now proving ineffective, as malaria has grown resistant to them.  Since then, additional studies have been done and the eggshell findings have been revisited.  DDT wasn't the problem it was once believed to be.

How the EPA Is Like DDT.  Though synthesized in 1874, the insecticidal properties of DDT were not discovered until 1939, the outbreak of WWII in Europe.  DDT was a boon to humanity when first used to kill vectors that spread human diseases.  GIs welcomed "showers" of DDT to rid themselves of lice and other insects.  When prisoner of war and concentration camps were liberated, the freed inmates were doused with DDT.  By the early 1950s, British colonial doctors were using DDT to control the scourge of the tropics, malaria, as well as other insect-borne diseases, by spraying the inside of huts with this persistent chemical about once every six months.  Malaria rates plummeted.  It was an inexpensive way to control a disease that killed millions and left many of the survivors partially disabled whenever they suffered outbreaks.

The Greens Just Love Us to Death.  You may recall [the environmentalists] got off to a strong start when the Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970.  Its first act was to ban DDT and the result of that has been the needless death of millions who could and should have been protected against malaria.  The nation these days is experiencing a bed bug population explosion that could be stopped in six months if the EPA would only authorize a pesticide to kill the critters.  They won't.

A Nutshell History of Climate-Change Hysteria.  Up until at least the mid-1970s, the frenzy to rescue the planet from industrial chemicals, especially pesticides like DDT, was fueled by Rachel Carson's alluring book Silent Spring.  This work, published in 1962, sparked the modern environmental movement, providing activists with both a laudable goal (cleaning up the planet) and reprehensible ones (portraying industry and modern society as enemies).  Silent Spring made it rather obvious to some that the modern industrial society needed to be disarmed of its "weapons" (synthetic chemicals).  Regardless of the fact that it is the careless practices of industry and the wasteful excesses of society that should have been precisely targeted, not modernity per se, the battle to save the planet was on.

Racism, Injustice, and the Left.  Every 45 seconds in Africa, a child dies from malaria, yet we continue to ban DDT, the single most effective weapon against the cause of the disease, because we worry about its effect on birds.  You would think the needless death of 700,000 black children every year, because of rabid environmentalism, would make the papers, but it doesn't.

The Top Ten Unfounded Health Scares of 2010.  [#3] Atrazine:  While herbicides and other pesticides have long been a target for various radical environmental groups, there is still no evidence that atrazine poses any health risk when found in miniscule quantities in groundwater.  Its real benefits far exceed any of the hypothetical threats it poses.

Don't Rush to Ban Chemicals.  Consider the case of California almonds.  A natural chemical, aflatoxin, is found in 15 percent of this crop and on other nuts as well.  If the aflatoxin is not eliminated before the nuts are consumed, people could die; and the most effective way to eliminate aflatoxin in nuts is with pesticides — triazines, such as simazine and atrazine, which have been found safe at levels up to 1,000 times what humans are exposed to when they're used on nuts.  But many environmental campaigners, citing controversial studies on frogs, lobby for a ban of triazines.

Environmentalist fraud and manslaughter.  Many chemotherapy drugs for treating cancer have highly unpleasant side effects — hair loss, vomiting, intense joint pain, liver damage and fetal defects, to name just a few.  But ... the drugs' benefits vastly outweigh their risks.  They save lives.  We need to use chemo drugs carefully, but we need to use them.  The same commonsense reasoning should apply to the Third World equivalent of chemotherapy drugs:  DDT and other insecticides to combat malaria.  Up to half a billion people are infected annually by this vicious disease, nearly a million die, countless survivors are left with permanent brain damage, and 90% of this carnage is in sub-Saharan Africa, the most impoverished region on Earth.

The EPA: 40 and past its prime.  [Lisa] Jackson lauds the EPA's protecting the public from chemical pesticides.  In fact, this is one of the agency's bêtes noirs.  The testing required is excessively burdensome and the tolerances permitted by regulators overly conservative (low).  What makes regulators' approach to chemical pesticides verge on the absurd is the fact that 99.99% of consumers' exposure to pesticides comes not from agricultural applications, but from substances that are naturally found in food.

Outwitting Lethal Government Policies.  [Scroll down]  If you live on the Texas border, or in fact anywhere in the Southwest, pay close attention to epidemics breaking out across the line.  As of 2010, we may add southern Florida to this list.  In July 2010, the Centers for Disease Control released the results of a study showing that up to 20% of the inhabitants of the Keys had been exposed to Dengue Fever, also known as "bonebreak fever" for the pain it causes.  Dengue is returning to endemic status in Texas after being banished by DDT.

The Slow Death of the Environmental Movement.  Today there are so many environmental organizations and groups that you need a directory to sort them out.  These groups, however, are now far more political than their original intent.  They are ministries of misinformation, disinformation, and outright scare mongering.  The movement as we know it today got a boost with the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson's book, "Silent Spring."  It was an anti-pesticide diatribe whose claims have long since been disproved, but it set in motion a tsunami of fears regarding all chemicals and, beyond that, concerns about all kinds of manufacturing and technology; indeed anything involving energy resources.  Within eight years of the book's publication President Nixon initiated the Environmental Protection Agency that has since metatisized into a rogue government agency intent on controlling all aspects of life in America.

Earth Day and Environmental Insanity:  Anyone who has been paying any attention to the environmental movement has got to have concluded it is insane. ... In America, there has been a resurgence of bed bugs, formerly controlled by DDT.  The EPA recently awarded $550,000 in grants to the University of Missouri, Texas A&M University, the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Rutgers University, and the Michigan Department of Community Health, for bed bug "education, outreach, and environmental justice departments."  So, instead of authorizing the use of a pesticide to rid us all of bed bugs, it wants to "educate" us to live with them.  That's insane.

NYT Article Admits DDT Ban as a Cause of Bedbug Outbreak.  Unfortunately for residents of many urban areas such as New York and Philadelphia, the bedbugs are not only biting but spreading at an alarming rate.  Despite this outbreak, the mainstream media has until recently kept insisting that bedbugs developed a resistance to DDT so any emergency lifting of the EPA ban on that pesticide is unnecessary.

Is the EPA to blame for the bed bug 'epidemic'?  Eradication [of bed bugs] can take months and cost thousands of dollars.  There's also the stigma -- many high-end New York residences, for instance, keep their bed bug infestations secret to avoid embarrassment.  But why are bed bugs back?  Though they've been sucking humans' blood since at least ancient Greece, bed bugs became virtually extinct in America following the invention of pesticide DDT.  There were almost no bed bugs in the United States between World War II and the mid-1990s.

US Grapples With Bedbugs as EPA Limits Options.  A resurgence of bedbugs across the U.S. has homeowners and apartment dwellers taking desperate measures to eradicate the tenacious bloodsuckers, with some relying on dangerous outdoor pesticides and fly-by-night exterminators.

And the most bedbug-infested U.S. city is ...  The exact cause is not known, but experts associate the resurgence with increased resistance of bed bugs to available pesticides, greater international and domestic travel, lack of knowledge regarding control of bed bugs due to their prolonged absence, and the continuing decline or elimination of effective pest control programs at state and local public health agencies.

If Bill Gates wants to beat malaria he should back DDT.  Mircosoft co-founder Bill Gates is fascinating.  So is the 19-page annual letter that describes the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest philanthropic institute.  But some of the foundation's strategies are baffling.

Wheat, Yes, Wheat!  Dr. David Bragg, Ph.D., an extension entomologist, recently enumerated the insect pests that can be depended upon to attack wheat.  They include the Russian Wheat Aphid, the Ladybird Beetle, the English Grain Aphid and Rosy Grass Aphid.  Then there's the Haanchen Barley Mealybug and Wireworm Beetle Larvae, as well as the False Wireworm, the Cereal Leaf Beetle, Cutworms and Armyworms.  By no means should we leave out the Wheat Stem Maggot, the Wheat Stem Saw Fly, and the Wheat Joint Worm.  I want you to think about this army of insect predators the next time some environmental group is demanding that all pesticides be banned and that all grains and vegetables be grown "organically."

The U.N. bows to the anti-insecticide lobby.
Malaria, Politics and DDT.  In 2006, after 25 years and 50 million preventable deaths, the World Health Organization reversed course and endorsed widespread use of the insecticide DDT to combat malaria.  So much for that.  Earlier this month, the U.N. agency quietly reverted to promoting less effective methods for attacking the disease.  The result is a victory for politics over public health, and millions of the world's poor will suffer as a result.  The U.N. now plans to advocate for drastic reductions in the use of DDT, which kills or repels the mosquitoes that spread malaria.

100 things you should know about DDT:  "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT…  In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable."  (National Academy of Sciences, 1970.)

Eco-Oppression.  Environmentalists in the West congratulate themselves for nearly ridding the Earth of DDT, but the people of South America, Asia and Africa are not celebrating.  They need DDT to ward off malaria, a mosquito-borne infection that thrives in tropical climates and is often lethal.  Thanks to Westerners' fear of all things inorganic — and Rachel Carson's scare-mongering book "Silent Spring" — one million inhabitants of third-world countries die of malaria every year.

Liberty and Tyranny II.  Those of us who lived in the 1970s recall the establishment of the EPA during the first year of that decade.  Needing something to justify it existence, the EPA banned DDT in 1972. ... With each passing year it is becoming more and more obvious that the ban on DDT has killed millions of children — especially in Africa — by crippling our ability to fight malaria.

The environmentalists' epidemic.  World Malaria Day was observed yesterday, and finally real progress is being made on eradicating this killer disease — no thanks to environmentalists.  Exaggerated fears about the pesticide DDT spread by Rachel Carson's 1962 book, "Silent Spring," prevented this solution from being used for many years.  For decades, a million or more people died from malaria annually in Africa, with children accounting for 80 percent to 90 percent of those deaths. ... In this era of climate-change scaremongering, this is a cautionary tale about acquiescing to the extreme measures environmentalists insist are necessary.  Green ideas can kill people.

DDT:  A Case Study In Scientific Fraud.  The chemical compound that has saved more human lives than any other in history, DDT, was banned by order of one man, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  Public pressure was generated by one popular book and sustained by faulty or fraudulent research.  Widely believed claims of carcinogenicity, toxicity to birds, anti-androgenic properties, and prolonged environmental persistence are false or grossly exaggerated.  The worldwide effect of the U.S. ban has been millions of preventable deaths.

Apparently there are people who take mosquitos seriously enough to sleep in a mosquito net.

Nine Worst Business Stories of the Last 50 Years -- [#1] DDT.  "When a malaria-endemic country stops using DDT, there is a cessation or great reduction in the numbers of houses sprayed with insecticides, and this is accompanied by rapid growth of malaria burden within the country," according to the Malaria Foundation International, a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting malaria.  The group notes that "without DDT, malaria rates are returning to those seen in the 1940s, affecting additional millions of infants, children, and adults."

Omission Speaks Volumes on Malaria Relief.  DDT cannot be ignored in discussions about reforming anti-malaria efforts.

Dying to be politically correct.  Each year, the U.S. government spends $200 million to help prevent malaria in the rest of the world, primarily in Africa and Asia.  That's mighty nice of us.  But none of the money goes for the inside residential spraying of DDT that allowed Americans to get a handle on the spread of the disease.  This summer President Bush announced a new five-year $1.2 billion effort to prevent malaria abroad.  But, again, no money for DDT.

What Is the Real Scientific Consensus on Pesticides?.  Most of the false alarms come from one or more of five interest groups that have learned how to profit from anti-pesticide alarmism.

DDT Is the Only Real Weapon for Combating Malaria.  U.S. taxpayers spend about $200 million annually on malaria control efforts.  Ironically, almost none of this money is spent to kill or repel the mosquitoes that spread disease.  The money is instead spent on anti-malarial drugs and insecticide-treated bed nets that aren't very effective.

DDT to Return as Weapon Against Malaria, Experts Say.  DDT, a notorious symbol of environmental degradation, is poised to make a comeback.  International experts are touting the widely banned pesticide as a best bet to save millions of human lives threatened by malaria.

DDT Did Not Harm Eagles.  In 1941, before any DDT was used, 197 bald eagles were counted.  In 1960, after 15 years of heavy DDT use, the count had risen to 891.

Sacrifices to the Climate Gods:  Our environmental protection practices have already caused the deaths of millions of people, mainly in poor African countries.  By far the most humans — mostly women and children — have been sacrificed in the mistaken belief that the use of any amount of the pesticide DDT would harm the environment.  As a result, the preventable disease malaria has continued to decimate Africa.

Going green means having green to spend.  The dirty secret of the environmental movement is how indifferent it can be to the poor.  Consider the widespread ban on DDT.  As environmental groups celebrated the recovery of bald eagles, parents in poor countries buried 20 million children who died from the ensuing malaria outbreak.

An Alphabet Soup of Chemical Myths:  Environmental advocacy groups have spared no effort to create the impression that organochlorines are extremely resistant to degradation and thus difficult to remove from the environment.  Contrary to these beliefs, there is plentiful evidence that biodegradation of these substances is widespread everywhere.  Moreover, in the quantities commonly found in the environment, organochlorines are not hazardous to human health.

Greenpeace:  A Long History of Poor Judgment.  Greenpeace Internationals' Cool Farming report is just the latest in a long line of claims by the organization that have proven unwise and incorrect.  In the 1970s, Greenpeace took the lead in condemning DDT — after the chemical had been used successfully to rid North America and Europe of malaria, which had been endemic throughout both continents.  Greenpeace claimed DDT caused cancer in humans, which has since been proven untrue.  It said DDT caused thinning in the eggshells of raptors, which isn't true either.  American bald eagles have resurged because the Congressional Bald Eagle Protection Act of 1940 halted the shooting and poisoning of the birds.  Greenpeace's opposition to DDT has contributed to at least 30 million deaths, most of them African children.

Top Ten Junk Science Moments for 2006.  It only took 30 years, tens of millions of lives lost, billions sickened and trillions of dollars of economic growth foregone, but the World Health Organization finally ended its ban on use of the insecticide DDT to kill malaria-bearing mosquitoes.  It's great news for developing nations that want to employ the most affordable and effective anti-malarial tool.  So what should happen to those environmental activists and government regulators who used junk science to have DDT banned in the first place?

Killing our babies.  Finally, the World Health Organization and Uganda's Health Ministry are again emphasizing DDT and other insecticides to control a disease that kills 110,000 Ugandans every year.  But instead of applauding the decision, anti-pesticide activists are attacking it with scare stories and lies.

The Green-Big Tobacco Death Alliance.  What has brought these two seemingly unlikely forces together?  The recent decision by the World Health Organization to reverse its 30 year-old ban on DDT for indoor use to combat malaria — one of the biggest killers of children in the Third World — after a mountain of scientific studies have repeatedly found that DDT is safe, inexpensive and the best way to eradicate mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite.

DDT Ban Makes Sense — Only If You're Rich.  In an affluent, mostly urban country such as the U.S., where malaria had been all but eradicated, the DDT ban was little more than an inconvenience.  In less-developed countries, where DDT was banned under U.S. pressure, the consequences were disastrous.  From Swaziland to Belize, malaria was soon epidemic again.  Millions died.

Day of Reckoning for DDT Foes?  Last week's announcement that the World Health Organization lifted its nearly 30-year ban on the insecticide DDT is perhaps the most promising development in global public health since… well, 1943 when DDT was first used to combat insect-borne diseases like typhus and malaria.  Overlooked in all the hoopla over the announcement, however, is the terrible toll in human lives, illness and poverty caused by the tragic, decades-long ban.

An Invaluable Insecticide.  [Scroll down]  The Lubombo Project succeeded because of indoor house spraying with DDT and other insecticides and the distribution of the best new anti-malaria medicines.  It was a triumph of everything that many on the political left want to despise:  DDT, mining companies, and aid-rejecting Southern African nations.  Only when the campaign was obviously successful did the UN-backed Global Fund and other agencies step in to support it.  Yet now the history is being rewritten to remove any mention of DDT.

More Global Warming Nonsense.  The concept of malaria as a "tropical" infection is nonsense.  It is a disease of the poor.  Alarmists in the richest countries peddle the notion that the increase in malaria in poor countries is due to global warming and that this will eventually cause malaria to spread to areas that were "previously malaria free."  That's a misrepresentation of the facts and disingenuous when packaged with opposition to the cheapest and best insecticide to combat malaria — DDT.

Deadly Environmental Program Ends.  As reported in the Investor's Business Daily (9/18/06) The World Health Organization reversed its 30 year opposition to the use of DDT — a very effective pesticide.  This is good news for millions of 3rd World citizens, millions of whom have died from malaria, yellow fever, typhus, dengue, plague, encephalitis, and other insect-borne diseases.

Hooray for DDT's life-saving comeback.  Who says there's never any good news?  After more than 30 years and tens of millions dead — mostly children — the World Health Organization (WHO) has ended its ban on DDT.  DDT is the most effective anti-mosquito, anti-malaria pesticide known.  But thanks to the worldwide environmental movement and politically correct bureaucrats in the United States and at the United Nations, the use of this benign chemical has been discouraged in Africa and elsewhere, permitting killer mosquitoes to spread death.  I don't expect any apologies from the people who permitted this to happen.  But I am thankful this nightmare is ending.

Tanzania reverses ban on DDT.  Tanzania is lifting a 2004 ban on the pesticide DDT so it can be used to fight mosquitoes carrying malaria in the east African nation.

Bishop Tutu Joins the Call to Fight Malaria with DDT.  Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu … has joined more than 100 prominent scientists and human rights advocates signing a petition urging the use of DDT to stop an African holocaust of malaria deaths.

Africa Marks Malaria Day; U.S. Rethinking DDT.  Sprayed in small quantities, just twice a year, on the walls and eaves of mud-and-thatch or cinderblock homes, DDT keeps 90 percent of mosquitoes from entering, and it irritates any that do come in, so they rarely bite.  No other insecticide at any price does that.  DDT also kills mosquitoes that land on walls.  Used this way, virtually no DDT ever reaches the environment.  But the health results are astounding.

Reigniting the Fight Against Malaria:  Bring Back DDT and Save Lives.  There's an important new coalition in Washington, and it's designed … to stop malarial mosquitoes.  It's a coalition that lives by the law of the jungle:  Kill them before they kill you.

Where Are The Greens On Malaria?  Every single day I get e-mail from various environmental groups warning about global warming.  Matt Drudge posts on his Web site the latest exhortations about this issue from scientists, politicians, Hollywood celebs, and, of course, Al Gore.  A coalition of environmentalists and institutional investors recently laid out for AOL customers a listing of which companies will be best prepared for climate change.  Greens may be concerned for their wallets, but when it comes to the lives of Africans, these environmentalists are nothing but a bunch of hypocrites.

Africa Launches DDT Attack Against Malaria.  Constant pressure from concerned scientists and public interest groups appears to be paying off for the people of Africa, as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has endorsed the indoor spraying of DDT to battle malaria in sub-Saharan Africa.  The decision, announced on May 2, is expected to turn the tide on a disease that has killed more than 1 million people each and every year since environmental activists effectively banned DDT in favor of ineffective tools such as bed nets.

Uganda Fighting for Right to Eradicate Malaria.  Until now, Uganda has bowed to outside pressure, but Health Minister Jim Muhwezi is determined to use DDT.  Speaking at a World Malaria Day commemoration in April 2005, Muhwezi noted, "DDT has been proven, over and over again, to be the most effective and least expensive method of fighting malaria."

Consensus is Nonsensus in Scientific Matters.  The US government has had a poor record in resolving scientific disputes.  Furthermore, the resulting unscientific government policies have been harmful, costly, and deadly (such as the EPA DDT ban, the proposed EPA chlorine ban, exaggerations of harmful effects of low level radiation, acid rain, etc).  In fact the 9000 pages of expert testimony given at the 1972 EPA hearings on DDT were ignored.  This resulted in the DDT ban with the resulting millions of deaths from malaria that could have been easily controlled by DDT.  The EPA continues with the 34 year DDT ban continues to this today.

Anti-pesticide Activists Perpetuate Diseases that Kill Millions.  Malaria is a disease that kills three times more African children than AIDS.  Hundreds of millions are infected and up to two million die annually.  But as the body count continues to mount, environmental activists and international aid agencies continue a deadly campaign against DDT.

Greenpeace, WWF Repudiate Anti-DDT Agenda.  Spokesmen for Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, activist environmental groups that have led the effort to ban worldwide use of the pesticide DDT, have admitted to the New York Times that DDT may be necessary and desirable after all.

Reject Environmentalism, Not DDT.  The West Nile virus deaths being reported across North America are a grim echo of a larger tragedy.  Each year a million lives are taken worldwide by another mosquito-borne killer:  malaria.  Though nearly eradicated decades ago, malaria has resurged with a vengeance.  But the real tragedy is that its horrific death toll is largely preventable.  The most effective agent of mosquito control, the pesticide DDT, has been essentially discarded — discarded based not on scientific concerns about its safety, but on environmental dogma.

Waging a losing war against mosquitoes.  [Scroll down]  The CDC has respect for mosquitoes, too.  The agency was created in 1946 to fight malaria, and while malaria's been all but wiped out in the U.S., there were more than 700 reported cases of the deadly West Nile virus here last year alone.

The myth of DDT versus the reality of malaria in Africa:  The United States has just assumed the largest burden of forgiving $40 billion in debt owed by 18 mostly African countries.  It's no wonder these countries can't repay their debts when they suffer the enormous human and economic costs of malaria.  According to Harvard development expert Jeffrey Sachs, malaria cuts in half the potential growth of African countries.

DDT Saves Lives.  The environmentalists' spin has taken hold and, in the conventional wisdom, DDT is associated with the death of Nature, if not the end of the world.  Its use has been banned in North America and Europe.  However, if this stuff was so bad and we basically dumped tons of it on our farms up until the 1970's, then why haven't we all dropped dead in the streets?

How Precaution Kills:  The Demise of DDT and the Resurgence of Malaria.  Most of our preoccupations arise from the modern paradox: while our longevity, health and environment has never been better, we spend more time than ever before worrying about all three.  Classic concerns are the various scares — alar, saccharine, breast implants, passive smoking, nuclear power, pesticide residues, children's vaccines — and more recently, mobile phones, genetically modified foods and global warming.  In some of these cases, the concern was completely invalid, in others the scare was blown out of all proportion.

The Myth of DDT, Pesticides and Health Risks:  This one is quick and easy:  There has never been a single documented death from the recommended use of DDT or any other pesticide.

Applying the Precautionary Principle to DDT.  When comparing the relative risks from banning DDT use to the risk of continued targeted use indoors, it is clear that a proper application of the precautionary principle would not only support continued use, but ethics would also require it.

USAID in the Hot Seat — Again.  Malaria is a preventable and curable disease.  Yet it continues to claim the lives of over one million people each year, with Africa, Asia and the Near East suffering the most losses.  USAID must change its policy or its health officials should be replaced by those who will.

Spray-averse officials just really bug me:  We shouldn't continue to treat mosquitoes like an endangered species.  We should use pesticides to kill them at the first sign of West Nile.

Mosquito-borne diseases:  West Nile Fever, Eastern Equine Encephalitis, Malaria, Dengue Fever.

How mosquitoes spread West Nile, but not HIV:  Think of mosquitoes as having two tiny straws inside their proboscis, or "stinger."  Through one they spit an anti-clotting saliva to thin your blood, which they sip through the other.

Environmental Genocide:  DDT was developed by Dr. Paul Müller, a Swiss chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1948, in recognition of the enormous medical importance of this remarkable chemical substance.  Though widely used for only three decades, DDT has been justifiably credited with preventing more human deaths by disease than any chemical ever concocted.

The Fruits of Eco-Extremism:  The unnecessary banning of DDT has resulted in the worldwide resurgence of malaria and the deaths of millions, and the banning of freon and similar CFCs will result in the deaths of millions more.

The Environmentalist Evil:  A great number of people tend to regard Environmentalism as a movement for cleaner air and water, for a better environment for man.  But the environmentalists' actions demonstrate otherwise.  Clear evidence of their disregard for human life is their decades-long campaign to ban the insecticide DDT, even for specific use against malaria-carrying mosquitoes.  Whatever the long-term effects of DDT on human health, they should certainly be an option for the people at risk from the ravaging short-term effects of malaria.

Science Rejects Anti-Pesticide Claims.  Public health officials across the country are considering widespread spraying of pesticides to control the mosquito-borne West Nile virus.  Anti-pesticide environmentalists claim spraying will devastate bird populations and other wildlife, but sound science shows the pesticides are safe and necessary.  West Nile virus and other factors in the natural environment pose greater threats to birds and wildlife than pesticide spraying.

West Nile Virus:  The Environmentalist's Epidemic.  So why, in the face of having their scientific arguments refuted and with the benefits of technology so clear, are the environmentalists able to keep the use of pesticides like DDT illegal?

Activists are to be Feared More than Pesticides.  As public health officials consider spraying pesticides to control the mosquito-borne West Nile virus, anti-pesticide activists claim that spraying devastates birds and other wildlife.  But such claims should be viewed with skepticism.

DDT saves lives:  Last year [1999], malaria deaths in Africa reached an all-time high.  Next year [2001] the disease will claim an estimated one million children.  To visualize this number, imagine seven Boeing 747s, loaded with kids, crashing every day.

Manto hails DDT against malaria.  Reports say DDT has reduced the number of malaria cases in South Africa by 42%.

How Good Intentions Kill:  One need only compare malaria rates in South Africa, Swaziland and Mozambique to see the effect of banning DDT.

DDT is safe:  just ask the professor who ate it for 40 years.  DDT was introduced as an insecticide during the 1940s.  In Churchill's words:  "The excellent DDT powder has been found to yield astonishing results against insects of all kinds, from lice to mosquitoes."  And astonishing they were.  DDT was particularly effective against the anopheles mosquito, which is the carrier of malaria, and people once hoped that DDT would eradicate malaria worldwide.  Consider Sri Lanka.  In 1946, it had three million cases, but the introduction of DDT reduced the numbers, by 1964, to only 29.  In India, the numbers of malaria cases fell from 75 million to around 50,000.

Sick Argument:  Global Warming and the Spread of Tropical Diseases.  Examples of misguided policies resulting in unnecessary illness and death abound.  Through the use of DDT, malaria mortality in Ceylon fell from tens of thousands of cases to a few hundred each year.  DDT was considered one of the safest pesticides in use.  However, DDT was banned in the United States by the EPA for fear it was causing death and reproductive problems in bald eagles and other raptors - despite the fact that most scientists found no links between DDT use and thinner eggshells or bird deformities.


"When U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief William Ruckelshaus was about to announce his decision to ban DDT in June 1972, he confided to a friend, "There is no scientific basis for banning this chemical — this is a political decision."

"The EPA and environmentalists must be held accountable for their crime:  There was not a single human death from DDT usage; there have been untold thousands of deaths and millions of disease-stricken persons as a result of the DDT banning."

This is an original compilation, Copyright © 2023 by Andrew K. Dart



Pesticides in general:

Creating the Great American Potato Famine.  McDonald's just agreed to pursue pesticide-free potatoes for its restaurants.  The anti-technology activists pushing this organic move had better hope the company drags its feet — or we risk having the first McDonald's in history with no French fries.  Less than a decade ago, the Danish government's high-level Bichel technical committee concluded that an organic-only mandate would cut Danish potato production by 80 percent.

Indigestible Organic Propaganda.  The research is actually good news on two fronts.  First, only miniscule traces of pesticide metabolites were found.  A part per billion is equal to one second in 32 years.  Second, it confirms that pesticides are rapidly detoxified and cleared from children's bodies — just as we thought they were.  But instead of using these findings to reassure parents about the safety of the food supply, the researchers tacitly promoted organic foods.

Plans to ban dozens of pesticides will 'lead to food shortages'.  A directive being proposed by the European Commission is designed to reduce the level of toxic chemicals in food.  It would lead to a ban on 15 percent of pesticides, it has been estimated.

Pesticides Not a Threat to Students.  The anti-pesticide crowd tried to scare parents last week with a new report alleging that pesticide use in schools is dangerous for students.  Contrary to its authors' apparent intent, however, the report should actually serve to reduce any anxiety parents may have about pesticide use.

Baby Boomers Are Living Proof That Pesticides Are Safe.  If pesticides are as harmful to human health as the Environmental Working Group and Consumers Union would have you believe, then there ought to be plenty of proof of this in the Baby Boom generation, which has lived 50 years with pesticide-treated food.  If what they say is true — that millions of children today are exposed to unsafe levels of pesticides in fruit and vegetables — then those of us who are Baby Boomers would have had our lives shortened or suffered all kinds of serious illnesses.  The facts say otherwise.

Pesticide bans put children at risk from roaches and rodents.  In the first phase of a carefully scripted campaign to ban the use of pesticides in the United States, environmental activist groups have taken aim at a population they usually claim to defend:  children.  Making no secret of their ultimate goal of using more "natural" means — such as a dramatically increased spider population — to control nuisance and disease-carrying insects, the anti-chemical groups are targeting schools and parks in their efforts to ban pesticides entirely.

Misconceptions About Environmental Pollution, Pesticides and the Causes of Cancer:  There is no epidemic of cancer, except for lung cancer due to smoking.  Cancer mortality rates have declined 16 percent since 1950 (excluding lung cancer).  Regulatory policy that focuses on traces of synthetic chemicals is based on misconceptions about animal cancer tests.

Latest Pesticide Scare Dismissed by Scientists.  Experts in nutrition and food safety have overwhelmingly rejected a report released January 29 [1998] by an activist environmental group alleging that over one million American infants and children are exposed each day to unsafe doses of pesticides in their food.

Stand by for Higher Food Prices, Courtesy of California's Environmental Crazies.  The Monterey Bay area is faced with an infestation of the Australian light brown apple moth that could jeopardize the area's massive agribusiness.  If you eat salads, the lettuce probably came from the fertile Salinas Valley.  The cost to eradicate the pest was estimated to be $1 million.  But the environmentally sensitive, question-authority crowd obtained a court order to temporarily stop the spraying.  They claim there is not enough known about the safety of the chemical being sprayed.  This caused the state to waste valuable time going to court litigating the safety of "Checkmate," the name of the pheromone (not pesticide) being used to stop the destructive moth.

Anti-pesticides Report Called a "Shameless Attempt" to Frighten the Public.  Leading scientists agree that Americans enjoy the world's safest, most abundant food supply.  A report that claims otherwise, released by a Washington, DC-based advocacy group, was deemed "a shameless attempt to frighten parents and an arrogant power play" by the American Farm Bureau Federation.

Will the EPA Make America Safe for Cockroaches?  The argument against organophosphates is essentially that they're poisonous — something that is true of most poisons.  The question is how harmful they are to those of us with fewer than six legs.  Answer:  not very.  Studies on laboratory mice have found that the average human adult would need to eat 875 pounds of broccoli every day for the rest of his life to approach the chlorpyrifos levels that caused problems in the rodents.


EPA's cautious exposure assumptions often mean the agency sets standards based on risk levels that are tens, and sometimes hundreds, of thousands of times higher than actual risks.  University of Texas Professor Frank Cross reviewed studies on the topic in 1997, just after the new pesticide law was passed.  He found EPA's conservative risk estimates overstated pesticide exposure by as much as 99,000 to 463,000 times actual exposure levels.*


Teddy Tackles the "Terrorists":  Is the Orkin Man the equivalent of an anthrax-mailing terrorist?  Senator Ted Kennedy thinks so.  Or, at least, the Massachusetts Democrat wants you to think so.

Anti-science Policies from EPA:  Carol Browner's own Scientific Advisory Panel … rejected the EPA's proposal to declare the nation's highest-use herbicide, atrazine, a "likely carcinogen."  Few papers covered it, and the most prominent, USA Today, got the story backward.  It declared:  "The most commonly used herbicide in the USA has been upgraded from a 'possible' to a 'likely' carcinogen in a draft report prepared by scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency."

Eat Your Vegetables, Reduce Cancer Risk:  To put the cancer risk from pesticides in perspective, 99.9 percent of all pesticides that humans eat are naturally produced by plants to defend themselves against fungi, insects and other animal predators.  Americans eat about 10,000 times more natural pesticides per person, per day (measured by weight) than they consume in synthetic pesticide residues.

Progressive Environmentalism:  Principles for Regulatory Reform.  A significant share of the world's food supply never makes it to market.  Even with pesticide use, insects eat high percentages of many crops and other crops spoil before reaching consumers.  Without pesticides, the loss would be much greater.  For example, a recent Department of Agriculture study estimated that if herbicides were banned in the state of Indiana, over 50 percent of the corn crop would be lost.



Rachel Carson subsection:

Practically all of the DDT debacle is the fault of Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, and the alarmists who picked up where she left off.

Google Honors Rachel Carson, Who Helped Cause the Death of up to 50 Million People.  Yesterday Google barely acknowledged Memorial Day, with a tiny little flag that contrasted sharply against the sea of flags on display on Bing's homepage.  But today is a holiday the Google people can get behind.  It's Rachel Carson's birthday.

Rachel Carson, environmentalism's answer to Pol Pot.  Yesterday would have been her 102nd birthday and I'm sorry I missed it, but my sharp-eyed fellow-traveller David Hinz at The Minority Report celebrated with a lively dance on the old fraud's grave. He doesn't mince his words:  Rachel Carson — poster girl of the international eco movement — was a "mass murderer" to rival Stalin and Pol Pot.  Was she really responsible for the deaths of as many as 50 million people?  That's just an estimate.  What we do know is that her landmark 1962 bestseller Silent Spring — the book that set a million and one green activists on the path of eco righteousness — was responsible for the worldwide ban on the insecticide DDT, the most effective preventative against the mosquitos which spread the world's deadliest disease, Malaria.  In this way countless millions of people, mostly Third World children, were condemned to death in the name of ecological correctness.

Green Weenie of the Week: Posthumous Rachel Carson Edition.  To be sure, DDT was overused, but a complete ban was unnecessary, and has contributed to the needless deaths of millions of people from malaria in the developing world.  It was never a proven human carcinogen, and its damage to wildlife can be mitigated through more careful use.  Indeed, the World Health Organization and even the New York Times editorial page have called for the reintroduction of DDT in the developing world.  Environmentalists won't hear of it.  We once had malaria in the U.S. and the use of DDT was instrumental in wiping it out here.  Typical of rich western liberals to deny to the developing world the same tools we used to better our own lives.

Movement to Ban DDT Cost Millions of Lives.  I find it very disturbing that there is a one-woman play to glorify Rachel Carson and her radical approach of placing the "natural world" above all else, including human life.  Writer Krista Ramsey stated that Rachel Carson's book, "Silent Spring," "changed the nation's thinking on pesticide use and started grassroots environmentalism."  The most significant result of Carson's activism was the banning of DDT in the U.S. and, more critically, eliminating its availability in developing countries.  DDT was a means to an end for Rachael Carson and the environmental groups expanding their power in the early 1960s.

Green:  The New Color of Catastrophe.  By exaggerating the effects of DDT, in particular by alleging a non-existent cancer risk from mere contact with it, [Rachel Carson] fomented a zealotry that cast any who opposed such measures as uniquely evil.  That fervor is self-perpetuating.  That is why DDT use is still for all intents and purposes banned despite its withdrawal causing devastation among the population of American elms, and the far more tragic result of stripping African nations of the most effective weapon they had against malaria.  The real silent spring is heard every year in playgrounds across countries like Uganda, where children fall victim to the disease in heart-rending numbers.  That's the human price of the moral fervor over DDT.

Rachel Carson and the Malaria Tragedy:  If Rachel Carson were still alive, April 12 would have been her 100th birthday.  All over the Western World well-meaning, but misguided, souls marked that day with choruses of praise for the woman who almost singly-handed created the modern environmental movement.  Her book, Silent Spring, warned us that man-made pesticides would kill our kids with cancer and eliminate our wild birds.  Since Silent Spring was published, of course, massive testing has documented that synthetic pesticides are no cancer threat to humans.

GOP senator thwarts Rachel Carson tribute.  A Democrat senator's resolution to honor the centennial of famed environmentalist and "Silent Spring" author Rachel Carson unexpectedly was blocked by Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, who blamed Carson for creating a climate of "hysteria and misinformation" that led to the banning of DDT and the deaths of millions.

Rachel Carson's Dire Unintended Consequences.  One of the most difficult aspects of keeping up with environmental issues is having to suffer through the agonizing hero worship at the altar of Rachel Carson. … It is mind-boggling to find such incredibly misguided admiration for a woman whose opposition to DDT and other synthetic pesticides led to the suffering and death of millions of people around the world.

Rachel's Folly:  The End of Chlorine.  The environmentalists are right about one thing:  Dirty water kills.  Millions are people are dying needlessly all over the world because of it.  But are the main culprits man-made pollution and chlorinated chemicals?  Try endemic poverty, bad plumbing and lack of access to basic water chlorination techniques. [PDF]

Post Glosses over Deaths Linked to 'Silent Spring' Author.  The book "Silent Spring" set in motion the banning of DDT and needlessly cost millions of lives.  The Washington Post chose to mark author Rachel Carson's 100th birthday by barely mentioning that her actions "have remained controversial."  That's quite an understatement.

Rachel Carson's Genocide:  [Rachel] Carson's centenary is no cause for celebration.  Her legacy includes more than a million deaths a year from the mosquito-borne disease malaria.  Though nearly eradicated decades ago, malaria has resurged with a vengeance because DDT, the most effective agent of mosquito control, has been essentially discarded — discarded based not on scientific concerns about its safety, but on environmental dogma advanced by Carson.

It's Time to Silence Silent Spring.  Published in 1962 at the height of the worldwide antimalaria campaign, Silent Spring sparked a crusade against DDT.  The widespread spraying of DDT had caused a spectacular drop in malaria incidence — Sri Lanka, for example, reported 2.8 million malaria victims in 1948, but by 1963 it had only 17.  Yet Carson's book made no mention of this.  It said nothing of DDT's crucial role in eradicating malaria in industrialized countries, or of the tens of millions of lives saved by its use.

Killing Mosquitoes or Killing Humans?  It took me a long time to understand why so many environmentalists oppose any and all pesticides.  It began with Rachel Carsen's Silent Spring in the 1960s, filled with dire predictions about pesticide use, most of which have long since been proven wrong.  By way of just one example, she claimed DDT spraying would wipe out the U.S. robin population.  Instead, the bird's population actually increased between 1941 and 1972.  How many people have died from insect-borne diseases because of her book can't even be calculated, but the loss of DDT alone has doomed millions.

The inconvenient truth:  In his new book, "Eco-Freaks," John Berlau, a policy director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank devoted to environmental policies, catalogs the tragic mistakes imposed on the rest of us by the environmentally correct.  After Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring," DDT was banned nearly everywhere.  Most of her "evidence" later turned out to be all wrong, but 2 million poor Africans die every year of malaria that DDT was on the way to eradicating.  Al Gore, of course, blames global warming.

Should We Be Honoring Rachel Carson?  Every year, half a billion people, mostly in Africa, get malaria. … Just spraying tiny amounts of DDT on the inside walls of houses once or twice a year keeps 90 percent of mosquitoes from entering homes, and thus reduces malaria by 75 percent or more.  Telling countries they must not use this insecticide is an unconscionable human rights violation.  Rachel Carson would surely not want this to be her legacy.

The New Black Death:  Every year, millions die of malaria in Africa simply because the environmental movement, sparked by a book written by Rachel Carson in the 1950s, has done everything in its power to eliminate the use of DDT and every other pesticide that might otherwise protect our lives.  That is murder on a grand scale.  Malaria is spread by mosquitoes.  If DDT had not been banned by a United Nations protocol, those millions would have been spared an early death.

The Bill Gates Mosquito Circus:  [Scroll down]  In this case, the good intentions of The Gates Foundation overlook the simple fact that their efforts are redundant:  Malaria was nearly eradicated in the 1960's.  And then came Rachel Carson and her wrong-headed book, Silent Spring.  Since Ms. Carson's tome was published, spring has been permanently silent for millions of Africans ... Ms. Carson's misguided compassion for a few species of birds which might possibly have been harmed by DDT made her an inspiration to the proto-PETA types who helped found the modern environmental movement.

Rachel Carson, environmentalism's answer to Pol Pot.  [David Hinz] doesn't mince his words:  Rachel Carson — poster girl of the international eco movement — was a "mass murderer" to rival Stalin and Pol Pot.  Was she really responsible for the deaths of as many as 50 million people?  That's just an estimate.  What we do know is that her landmark 1962 bestseller Silent Spring — the book that set a million and one green activists on the path of eco righteousness — was responsible for the worldwide ban on the insecticide DDT, the most effective preventative against the mosquitos which spread the world's deadliest disease, Malaria.  In this way countless millions of people, mostly Third World children, were condemned to death in the name of ecological correctness.

The Ghost of Lysenko.  The imaginary science of man-made global warning can now be entered into the infamous history of politicized science, the results of which have threads in our lives today.  Consider the residue of such frauds as Rachel Carson, Alfred Kinsey, and Margaret Mead. ... Carson, Kinsey, and Mead had an agenda before they did any research, and this agenda governed everything else.

Environmentalists Are Killing Environmentalism.  [Environmentalists have] misled, exaggerated and made a multitude of false predictions to the detriment of the environment and people's willingness to be aware and concerned.  Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was a major starting point that blamed DDT for many things including thinner eggshells none of which proved correct.

Somewhat related...
Imagining a world without mosquitoes.  An article in the scientific journal Nature has set off a discussion about whether it is advisable or even feasible to kill the world's mosquitoes.  The article, by Nature intern Janet Fang, featured numerous scientists downplaying the environmental harm that would be caused by eradicating the world's 3,500 species of mosquitoes.

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Updated November 23, 2023.

©2023 by Andrew K. Dart