A Stitch in Haste

"Hey farmer, farmer
Put away that DDT now
Give millions malaria
But leave me the birds and the bees"

This Steven Milloy piece is an absolute must-read (actually, every "Junk Science" column he writes should be considered a must-read):

Dr. Edwards [who recently passed away] led the opposition to environmental extremist efforts to ban DDT in the wake of Rachel Carson's infamous 1962 book "Silent Spring." The testimony of Dr. Edwards and others during Environmental Protection Agency hearings in 1971 on whether to ban the insecticide led to an EPA administrative law judge ruling that, "DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man. DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man. The uses of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife."

Inexplicably — or so it seemed — DDT was nonetheless banned by EPA administrator William Ruckleshaus. Dr. Edwards investigated and uncovered disturbing statements and troubling connections between Ruckleshaus and anti-DDT environmental extremist groups.
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Now, even the New York Times has seen the light, running a pro-DDT editorial on Dec. 23, 2002 ("Fighting Malaria with DDT), a pro-DDT op-ed column on Aug. 7, 2003 (Is there a place for DDT?") and, most recently, a pro-DDT New York Times Magazine article on April 11, 2004. ("What the World Needs Now is DDT").

Milloy chronicles the ruthless and ethically questionable behavior of certain anti-DDT activists, boh in and out of government. The article is a good reminder of just how dangerous, and sometimes sociopathic, the eco-wingnuts can be.

P.S. The Counting Crows version sucks even worse.

More on the "Silent Spring" hysteria here.

Andrew Kenny by way of Tim Blair:

Ideology comes in three colours: red, brown and green, representing Marxism, fascism and environmental extremism. The death toll (difficult to measure) is roughly, Hitler's holocaust 6 million, Stalin's famine and terror 8 million, and Mao's famine 30 million. But the greens have topped them all. In a single crime they have killed about 50 million people. In purely numerical terms, it was the worst crime of the 20th century. It took place in the USA in 1972. It was the banning of DDT.

I first blogged about DDT here, when the principal critic of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, died and both Carson's fans and detractors had cause to revisit her claim (which Edwards vehemently disputed) that DDT, through the food chain, softened the shells of bird eggs, threatening certain species including the beloved American Bald Eagle. Carson's cabal also argued that DDT was a significant cancer risk in humans, particularly children.

As it turns out, there is compelling evidence that the entire "Silent Spring" thesis was a fraud:

The testimony of Dr. Edwards and others during Environmental Protection Agency hearings in 1971 on whether to ban the insecticide led to an EPA administrative law judge ruling that, "DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man. DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man. The uses of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife."

So why did the EPA ban it anyway? Simple — The Politics of Pull:

Inexplicably — or so it seemed — DDT was nonetheless banned by EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus. Dr. Edwards investigated and uncovered disturbing statements and troubling connections between Ruckelshaus and anti-DDT environmental extremist groups.

In a May 1971 speech before the Wisconsin Audubon Society, Ruckelshaus acknowledged being a member of the anti-DDT National Audubon Society and to have "streamlined" EPA procedures so that DDT could be banned even before the administrative hearings had been completed.

After Ruckelshaus left the EPA, he began fundraising for the Environmental Defense Fund, a spin-off of the National Audubon Society and the lead petitioner to have EPA ban DDT.

The probability that Ruckelshaus had made up his mind to ban DDT regardless of the facts is increased by his refusal of requests made under the Freedom of Information Act and by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to turn over the documentation on which the ban was based.

One eco-freak activist bureaucrat places warm fuzzy feelings ahead of science (and economics) and 50 million people die of malaria. So much for being "environmentally friendly."

Could you imagine if one FDA super-official had sole authority over the drug approval process (and was in bed with the pharmaceutical industry to boot)? Or if one lone educrat, perhaps an Intelligent Design advocate, had carte blanche authority to approve, reject or edit school textbooks?

Yet how much more damage to humanity did this lone EPA radical cause, not just in the U.S. but throughout the developing world?

Madness.

The entire record on DDT must be wiped clean and new, unbiased research should commence immediately, with an eye on potentially lifting the ban on DDT, discrediting the ongoing DDT hysteria and ending the malaria scourge crippling the world.

We ended the Brown Terror, we ended (most of) the Red Terror. It's now time to end the Green Terror.

Fifty million dead is enough.

Late last week, President Bush, as part of his and the G8's lip service to "helping Africa" (the only real way to help Africa would be to effect regime change across the continent and establish market-based democracies throughout the region, but that won't happen anytime soon), pledged greater anti-malaria assistance:

"America will bring this anti-malaria effort to at least four more highly endemic African countries in 2007 and at least five more in 2008. In the next five years with the approval of Congress we'll spend more than $1.2 billion on this campaign," Bush said in a speech to the Hudson Institute.

This is a good excuse to revisit an earlier post of mine that tiptoed into what I have since learned is an extremely heated debate about malaria and DDT.

I blogged the following:

One eco-freak activist bureaucrat places warm fuzzy feelings ahead of science (and economics) and 50 million people die of malaria. So much for being "environmentally friendly."

The "eco-freak activist bureaucrat" was EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus back in 1971 after the Silent Spring mania. Ruckelshaus single-handedly banned DDT in the United States. For details see my link above.

To clarify, there is no global ban on DDT; it is banned in the U.S. and other countries, but not globally. To the extent that my blog implied otherwise, I apologize.

Some environmental and pro-Africa activists like to refer to this inaccurate inference (and in my case I truly do mean "inference" and not "implication" — it was not my intention to deceive my readers) as the "DDT Hoax Meme."

Advocates of the DDT Hoax Meme claim that, since DDT was not banned globally, it cannot be blamed for any increase in malaria deaths over the past 30 years. The real reason for the persistent malaria crisis isn't the lack of DDT, the Hoax Meme crowd will tell you, but rather poverty, which of course requires, not DDT, but money — especially Western money.

And as Africa recaptures headlines, and malaria recaptures human lives, the DDT Hoax Meme is gaining popularity, with chants of "DDT isn't really banned, so don't blame malaria on that" increasingly parroted by activists. Even Tyler Cowen has recently embraced the DDT Hoax Meme, linking favorably to not one but two Tim Lambert posts endorsing the Meme.

There's just one problem: The DDT Hoax Meme is itself a hoax.

There are in fact significant constraints on the use of DDT globally, including intense pressure from the developed world, NGOs and private donors against its use. Stated differently, far less DDT is being used than would be but for the pressure by non-malarial nations and environmentalist patrons not to use it.

For example:

Of the roughly 100 countries where malaria is endemic, only 23 now employ DDT to fight the disease. And that is frequently the fault of aid donors who help to finance the battle against malaria.

In the early 1990s, for example, the United States Agency for International Development stopped the governments of Bolivia and Belize from using DDT. In Madagascar, the United Nations Development Programme tried to persuade the government to replace DDT with Propoxur, a less effective pesticide. To its credit, Madagascar refused. In Mozambique, both NORAD, the Norwegian development agency, and SIDA, its Swedish counterpart, said that they could not support the use of DDT, as it was banned in their own countries. That the problems of a desperately poor malarial country in Africa might be somewhat different from those of wealthy, non-malarial Scandinavia seems not to have occurred to them.

Twenty-three out of one hundred. The term "de facto ban" would not be inappropriate.

More:

Facing pressure from environmentalists, the [South Africa] national malaria control programme abandoned DDT in favour of more expensive pyrethroid insecticides in 1996. Within three years, pyrethroid resistant A funestus mosquitoes invaded KwaZulu-Natal province, where they had not been seen since DDT spraying began in the 1940s. Malaria cases then promptly soared, from just 4,117 cases in 1995 to 27,238 cases in 1999 (or possibly 120,000 cases, judging by pharmacy records).

As for Lambert, his lengthy posts seem to boil down to the following thesis: First, since some DDT advocates, either intentionally or negligently, misled people about a global DDT ban, any other arguments they make are to be dismissed outright for lack of credibility. Second, since there are other (far more expensive) pesticides and (far less efffective) techniques such as mosquito nets, why bother to re-evaluate the use of DDT or revisit the claims made by Rachel Carson and William Ruckelshaus?

The answer is of course: 50,000,000 (or however many it really was) dead of malaria since DDT was banned limited. That's why.

As economists like to say, boundary solutions are almost never optimal. DDT won't solve the malaria crisis single-handedly. But neither will alternative pesticides or mosquito nets. The nations of Africa should be left free to use whatever combination of techniques they think best to fight this scourge, without pressure or condescension from non-malarial nations, and certainly not from environmental activists to avoid "politically incorrect" solutions.

POST SCRIPT: There's another issue regarding the use of DDT, namely the rise of resistant mosquitoes. Quite frankly, I've seen so many "statistics" from both supporters and opponents of DDT that I honestly don't know whom to believe. What I do know is that the African and other malarial nations should be left alone to make their own decisions about the pesticide, with no outside warm-fuzzy-feeling pressure from governments of non-malarial nations or from do-gooder environmentalist activists.

Hat tip to Bilious Young Fogey. Other thoughts on the DDT Hoax Hoax at Crumb Trail.

For a fresh fisking of Silent Spring, see this Spiked article. For background on the global malaria crisis, see Malaria Foundation International (funded, incidentally, by the United States government and the pharmaceutical industry, not the chemical/pesticide industry).

I have long chronicled the insane policies of the World Health Organization and other governmental and quasi-government entities restricting the use of DDT to fight malaria — the number-four cause of death worldwide.

Well, a few decades and a few million lives late, common sense and the scientific method have finally scored a much-needed victory:

The World Health Organization (WHO) has reversed a 30-year policy by endorsing the use of DDT for malaria control.
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DDT has been banned globally for every use except fighting disease because of its environmental impacts and fears for human health.

WHO says there is no health risk, and DDT should rank with bednets and drugs as a tool for combating malaria, which kills more than one million each year.

Had the concerns of the 1970s about DDT (i.e., its alleged impact on the health of both birds and humans) actually had any validity, then it still would not have justified the death (and a quite horrible death) of millions upon millions of poor Africans — many of them children. I love bald eagles as much as anyone, but they're simply not worth almost a whole generation of almost a whole continent dead.

And the "DDT Scare" was a fraud anyway — a flat-out lie by a "dedicated public servant" (FDA Administrator William Ruckleshaus) conspiring with the dishonest "friend of the earth" author (Rachel Carson) of what became a genocidal book ("Silent Spring").

Madness. Sheer madness.

Thank goodness it's over.

More thoughts from Pragmatic Libertarian, Out of Control.

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On a somewhat related note, one cannot help but notice that the E.Coli spinach outbreak across the country has been traced to an "organic" produce processor. How I yearn for the days when "organic" meant "carbon-based" and not vacuous hippie gobbledygook at the supermarket.

This is not a suitable subject for Schadenfreude — a person is dead and many are ill — but I found this development, well, hilarious:

A lawsuit in the spinach E-coli case has been filed in Redwood City, California, by the Seattle law firm that handled Jack in the Box and Odwalla E-coli cases.
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Lawyer William Marler says seniors are less able to fight off foodborne illness and the food supplier should have made sure the food was safe.

Of course, the two demands:

1. Don't do anything to my food (i.e., keep it "organic").

2. Make sure the food is safe.

are inconsistent if not mutually exclusive. It would be akin to demanding that preservative-free food never spoil. But who cares? Sue them anyway. (Via Medpundit.)