Does Mormonism affect how we treat our enviroment?

[_harmony]

Was there supoosed to be a reply here?

It's called hitting the submit button instead of the change the page button.

[_Who Knows]

Interesting survey done here:

http://syndication.nationaljournal.com/ ... NJlogo.pdf

The question to members of congress was: "Do you think it’s been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that
the Earth is warming because of man-made problems?"

95% of the Democrats said YES
84% of the Republicans said NO

[Dr. Sunstoned]

Here are some starting points for sources on the DDT controversy re the pathetic and dangerous misinformation and varying mendacities emaniating from the environmental movement over the last third of the 20th century.


Day of Reckoning for DDT Foes?


Op-Eds & Articles
by Steven J. Milloy
September 21, 2006

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 (tens of millions dead — mostly pregnant women and children under the age of 5), illness (billions sickened) and poverty (more than $1 trillion dollars in lost GDP in sub-Saharan Africa alone) caused by the tragic, decades-long ban.

Much of this human catastrophe was preventable, so why did it happen? Who is responsible? Should the individuals and activist groups who caused the DDT ban be held accountable in some way?

Rachel Carson kicked-off DDT hysteria with her pseudo-scientific 1962 book, “Silent Spring.” Carson materially misrepresented DDT science in order to advance her anti-pesticide agenda. Today she is hailed as having launched the global environmental movement. A Pennsylvania state office building, Maryland elementary school, Pittsburgh bridge and a Maryland state park are named for her. The Smithsonian Institution commemorates her work against DDT. She was even honored with a 1981 U.S. postage stamp. Next year will be the 100th anniversary of her birth. Many celebrations are being planned.

It’s quite a tribute for someone who was so dead wrong. At the very least, her name should be removed from public property and there should be no government-sponsored honors of Carson.

The Audubon Society was a leader in the attack on DDT, including falsely accusing DDT defenders (who subsequently won a libel suit) of lying. Not wanting to jeopardize its non-profit tax status, the Audubon Society formed the Environmental Defense Fund (now simply known as Environmental Defense) in 1967 to spearhead its anti-DDT efforts. Today the National Audubon Society takes in more than $100 million per year and has assets worth more than $200 million. Environmental Defense takes in more than $65 million per year with a net worth exceeding $73 million.

In a February 25, 1971, media release, the president of the Sierra Club stated that his organization wanted “a ban, not just a curb” on DDT, “even in the tropical countries where DDT has kept malaria under control." Today the Sierra Club rakes in more than $90 million per year and has more than $50 million in assets.

Business are often held liable and forced to pay monetary damages for defective products and false statements. Why shouldn’t the National Audubon Society, Environmental Defense, Sierra Club and other anti-DDT activist groups be held liable for the harm caused by their recklessly defective activism?

It was, of course, then-Environmental Protection Agency administrator William Ruckelshaus who actually banned DDT after ignoring an EPA administrative law judge’s ruling that there was no evidence indicating that DDT posed any sort of threat to human health or the environment. Ruckleshaus never attended any of the agency’s hearings on DDT. He didn’t read the hearing transcripts and refused to explain his decision.

None of this is surprising given that, in a May 22, 1971, speech before the Wisconsin Audubon Society, Ruckleshaus said that EPA procedures had been streamlined so that DDT could be banned. Ruckleshaus was also a member of — and wrote fundraising letters for — the EDF.

The DDT ban solidified Ruckelshaus’ environmental credentials, which he has surfed to great success in business, including stints as CEO of Browning Ferris Industries and as a director of a number of other companies including Cummins Engine, Nordstrom, and Weyerhaeuser Company. Ruckelshaus currently is a principal in a Seattle, Wash., -based investment group called Madrona Venture Group.

Corporate wrongdoers — like WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers and Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski — were sentenced to prison for crimes against mere property. But what should the punishment be for government wrongdoers like Ruckleshaus who, apparently for the sake of his personal environmental interests, abused his power and affirmatively deprived billions of poor, helpless people of the only practical weapon against malaria?

Finally, there is the question of the World Health Organization itself. What’s the WHO been doing for all these years? There are no new facts on DDT — all the relevant science about DDT safety has been available since the 1960s. Moreover, the WHO’s strategy of mosquito bednets and malaria vaccine development has been a dismal failure. While the death toll in malarial regions has mounted, the WHO has been distracted by such dubious issues as whether cell phones and French fries cause cancer.

It’s a relief that the WHO has finally come to its senses, but on the other hand, the organization has done too little, too late. The ranks of the WHO’s leadership need to be purged of those who place the agenda of environmental elitists over the basic survival of the world’s needy.

In addition to the day of reckoning and societal rebuke that DDT-ban advocates should face, we should all learn from the DDT tragedy.

With the exception of Rachel Carson (who died in 1964), all of the groups and individuals above mentioned also promote global warming alarmism. If they and others could be so wrong about DDT, why should we trust them now? Should we really put the global economy and the welfare of billions at risk based on their track record?

How Environmentalism Kills the Poor – Malaria and the DDT Story

By Dr Roger Bate for Envirobio Conference, 14th November 2000 Paris.

The Author
Roger Bate (PhD Cambridge) is a fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London and
a founder of the European Science and Environment Forum in Cambridge. He has published
numerous papers and edited four books for ESEF, with Butterworth Heinemann, What
Risk? Science, politics and public health, Environmental Health: Third World
Problems; First World Preoccupations (with Lorraine Mooney), Fearing Food: Risk,
health and environment (with Julian Morris), and most recently Life’s Adventure: Virtual
Risk in a Real World ( a collection of 65 of his newspaper articles). He can be
contacted on rbate@iea.org.uk

Most of our pre-occupations 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 examples in Europe have been the various scares – nitrates, pesticides
residues, breast implants, passive smoking, nuclear power; more recently, mobile phones;
and GM foods. In some of these, the concern was completely invalid, in others the scare
was blown out of all proportion.

This paper is not aimed at exposing such scares, misinformation or exaggeration but to say,
even if some of the scares contain truth, it may be inappropriate for poor countries to be
worried too much about them. Indeed, it may be sensible for other countries to allow things
to happen which we would sensibly discourage or even prohibit.
You might think that the poorest less developed countries (LDCs) in the world would not
share our preoccupations, such as a cancer risk from overhead power-lines (when lack of
electricity for refrigeration of food and medicines, and lighting for education… is the real
problem). But often this isn’t the case. For example, it is instructive to see analysis of risk
issues in France and the francophone African State of Burkina Faso. The medical,
environmental, geographical and political realities of Burkina Faso are radically different
from France, yet a study of attitudes towards risk showed that Burkina Faso intellectuals
had approximately the same preoccupations as the French respondents and to the same
degree. In fact intellectual responses reflected media coverage in Burkina Faso, indicating
that reality plays a secondary role to the media’s representations of reality (Craven and
Johnson 1999).

Why this is the case is not properly established, but it appears that media coverage in LDCs
is likely to follow press coverage from powerful trading partners (such as USA), or former
colonial powers (such as France or Britain). It is also probable that poor country
intellectuals and political elites have been educated at Western universities, and share
western concerns. Furthermore, given that in LDCs tertiary educated people are rare, it is
likely that the educated are the ones writing the news.

But even where local media addresses local problems, the solutions proposed will often be
driven by western concerns, which may be inappropriate to local conditions. Sometimes
countries take an individual line, but in doing so they often go up against an unwritten
consensus, a tacit international agreement about the ‘correct’ way to deal with an issue, in
what is known in the jargon as a ‘status marker’ of opinion. Recent examples include: South
African President Thabo Mbeki’s stance on AIDS; Chinese official’s refusal to sanction a
UN Convention on tobacco; similarly OPEC states’ refusal to go along with the climate
change consensus. In all three examples they have felt the opprobrium of the Englishspeaking
media – conservative and socialist alike.

But on the whole poor country politicians do not go up against the international community
and problems often arise because of this. There are many examples of this from policy on
irrigation and agricultural development (where I have some knowledge) to education of
women and rights of the child (where I have none), but analysis is limited in the literature, not
because they are not plentiful but because research costs are high, not so much in
discovering anecdotal examples but in following them through into a detailed study.
I am lucky enough to have lived in South Africa on and off since 1994, and became aware
of one key example. And I want to track through this example to detail the unintended
consequences of policy. We hear that phrase, ‘unintended consequences’ often but we
don’t always appreciate the extent or depth (in terms of human lives) of the consequences.
Therefore, this paper concentrates on one main example to show the problem. But also to
show how necessary it is to dig to get the details, because the type of problem I discuss are
almost certainly increasing in number and severity, especially as our rich societies becomes
more risk averse, but poor countries still have problems we long said good bye to.

First, three short examples:

1.Concerns about trihalomethanes (compounds created in water chlorination, which are
carcinogenic in rats) in drinking water contributed to the Peruvian Government’s decision to
reduce the chlorination of drinking water. This decision was made simpler by the fact that
they simply didn’t have the money to fully implement the chlorination programme and this
gave them the perfect excuse: ‘the richest country in the world (the US EPA) thinks chlorine
poses a health problem so we are justified in not imposing this risk on our people’) This led
to the first outbreak of cholera in Peru in 1991, killing thousands. It then spread across
South America with nearly a million cases. As far as known trihalomethane compounds have
never killed anyone – but they are nasty for rats when drowned in the stuff (see Ghersi
1999).

2. A ban on trade in certain secondary metals (cadmium, zinc, nickel) has seriously harmed
the market and hence jobs for very poor traders in Asia. Metals pollution is an
environmental problem, but batteries we in the west throw away are scavenged by many
Asian traders for reuse and recycling. For them the risk of a bit of metal pollution is easily
outweighed by the benefit of jobs and income (albeit those benefiting from the jobs may not
be harmed by pollution even though occupational exposure says they’re first in line for any
risk). But the point is that such traders had no voice in a ban established by western interests
for western interests (See Evans 1996)

3. Another contentious example is from the development of nuclear power in LDCs. In
many poor African states there are no electricity grid systems (or they are very limited
highly-dispersed, sparse populations make the infrastructure unfeasibly expensive, plus the
equipment is often dismantled and used to build houses or burnt for firewood). Some large
industrial plants in remote locations use significant amounts of energy (an aluminium smelter
in Mozambique for example). Two technologies with potential here are nuclear and solar.
South African efforts to bring on line a new technology, the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor,
which could be used at the aluminium smelter, are being hampered by international rejection
of older nuclear technologies. Furthermore, although the Reactor would benefit Southern
Africa it is a home-grown technology, which arouses suspicion and mistrust from the
countries of the North – we forget that South Africa has many capable nuclear physicists
(see Kemm 1999).

There are, of course, other examples of this phenomenon, but now I will concentrate on the
main example, which is of the disease malaria and the use of the pesticide
dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, commonly know as DDT.
Malaria

Most people consider malaria to be a tropical disease, and indeed today it is. But this has
not always been the case. In the period called the Little Ice Age (over 300 years ago)
Malaria was common in England. At the time it was called the ague.
William Harvey (who discovered the circulation of blood) wrote: "When insects do swarm
extraordinarily and when… agues (especially quartans) appear early as about midsummer,
then autumn proves very sickly."

The diarist Samuel Pepys – suffered from chronic ague. Oliver Cromwell died of the Ague in
a cool September 1658.

William Shakespeare wrote about it in eight of his plays. Most notably in The Tempest (Act
II, Scene II), the slave Caliban curses his master Prospero and hopes that he will be struck
down by the disease: "All the infections that the sun sucks up/ From bogs, fens, flats, on my
master fall and make him/ By inch-meal a disease!"
The disease is caused by a parasitic single-cell protozoa – plasmodium (such as vivax and
falciparum) carried by the female Anopheles mosquito (such as atroparvus or funestus).
Depending on the type of plasmodia it either causes periodic fevers or in some people
death.

The cure, quinine powder, was used for the first time in 1660 (this is why we know Ague
was malaria, since the symptoms were the same, as was the cure). It became known as
Jesuit’s Powder, and helped cure French King Louis XIV’s son. Interestingly Protestants
didn’t like to use the powder as it was seen as a Catholic cure (See Reiter 2000 for a fuller
discussion).

Even though the cure was known, and the disease declined due to better drainage (removal
of mosquito habitat, often through planting eucalyptus trees) there were still major epidemics
in all of Europe up to the early part of the 1920s. There were even Russian epidemics as far
north as Archangel on the Arctic Circle, and also in Holland and Britain, as well as many US
States. Malaria was endemic to Southern US States and in Italy andGreece.
These countries completely eradicated malaria after the second world war when widespread
vector control (insecticidal spraying to kill the mosquito (which is the disease carrier or
vector) was undertaken – especially with DDT.

History of DDT

DDT was first synthesised in the 1880s by mistake and its insecticidal properties were not
rediscovered until the Swiss chemist Paul Müller was looking for a new agricultural
pesticide. Müller won the Nobel Prize in 1948 for this discovery. DDT was introduced to
control malaria, typhus and other insect-carried diseases by the US Military by 1944. After
the end of the Second World War DDT was in widespread use around the world for vector
control and in agriculture. The use of the pesticide led to enormous optimism and the belief
that malaria could be eradicated from the entire globe. The reasons for this optimism were
not hard to see. DDT was, and still is, highly effective in killing the malaria vector and so
interrupting the transfer of the malaria parasite. It is also safe, cheap and easy to use which
put it within reach of even the poorest countries’ health budgets. Shortly after the end of the
Second World War there was also a conviction that vector control, and in particular
pesticide spraying, was the only way in which the disease could be tackled.

The early successes of DDT were nothing short of spectacular. Scientists ‘thought that the
whole literature of agricultural and medical entomology would have to be re-written…
because of the use of DDT’ (Mellanby 1992:37). Mellanby even withdrew a book he had
written on medical entomology because he believed it would be overtaken by events. In
Europe and North America, DDT was widely used and within a few years, the disease had
been eradicated from both continents. It is thought that in one year alone, the transmission of
malaria in Greece came to a halt (Harrison, p. 231). One historian (Mack-Smith, 1959:494)
even suggested that malaria eradication ‘was the most important single fact in the whole of
modern Italian history’.

In South Africa, the malaria control programme adopted DDT in 1946 and shortly
afterwards, the number of cases in the then Transvaal declined to about one tenth of the
number of cases reported in 1942/3. In some areas of South Africa, DDT spraying stopped
altogether because of the success it had achieved and was only reintroduced after periods of
heavy rains, when malaria cases tended to rise.
Perhaps the most remarkable success story however was to be found in Sri Lanka (then
Ceylon). DDT spraying began in 1946 and, as with South Africa, was an instant success
with the island’s death rate from malaria falling dramatically. Within ten years, DDT use had
cut the incidence of malaria down from around three million cases to 7,300 and had
eliminated all malaria deaths (Harrison 1978: 230) By 1964, the number of malaria cases
had been reduced to just 29 and at the time it was assumed that the war against malaria in
Sri Lanka had been won.

India also used the pesticide to great effect. India at the time had a particularly bad malaria
problem, where every year around 75 million people contracted the disease and about
800,000 died. Almost the entire country was malarial, except for the mountainous areas and
there were, and still are, six Anopheline mosquito vectors. By using DDT, India managed to
bring the number of cases down from the estimated 75 million in 1951 to around 50,000 in
1961 (Harrison:1978: 247) The achievement of reducing the number of infections to this
degree cannot be overstated, however the success in India as in many other countries was
to be short-lived.

Success but no eradication

Complete eradication of malaria was achieved in only ten countries, four of which were in
Europe, and the other six in the Americas and the Caribbean. The international strategy of
eliminating malaria from the globe was led by WHO and largely funded by The United
States Agency for International Development (USAID). USAID contributed $1.2 billion to
the programme between 1950 and 1972. The WHO contributed far less, with $20.3 million
between 1956 and 1963, of which $17.5 million was contributed by the United States. All
other countries combined contributed only $2.8 million. (Baird 1999:14)

These efforts did not stretch to much of Africa, where the vast majority of cases occurred
and indeed still occur. It had been hoped that the swift and decisive use of DDT through
well planned and funded malaria control programmes throughout the world would achieve
success. For some countries, particularly those in Europe and the Americas it did. For
others the plans were not appropriate. While vector control using DDT certainly proved
effective, many countries (especially in Africa) did not have the infrastructure and capacity to
ensure that the spraying programmes were carried out systematically and effectively.
One of the reasons that the WHO pushed for rapid implementation of DDT spraying for an
intensive and limited time period was because of fears of resistance to the pesticide. The
problems of resistance to DDT first emerged in Greece in the early 1950s where it was
observed that the main Greek vector, Anopheles sacharovi showed physiological
resistance to the pesticide. Resistance to DDT was later observed in the Middle East, parts
of Indonesia and also in northern Nigeria in 1956.

Fears about the increase in resistance to DDT (and also another pesticide - Dieldrin) led the
WHO expert committee in 1956 to call once again for the swift and overwhelming vector
control programmes that would eliminate the pool of parasites before resistance could
develop. But for a variety of reasons, complacency, poor-training, poor DDT formulation1,
poor medical detection of cases, and lack of political will led to the demise by the mid
1960s of the Global Malaria Eradication Campaign which had been adopted by the World
Health Assembly in May 1955.

1 DDT is insoluble in water and hence has to be suspended in a solution with inert matter
(such as clay) to stop it sinking. Poor formulation is a key problem especially from DDT
sources in developing countries.

DDT was remarkably successful in almost all the countries in which it was used, however it
was never likely to work as a magic bullet. Malaria is a disease that is influenced by a
number of factors, such as climate and migration of people. Developing a malaria control
strategy that is solely reliant on vector control and in particular on the use of one pesticide
was optimistic at best and foolish at worst. The greater folly however was in the unilateral
way in which the policy was developed which failed to take into account the conditions
under which the policy would be implemented.
So to summarise in the early 1970s the WHO dropped DDT-based mosquito eradication
programme because of the following reasons:
1. DDT resistance;
2. Eradication of malaria from donor countries;
3. Lack of infrastructure in Sub-Saharan countries to support eradication programmes;
4. Environmental and health concerns about DDT (many of which have been later been
shown to be exaggerated).

Green backlash and its impact today

I will dwell on this last reason. While DDT was being used in malaria control campaigns and
also in agriculture, concerns were raised about the environmental impacts of the pesticide2.
Perhaps the most well known attack on DDT was Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring,
which was published in 19623. The book popularised the scare associated with DDT and
claimed that it would have devastating impacts on birdlife, particularly those higher up the
food chain. The fears were based on the fact that DDT and its metabolites, DDE and DDD
accumulate in the body fat of animals. Despite the fact that many of the fears surrounding
DDT were unfounded and the studies upon which they were based were unscientific, DDT
was banned by the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1972

The EPA administrator, William Ruckelshaus overturned scientific reports and evidence
given by numerous expert witnesses, the conclusions of which were firmly against a ban of
DDT and argued in favour of its continued use. The US National Academy of Sciences
claimed that it had saved “500 million lives from malaria”. Whereas, Ruckelshaus argued
that the pesticide was “…a warning that man may be exposing himself to a substance that
may ultimately have a serious effect on his health”. Ruckelshaus’s preoccupations with
potentially negative environmental and health impacts (despite all the evidence to the
contrary) and refusal to accept the scientific advice offered most certainly condemned
millions to death in malarial countries by denying them access to this life saving pesticide4.

2 Before WWII it was generally argued that malaria control could only be afforded if it
contributed to agricultural development. For two decades from 1945 this link was dissolved
(Litsios 1997). But in recent decades a new parallel has emerged with the pre-war phase, in
that although much medical control of malaria is done for humanitarian reasons, the only
insecticides used in vector control are those that were developed for agriculture. DDT
remains the exception, that was developed for disease control, although the original research
was into agricultural pesticides.

3 Entomologists and other scientists in Britain and US were aware of the potential
environmental dangers of DDT in 1945. But at the time the acute toxicity problems from
other pesticides, including organophosphate pesticides dominated concerns of various
governmental scientific committees (Mellanby 1992:83).

4 Others had Neo-Malthusian objections. For example, the argument was made that it
would be unkind to keep people from “dying from malaria so that they could die more
slowly of starvation”, and even saw malaria as “a blessing in disguise, since a large
proportion of the malaria belt is not suited to agriculture, and the disease has helped to keep

DDT is banned

Most developed countries soon imposed outright bans on the chemical for all uses. Some
developing countries also imposed a complete ban of the pesticide – for agricultural use and
(and some for all uses). For example South Africa banned it for agricultural use in 1974. Sri
Lankan officials had stopped using DDT in 1964 believing the malaria problem was solved,
but by 1969 the number of cases had risen from the low of 17 (achieved when DDT was
used) to over half a million (Silva 1997). It is alleged that DDT was not widely re-introduced
because of mosquito resistance to it, and DDT use was finally abandoned in favour of
Malathion5 in 1977 (Spielman 1980). But pressure not to use DDT was applied by western
donors, and arguments of resistance were used as a political convenience. But recent
evidence shows that even where resistance to DDT has emerged the ‘excito-repellancy’ of
DDT causes mosquitoes not to enter buildings which have been sprayed (Roberts et al.
2000 ), in other words mosquitoes don’t like settling on areas sprayed with DDT. Hence it
is unlikely that malaria rates would have increased (significantly) even if resistance was
found.

Malaria Recovery

The failure to eradicate malaria led to calls for stabilisation, but without the use of DDT in
many countries (banned because of environmental concerns), malaria rates have bounced
back. The countries discussed before Sri Lanka, South Africa, India have all seen cases and
deaths rise significantly by many fold.
N.B. Some have claimed that the resurgence in the disease in the past 20 years has been
because of changes in climate due to man’s activities. But according to world expert Dr Paul
Reiter, head of Vector Control at CDC in US:
“Increase has been attributed to population increase, forest clearance, irrigation and other
agricultural activities, ecologic change, movement of people, urbanization, deterioration of
public health services, resistance to insecticides and antimalarial drugs, deterioration of
vector control operations, and disruptions from war, civil strife, and natural disasters. Claims
that malaria resurgence is due to climate change ignore these realities and disregard history”
(Reiter 2000).

Economic Costs

Other than obvious humanitarian reasons, controlling malaria is vital because the economic
costs are significant. Professor Jeffrey Sachs at the Harvard University Center for
International Development has analyzed the effects of malaria on 27 African economies from
1965 to 1990. The study found that the disease cut 1 percentage point a year from the
annual growth rates of those economies. If malaria had been eliminated in 1965, Africa's
annual gross domestic product would be $400 billion now, rather than $300 billion, the
man from destroying it – and from wasting his substance upon it” (Vogt 1949:13;28). The
modern day green version of this is stated by Gell-Man: “Some day anti-malarial vaccines
will probably be developed, which may even wipe out the various forms of the disease
entirely, but then another difficulty will arise: important wild areas that had been protected by
the dangers of malaria will be exposed to unwise development (1994:353).
5 The introduction of alternative pesticides had disastrous results for those doing the
spraying, with many deaths caused by poisoning from replacements. It should be recognised
that there are many examples of individuals eating DDT everyday for decades with no harm.
The DDT expert Kenneth Mellanby used to eat a pinch of DDT at every lecture he gave on

DDT over a period of 40 years (Mellanby 1992:75).

study estimated. The models did more than just assess the costs of treatment and losses
associated with death. They also estimated the losses to tourism and foreign investment from
malaria-prone countries; the damage done by large numbers of sick children missing school;
and the increase in population and impoverishment that ensues when parents decide to have
extra children because they know some will die (Gallup and Sachs 1998). Sachs’ study
confirms research done by Richard Tren of the NGO Africa Fighting Malaria which shows
that the cost to Southern Africa is several billion dollars a year, and this figure was far higher
in the past (see www.iea.org.uk for Tren paper).
What is important for our discussion is that some countries have defied international opinion
and continued to use DDT. These countries have benefited from a lower death rate due to
malaria and hence a better economy.

Indeed, DDT has quietly been used in developing countries, such as South Africa,
Botswana, Equador, Indonesia and India for the past three decades, almost without
comment. In 1995, however, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) decided
to promote a legal instrument that would ban or heavily restrict the use of 12 persistent
organic pollutants (POPs), including DDT (see http://irtpc.unep.ch/pops).
Rise of Conventions – the international community has its way

Legal conventions set the ground rules and tone of whole treaty process. It usually
establishes conditions that are easy to agree among the parties. In the POPs treaty process
(as in all UNEP treaties), the developed world, mainly European and American interests, are
promoting the agenda and draft text. Since these countries neither produce nor use any of
the 12 chemicals to be targeted, it is simple for them to promote a total ban. Western
industry is not fighting to retain any of the chemicals, and the green pressure groups want a
total ban. The only reason the language is not completely prohibitionist is because of three
factors:
1. Western industry concern about what might be next. Once the initial 12 chemicals are
banned, the green pressure groups and the treaty secretariat will probably target other
chemicals which are produced and used in the west;
2. Official protests from developing countries that do produce and or use some of the 12
chemicals listed;
3. Pressure from two or three anti-malaria groups who are concerned about the fate of
malaria vector control without DDT.
The Status of the POPs instrument
A negotiating text for the treaty document is established, but certain textual changes can and
will be made prior to December when the final negotiating meeting will take place in South
Africa. Complete agreement on the treaty is held up on two issues: will DDT be reprieved?
And how will the rich countries pay for the developing countries to abandon the 12 POPs
(possibly including DDT).

It is possible, given pressure from the pro-DDT groups (including AFM, Malaria
Foundation International and the Malaria Project, as well as some University medic staff),
that DDT will be reprieved for use in malaria control. However, this is far from certain as
several important country delegates (from Scandinavia, some other European countries,
Argentina, Canada and possibly USA) still want a ban. And behind the scenes the pressure
groups are working on delegates for this forthcoming meeting. A special concern is financial
transfers to Francophone malarial African countries from green groups, and possibly
international agencies, to vote in favour of a DDT ban (but there is no data on this, just
speculation from various off the record sources)6.

However, at least a reprieve is possible. Prior to INC 3, it looked most unlikely. At the first
two meetings a straw poll showed that about 80% did not know that DDT was still used in
malaria control. At that time the Malaria Project put forward a letter signed by 400 malaria
experts including 3 Nobel Laureates to demand the right to use DDT. I watched in Geneva
as the letter was presented to the UN conference, and was astonished to see the WHO not
support the initiative – the representative looked embarrassed but obviously had his
instructions.

Indeed, medical leaders seem to want to pursue only two modes of attack: drugs and
bednets. Now there is nothing wrong with these two approaches, but to combat malaria
every weapon in the arsenal is required, which includes insecticides (and DDT). The people
on the ground know it, but it either hadn’t filtered through to the people in Geneva, or more
likely they overruled pesticide use, the head of the WHO is after all green apostle, Gro
Harlem Brundtland.

Furthermore, far from learning from past errors, such as ignoring local concerns and
adopting a one-weapon approach, the WHO and donor agencies, including USAID
continue to promote policies on political grounds.
However, after the letter presented at Geneva, and good media coverage (such as in the
NYT, Guardian, Economist) the WHO has now finally come out in favour of DDT. Even the
WWF has backtracked from calling for a ban, just yet. But aid agencies (including USAID7,
NORAD, SIDA.…), as well as EU country delegates still want a ban.

One way they may achieve this is by switching pressure from proposing an outright ban
(INC1-INC3) to proposing restricted trade (INC4). This is strategically sensible on their
part. Most people who bother to listen are convinced that DDT should still be used to
control malaria (today a child dies every 15 seconds from the disease), but they can also be
persuaded that we do not need international trade in the product (anti-globalisation
arguments about local production for local use, with concern about transporting toxic
chemicals, is the usual rhetoric). If they can persuade the delegates to ban trade in DDT then
this would be close to banning its use. Only China and India (and probably Russia) produce
DDT, and the quality is not the best (potentially leading to resistance in mosquitoes,
increased spray time – hence higher cost) (see Baird 1999). The impact of having
production in only a few countries is already problematic. For example, Botswana claims it
cannot get enough DDT for its malaria control programme, and is having to buy less of the
more expensive alternatives. Compliance with import restrictions, delays and uncertainties
have already forced Tanzania to reduce its DDT intake, because of bureaucratic cost.
Related Problems

Western chemical companies have become concerned by the possibility of a reprieve for
DDT. While overtly supportive of DDT, some may be funding the work of the green
6 What is certain is that the Francophone countries are angry at English-speaking African
nations. The English speaking nations dominated the Africa working group session at INC3
– because there was no French-English translator. The French speakers did not feel that
they were able to put there arguments across, and while UNEP were to blame, they
unfortunately decided to attack one bit of policy that was discussed at the meeting – support
for DDT use. Consequently the francophone countries are taken an anti-DDT stand on
political grounds (see Bate 2000).
7 A worrying example of USAID pressure is in Belize where officials, having imported seven
tonnes of DDT, decided not to use it all under pressure from USAID. Two tonnes was
found close to a water course in a poorly maintained state.
pressure groups to argue against DDT. The reason is financial – vector control is roughly
25% of the market for replacement pesticides for DDT. Re-introduction or expansion of
DDT-use in developing countries would cost certain companies tens of millions of dollars.
Furthermore, green pressure groups have moved from discussing the carcinogenic effects of
DDT to alarm over its possible endocrine disruption effects. Once again the evidence is
flimsy at best and there is no choice for the people exposed to malaria. But nevertheless, it is
once again gaining coverage in European press, and encouraging the prohibitionists within
the EU to push for an outright ban in December.
Related Advantages

While unfortunate for those contracting the disease, it is to our advantage that the final POPs
meeting is in South Africa, because SA has 500% more malaria cases this year than in
1997, and 30 times the cases in 1994 (incidentally, DDT use was dropped in 1996). INC
1-4 occurred in non-malarial countries (Vancouver, Geneva (twice), Bonn), where local
politicians knew and cared little about malaria issues. SA politicians are aware and have to
be seen to care about the issue. Furthermore in SA the media are interested in development
issues and especially the DDT/malaria issue, since they perceive correctly that western
attitudes are dictating policies for the poor.

Western media are beginning to wake up to the problems of mosquito-borne diseases such
as the West-Nile virus in New York State. There are also problems with mosquito control
in Florida. Here we have another example of unintended consequences. Regulations
designed by EPA to make Floridians and other Americans safe from pesticides are making it
prohibitively expensive (even in America) to develop new, or even re-test old products.
Every year there are fewer products (with notably different molecular structures) reaching
the market – which means faster mosquito resistance transferral. In a weird twist of fate,
mosquito abatement societies are trying to get the EPA to re-introduce pesticides that its
own regulations have made non-viable.

It remains to be seen what the outcome will be in December at the most important meeting
on DDT’s fate since the EPA hearings 30 years ago. But the real medical concerns of Africa
are seriously threatened by relatively trivial concerns from rich countries. The unintended
consequences of our policies are not just measured in billions of dollars, but in thousands,
maybe millions of lives.

References

Baird, J.K (1999) “Resurgent Malaria at the Millennium: Control Strategies in Crisis,
Parasitic Diseases Program,” Working Paper, US Naval Medical Research Unit, No. 2
Bate, R (2000) “A New Kind of Health Club”, Wall Street Journal Europe 15th May
Coetzee, M, & Hunt, R, (1993), “African Anopheline Mosquito Taxonomy and the Control
of Malaria, Published in, Entomologist Extraordinary, Botha de Meillon, edited by Maureen
Coetzee, Department of Medical Entomology, South African Institute for Medical
Research, Johannesburg
Coetzee, M, (Prof.), (2000), Head, Department of Medical Entomology, South African
Institute for Medical Research, Personal communication, 18 May 2000
Creamer, T. (1998), “Anti-malaria plan opens way for jobs in Lubombo,” Engineering
News, 13/11/1998
DeGregori, T 2000. Let Us Spray: Malaria and DDT in Mozambique. drkoop.com online
and ACSH.com online.
Dyson, J (2000) Why we must think again about DDT Readers Digest November
Gallup, J.L. and Sachs, J.D. (1998), “The Economic Burden of Malaria,” Centre for
International Development at Harvard, October 1998
Goklany, I.M. (2000), “Applying the Precautionary Principle to DDT, Global Warming, and
Genetically Modified Crops” in Rethinking Risk and the Precautionary Principle ed,
Julian Morris (Oxford Butterworth Heinemann)
Gell-Mann, M. (1994)”The Quark and the Jaguar” London: Little, Brown and Company.
Harrison, G (1978) “Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man: A History of the Hostilities Since
1880,” John Murray, London
Mack-Smith, d. (1959) “Italy: A Modern History” Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mellanby, K. (1992) “The DDT Story” The British Crop Protection Council, Surrey, UK
Reiter, P. (2000) “From Shakespeare to Defoe: Malaria in England in the Little Ice Age”
Emerging Infectious Diseases 6,:1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Spielman, A. (1980) “Environmental Health Impact of the Mahaweli Development Program
of Sri Lanka: Vector Borne Disease. A Report Submitted to the Government of Sri Lanka.
Verdoorn, G. H. Dr. (2000) Director, Poisons Working Group, Endangered Wildlife Trust,
Personal communication, 26 June 2000
Vogt, W. (1949) “The Road to Survival” London: Victor Gollancz Ltd.
World Health Organisation (1955) “Malaria Eradication. Proposal by the Director General
to the Eighth World Assembly, may 3. A8/P&B/10.
World Wildlife Fund, “Toxic Chemicals Initiative – Persistent Organic Pollutants,” WWF
web publication, <http://www.panda.org/toxics/areas_pops.cfm>
World Wildlife Fund, (2000), “UNEP Global POPs Treaty – INC4/Bonn. Eliminating
DDT and Protecting Public Health”, March 2000, WWF web publication




100 things you should know about DDT

by J. Gordon Edwards and Steven Milloy



I. Historical Background
II. Advocacy against DDT
III. EPA hearings
IV. Human exposure
V. Cancer
VI. Egg shell thinning
VII. Bald eagles
VIII. Peregrine falcons
IX. Brown pelicans
X. Bird populations increase during DDT years
XI.Erroneous detection

I. Historical Background

Discovered by accident, DDT became one of the greatest public health tools of the 20th century.
Overuse harmed its efficacy -- and made it politically unpopular.

1.

Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) was first synthesized, for no purpose, in 1874 by German chemist Othmar Zeidler. In 1939, Dr. Paul Müller independently produced DDT. Müller found that DDT quickly killed flies, aphids, mosquitoes, walking sticks and Colorado potato beetles. Müller and the Geigy corporation patented DDT in Switzerland (1940), England (1942) and U.S. (1943).

2.

The first large-scale use of DDT occurred in 1943 when 500 gallons of DDT were produced by Merck & Company and delivered to Italy to help squelch a rapidly spreading epidemic of louse-borne typhus. Later in 1943, the U.S. Army issued small tin boxes of 10 percent DDT dust to its soldiers around the world who used it to kill body lice, head lice and crab lice.

3.

Müller won the Nobel Prize in 1948 for his work on DDT.

4.

Peak usage occurred in 1962, when 80 million kilograms of DDT were used and 82 million kilograms produced.

5.

"In May 1955 the Eighth World Health Assembly adopted a Global Malaria Eradication Campaign based on the widespread use of DDT against mosquitos and of antimalarial drugs to treat malaria and to eliminate the parasite in humans. As a result of the Campaign, malaria was eradicated by 1967 from all developed countries where the disease was endemic and large areas of tropical Asia and Latin America were freed from the risk of infection. The Malaria Eradication Campaign was only launched in three countries of tropical Africa since it was not considered feasible in the others. Despite these achievements, improvements in the malaria situation could not be maintained indefinitely by time-limited, highly prescriptive and centralized programmes."

[Bull World Health Organ 1998;76(1):11-6]

6.

"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, Committee on Research in the Life Sciences of the Committee on Science and Public Policy. 1970. The Life Sciences; Recent Progress and Application to Human Affairs; The World of Biological Research; Requirements for the Future.]

7.

It is believed that [malaria] afflicts between 300 and 500 million every year, causing up to 2.7 million deaths, mainly among children under five years.

[Africa News, January 27, 1999]

8.

Some mosquitoes became "resistant" to DDT. "There is persuasive evidence that antimalarial operations did not produce mosquito resistance to DDT. That crime, and in a very real sense it was a crime, can be laid to the intemperate and inappropriate use of DDT by farmers, espeially cotton growers. They used the insecticide at levels that would accelerate, if not actually induce, the selection of a resistant population of mosquitoes."

[Desowitz, Relief Society. 1992. Malaria Capers, W.W. Norton & Company]

9.

"Resistance" may be a misleading term when discussing DDT and mosquitoes. While some mosquitoes develop biochemical/physiological mechanisms of resistance to the chemical, DDT also can provoke strong avoidance behavior in some mosquitoes so they spend less time in areas where DDT has been applied -- this still reduces mosquito-human contact. "This avoidance behavior, exhibited when malaria vectors avoid insecticides by not entering or by rapidly exiting sprayed houses, should raise serious questions about the overall value of current physiological and biochemical resistance tests. The continued efficacy of DDT in Africa, India, Brazil, and Mexico, where 69% of all reported cases of malaria occur and where vectors are physiologically resistant to DDT (excluding Brazil), serves as one indicator that repellency is very important in preventing indoor transmission of malaria."

[See, e.g., J Am Mosq Control Assoc 1998 Dec;14(4):410-20; and Am J Trop Med Hyg 1994;50(6 Suppl):21-34]

II. Advocacy against DDT

DDT was demagogued out of use.


10.

Rachel Carson sounded the initial alarm against DDT, but represented the science of DDT erroneously in her 1962 book Silent Spring. Carson wrote "Dr. DeWitt's now classic experiments [on quail and pheasants] have now established the fact that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction. Quail into whose diet DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched." DeWitt's 1956 article (in Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry) actually yielded a very different conclusion. Quail were fed 200 parts per million of DDT in all of their food throughout the breeding season. DeWitt reports that 80% of their eggs hatched, compared with the "control"" birds which hatched 83.9% of their eggs. Carson also omitted mention of DeWitt's report that "control" pheasants hatched only 57 percent of their eggs, while those that were fed high levels of DDT in all of their food for an entire year hatched more than 80% of their eggs.

11.

Population control advocates blamed DDT for increasing third world population. In the 1960s, World Health Organization authorities believed there was no alternative to the overpopulation problem but to assure than up to 40 percent of the children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the Agency for International Development stated, "Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing."

[Desowitz, Relief Society. 1992. Malaria Capers, W.W. Norton & Company]

12.

The environmental movement used DDT as a means to increase their power. Charles Wurster, chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, commented, "If the environmentalists win on DDT, they will achieve a level of authority they have never had before.. In a sense, much more is at stake than DDT."

[Seattle Times, October 5, 1969]

13.

Science journals were biased against DDT. Philip Abelson, editor of Science informed Dr. Thomas Jukes that Science would never publish any article on DDT that was not antagonistic.

14.

William Ruckelshaus, the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who made the ultimate decision to ban DDT in 1972, was a member of the Environmental Defense Fund. Ruckelshaus solicited donations for EDF on his personal stationery that read "EDF's scientists blew the whistle on DDT by showing it to be a cancer hazard, and three years later, when the dust had cleared, EDF had won."

15.

But as an assistant attorney general, William Ruckelshaus stated on August 31, 1970 in a U.S. Court of Appeals that "DDT has an amazing an exemplary record of safe use, does not cause a toxic response in man or other animals, and is not harmful. Carcinogenic claims regarding DDT are unproven speculation." But in a May 2, 1971 address to the Audubon Society, Ruckelshaus stated, "As a member of the Society, myself, I was highly suspicious of this compound, to put it mildly. But I was compelled by the facts to temper my emotions ... because the best scientific evidence available did not warrant such a precipitate action. However, we in the EPA have streamlined our administrative procedures so we can now suspend registration of DDT and the other persistent pesticides at any time during the period of review." Ruckelshaus later explained his ambivalence by stating that as assistant attorney general he was an advocate for the government, but as head of the EPA he was "a maker of policy."

[Barrons, 10 November 1975]

16.

Environmental activists planned to defame scientists who defended DDT. In an uncontradicted deposition in a federal lawsuit, Victor Yannacone, a founder of the Environmental Defense Fund, testified that he attended a meeting in which Roland Clement of the Audubon Society and officials of the Environmental Defense Fund decided that University of California-Berkeley professor and DDT-supporter Thomas H. Jukes was to be muzzled by attacking his credibility.

[21st Century, Spring 1992]

III. EPA hearings

DDT was banned by an EPA administrator who ignored the decision of his own administrative law judge.


17.

Extensive hearings on DDT before an EPA administrative law judge occurred during 1971-1972. The EPA hearing examiner, Judge Edmund Sweeney, concluded that "DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man... DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man... The use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife."

[Sweeney, EM. 1972. EPA Hearing Examiner's recommendations and findings concerning DDT hearings, April 25, 1972 (40 CFR 164.32, 113 pages). Summarized in Barrons (May 1, 1972) and Oregonian (April 26, 1972)]

18.

Overruling the EPA hearing examiner, EPA administrator Ruckelshaus banned DDT in 1972. Ruckelshaus never attended a single hour of the seven months of EPA hearings on DDT. Ruckelshaus' aides reported he did not even read the transcript of the EPA hearings on DDT.

[Santa Ana Register, April 25, 1972]

19.

After reversing the EPA hearing examiner's decision, Ruckelshaus refused to release materials upon which his ban was based. Ruckelshaus rebuffed USDA efforts to obtain those materials through the Freedom of Information Act, claiming that they were just "internal memos." Scientists were therefore prevented from refuting the false allegations in the Ruckelshaus' "Opinion and Order on DDT."

IV. Human exposure

Actual human exposures have always been far lower than the "acceptable" level.


20.

Human ingestion of DDT was estimated to average about 0.0026 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day (mg/kg/day) about 0.18 milligrams per day.

[Hayes, W. 1956. J Amer Medical Assn, Oct. 1956]


21.

In 1967, the daily average intake of DDT by 20 men with high occupational exposure was estimated to be 17.5 to 18 mg/man per day, as compared with an average of 0.04 mg/man per day for the general population.

[IARC V.5, 1974].

22.

Dr. Alice Ottoboni, toxicologist for the state of California, estimated that the average American ingests between 0.0006 mg/kg/day and 0.0001 mg/kg/day of DDT.

[Ottoboni, A. et al. California's Health, August 1969 & May 1972]

23.

"In the United States, the average amount of DDT and DDE eaten daily in food in 1981 was 2.24 micrograms per day (ug/day) (0.000032 mg/kg/day), with root and leafy vegetables containing the highest amount. Meat, fish, and poultry also contain very low levels of these compounds."

[Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. 1989.Public Health Statement: DDT, DDE, and DDD]

24.

The World Health Organization set an acceptable daily intake of DDT for humans at 0.01 mg/kg/day.

25.

"Air samples in the United States have shown levels of DDT ranging from 0.00001 to 1.56 micrograms per cubic meter of air (ug/m3), depending on the location and year of sampling. Most reported samples were collected in the mid 1970s, and present levels are expected to be much lower. DDT and DDE have been reported in surface waters at levels of 0.001 micrograms per liter (ug/L), while DDD generally is not found in surface water. National soil testing programs in the early 1970s have reported levels in soil ranging from 0.18 to 5.86 parts per million (ppm)."

[Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. 1989.Public Health Statement: DDT, DDE, and DDD]

V. Cancer

DDT was alleged to be a liver carcinogen in Silent Spring and a breast carcinogen in Our Stolen Future.


26.

Feeding primates more than 33,000 times the average daily human exposure to DDT (as estimated in 1969 and 1972) was "inconclusive with respect to a carcinogenic effect of DDT in nonhuman primates."

[J Cancer Res Clin Oncol 1999;125(3-4):219-25]

27.

A nested case-control study was conducted to examine the association between serum concentrations of DDE and PCBs and the development of breast cancer up to 20 years later. Cases (n = 346) and controls (n = 346) were selected from cohorts of women who donated blood in 1974, 1989, or both, and were matched on age, race, menopausal status, and month and year of blood donation. "Even after 20 years of follow-up, exposure to relatively high concentrations of DDE or PCBs showed no evidence of contributing to an increased risk of breast cancer."

[Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 1999 Jun;8(6):525-32]

28.

To prospectively evaluate relationships of organochlorine pesticides and PCBs with breast cancer, a case-control study nested in a cohort using the Columbia, Missouri Breast Cancer Serum Bank. Women donated blood in 1977- 87, and during up to 9.5 years follow-up, 105 donors who met the inclusion criteria for the current study were diagnosed with breast cancer. For each case, two controls matched on age and date of blood collection were selected. Five DDT analogs, 13 other organochlorine pesticides, and 27 PCBs were measured in serum. Results of this study do not support a role for organochlorine pesticides and PCBs in breast cancer etiology.

[Cancer Causes Control 1999 Feb;10(1):1-11]

29.

A pooled analysis examined whether exposure to DDT was associated with the risk of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma among male farmers. Data from three case-control studies from four midwestern states in the United States (Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas) were pooled to carry out analyses of 993 cases and 2918 controls. No strong consistent evidence was found for an association between exposure to DDT and risk of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

[Occup Environ Med 1998 Aug;55(8):522-7]

30.

"We measured plasma levels of DDE and PCBs prospectively among 240 women who gave a blood sample in 1989 or 1990 and who were subsequently given a diagnosis of breast cancer before June 1, 1992. We compared these levels with those measured in matched control women in whom breast cancer did not develop. Data on DDE were available for 236 pairs, and data on PCBs were available for 230 pairs. Our data do not support the hypothesis that exposure to [DDT] and PCBs increases the risk of breast cancer."

[N Engl J Med 1997;337:1253-8]

31.

"... weakly estrogenic organochlorine compounds such as PCBs, DDT, and DDE are not a cause of breast cancer."

[http://www.nejm.org/content/1997/0337/0018/1303.asp]

32.

To examine any possible links between exposure to DDE, the persistent metabolite of the pesticide dicophane (DDT), and breast cancer, 265 postmenopausal women with breast cancer and 341 controls matched for age and center were studied. Women with breast cancer had adipose DDE concentrations 9.2% lower than control women. No increased risk of breast cancer was found at higher concentrations. The odds ratio of breast cancer, adjusted for age and center, for the highest versus the lowest fourth of DDE distribution was 0.73 (95% confidence interval 0.44 to 1.21) and decreased to 0.48 (0.25 to 0.95; P for trend = 0.02) after adjustment for body mass index, age at first birth, and current alcohol drinking. Adjustment for other risk factors did not materially affect these estimates. This study does not support the hypothesis that DDE increases risk of breast cancer in postmenopausal women in Europe.

[BMJ 1997 Jul 12;315(7100):81-5]

33.

No correlation at the population level can be demonstrated between exposures to DDT and the incidence of cancer at any site. It is concluded that DDT has had no significant impact on human cancer patterns and is unlikely to be an important carcinogen for man at previous exposure levels, within the statistical limitations of the data.

[IARC Sci Publ 1985;(65):107-17]

34.

Syrian golden hamsters were fed for their lifespan a diet containing 0, 125, 250 and 500 parts per million (ppm) of DDT. The incidence of tumor bearing animals was 13% among control females and ranged between 11-20% in treated females. In control males 8% had tumors. The incidence of tumor bearing animals among treated males ranged between 17-28%.

[Tumori 1982 Feb 28;68(1):5-10]

35.

None of 35 workers heavily exposed to DDT (600 times the average U.S. exposure for 9 to 19 years) developed cancer.

[Laws, ER. 1967. Arch Env Health 15:766-775]

36.

Men who voluntarily ingested 35 mgs of DDT daily for nearly two years were carefully examined for years and "developed no adverse effects."

[Hayes, W. 1956. JAMA 162:890-897]

37.

DDT was found to reduce tumors in animals.

[Laws, ER. 1971. Arch. Env Health, 23:181-184; McLean, AEM & EK McLean. 1967. Proc Nutr Soc 26;Okey, AB. 1972. Life Sciences 11:833-843;Sillinskas, KC & AB Okey. 1975. J Natl Cancer Inst 55:653- 657, 1975]

38.

Rodent tests for a carcinogenic effect of DDT, DDE and TDE produced equivocal results despite extremely high doses (642 ppm of DDT, 3,295 ppm of TDE and 839 ppm of DDE).

[National Toxicology Program, TR-131 Bioassays of DDT, TDE, and p,p'-DDE for Possible Carcinogenicity (CAS No. 50-29-3, CAS No. 72-54-8, CAS No. 72-55-9)]

VI. Egg-shell thinning

DDT was alleged to have thinned bird egg shells.


39.

Many experiments on caged-birds demonstrate that DDT and its metabolites (DDD and DDE) do not cause serious egg shell thinning, even at levels many hundreds of times greater than wild birds would ever accumulate.

[Cecil, HC et al. 1971. Poultry Science 50: 656-659 (No effects of DDT or DDE, if adequate calcium is in diet); Chang, ES & ELR Stokstad. 1975. Poultry Science 54: 3-10 1975. (No effects of DDT on shells); Edwards, Jersey Girl. 1971. Chem Eng News p. 6 & 59 (August 16, 1971) (Summary of egg shell- thinning and refutations presented revealing all data); Hazeltine, WE. 1974. Statement and affidavit, EPA Hearings on Tussock Moth Control, Portland Oregon, p. 9 (January 14, 1974); Jeffries, DJ. 1969. J Wildlife Management 32: 441-456 (Shells 7 percent thicker after two years on DDT diet); Robson, Washington et al. 1976. Poultry Science 55:2222- 2227; Scott, ML et al. 1975. Poultry Science 54: 350-368 (Egg production, hatchability and shell quality depend on calcium, and are not effected by DDT and its metabolites); Spears, G & P. Waibel. 1972. Minn. Science 28(3):4-5; Tucker, RK & HA Haegele. 1970. Bull Environ Contam. Toxicol 5:191-194 (Neither egg weight nor shell thickness affected by 300 parts per million DDT in daily diet);Edwards, Jersey Girl. 1973. Statement and affidavit, U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, 24 pages, October 24, 1973; Poult Sci 1979 Nov;58(6):1432-49 ("There was no correlation between concentrations of pesticides and egg shell thinning] .") ]

40.

Experiments associating DDT with egg shell thinning involve doses much higher than would ever be encountered in the wild.

[J Toxicol Environ Health 1977 Nov;3(4):699-704 (50 ppm for 6 months); Arch Environ Contam Toxicol 1978;7(3):359-67 ("acute" doses); Acta Pharmacol Toxicol (Copenh) 1982 Feb;50(2):121-9 (40 mg/kg/day for 45 days); Fed Proc 1977 May;36(6):1888-93 ("In well-controlled experiments using white leghorn chickens and Japanese quail, dietary PCBs, DDT and related compounds produced no detrimental effects on eggshell quality. ... no detrimental effects on eggshell quality, egg production or hatchability were found with ... DDT up to 100 ppm)]

41.

Laboratory egg shell thinning required massive doses of DDE far in excess of anything expected in nature, and massive laboratory doses produce much less thinning than is seen in many of the thin-shelled eggs collected in the wild.

[Hazeltine, WE. 1974. Statement and affidavit, EPA Hearings on Tussock Moth Control, Portland Oregon, p. 9 (January 14, 1974)]

42.

Years of carefully controlled feeding experiments involving levels of DDT as high as present in most wild birds resulted in no tremors, mortality, thinning of egg shells nor reproductive interference.

[Scott, ML et al. 1975. Poultry Science 54: 350-368 (Egg production, hatch ability and shell quality depend on calcium, and are not effected by DDT and its metabolites)]

43.

Egg shell thinning is not correlated with pesticide residues.

[Krantz WC. 1970 (No correlation between shell-thinning and pesticide residues in eggs) Pesticide Monitoring J 4(3): 136-141; Postupalsky, S. 1971. Canadian Wildlife Service manuscript, April 8, 1971 (No correlation between shell-thinning and DDE in eggs of bald eagles and cormorants); Anon. 1970. Oregon State University Health Sciences Conference, Annual report, p. 94. (Lowest DDT residues associated with thinnest shells in Cooper's hawk, sharp-shinned hawk and goshawk); Claus G and K Bolander. 1977. Ecological Sanity, David McKay Co., N.Y., p. 461. (Feeding thyreprotein causes hens to lay lighter eggs, with heavier, thicker shells)]

44.

Among brown pelican egg shells examined there was no correlation between DDT residue and shell thickness.

[Switzer, B. 1972. Consolidated EPA hearings, Transcript pp. 8212-8336; and Hazeltine, WE. 1972. Why pelican eggshells are thin. Nature 239: 410-412]

45.

Egg shells of red-tailed hawks were reported to be six percent thicker during years of heavy DDT usage than just b

[_Coggins7]

46.

Oil has been associated with egg shell thinning.

[Anon. National Wildlife Federation, Conservation News, pp. 6-10, October 15 1979. (Embryonic mortality from oil on feathers of adults birds) ; Hartung, R. 1965. J Wildlife Management 29:872-874 (Oil on eggs reduces hatch ability by 68 percent); Libby, EE. 1978. Fish, wildlife and oil. Ecolibrium 2(4):7-10; King, KA et al. 1979 Bull Environ Contam Tox 23:800-805 (Oil a probably cause of pelican mortality for six weeks after spill);Albers, PH. 1977. Fate and Effects of Petroleum Hydrocarbons in Marine Ecosystems, Pergamon Press, N.Y. (Chapters 15 & 16; Dieter, MP. 1977. Interagency Energy-Environment Research and Development Program Report, pp. 35-42 (5 microliters of oil on fertile egg kills 76 to 98 percent of embryos within; birds ingesting oil produce 70 percent to 100 percent less eggs than normal; offspring failed to develop normal flight feathers); Szaro, RC. 1977. Proc 42nd N Amer Wildlife Nat Resources Conference, pp. 375-376]

47.

Lead has been associated with egg shell thinning.

[Bellrose, RC. 1959. Ill Nat Hist Survey Bull 27:235-288 (Lead poisoning in wildlife)]

48.

Mercury has been associated with egg shell thinning.

[D'Itri, FM & PB Trost. 1970. International Conference on Mercury Contamination, Ann Arbor, September 30, 1070; Scott, JL et al. 1975. Effects of PCBs, DDT and mercury upon egg production, hatch ability and shell quality. Poultry Sci 54:3350-368; Stoewssand, GS et al.. 1971. Shell- thinning in quail fed mercuric chloride. Science 173:1030-1031; Tucker, RK. 1971. Utah Science June 1971:47-49 (Effects of many chemicals on shell thickness).; Tucker, RK & HA Haegle. 1970. Bull Environ Contamin Toxicol 5:191-194]

49.

Stress from noise, fear or excitement and disease are associated with egg shell thinning.

[Scott, HM et al.. 1944. (Physiological stress thins shells) Poultry Science 23:446-453; Draper, MH & PE Lake. 1967. Effects of stress and defensive responses. In Environmental Control in Poultry Production, Oliver and Boyd, London; Reid, Brian Laundrie. 1971. (Effects of stress on laying birds) Farm Technology, Fall 1971; Sykes, AH. 1955 (Adrenaline excess inhibits shell formation) Poultry Science 34: 622-628]

50.

Older birds produce thinner shells.

[Sunde, ML. 1971 (Older birds produce thinner shells) Farm Technology, Fall 1971]

51.

Normal egg shells become 5 percent thinner as developing embryos withdraw calcium for bone development.

[Romanoff, AL and AJ Romanoff. 1967. Biochemistry of the Avian Embryo, Wiley & Sons, N.Y.; Simkiss, K. 1967. (Shells thinned by embryo development within) In Calcium in Reproductive Physiology, Reinhold, NY, pp 198-213]

52.

Larger birds tend to produce thicker-shelled eggs.

[Asmundson, VS et al. 1943. (Relations between the parts of birds' eggs) Auk 60:34-44]

53.

Dehydration is associated with thinner egg shells.

[Tucker, RK and HA Haegle. 1970. (30 percent thinner shells formed after quail were kept from water for 36 hours) Bull Environ Contam Toxicol 5(3): 191-194]

54.

Temperature extremes are associated with thinner egg shells.

[Romanoff, AL and AJ Romanoff, 1949. The Avian Egg, Wiley & Sons]

55.

Decreased illumination is associated with thinner egg shells.

[Peakall, DB. 1970. (Shells not thinned even after illumination was abruptly reduced from 16 hours daily to 8 hours daily and high DDT dosage begun simultaneously) Science 168:592-594; Day, EJ. 1971. (Importance of even illumination on laying birds) Farm Technology, Fall 1971;Houser, EJ. 1962. Pacific Poultryman, August 1962; Morris, TR et al. 1964. (The most critical area of light duration is that between 16 hours and 8 hours daily) British Poultry Science 5: 133-147; Ward, P. 1972 (Physiological importance of photo period in bird experiments) Ibis 114: 275]

56.

Human and predator intrusion is associated with thinner egg shells.

[Beatty, RG. 1973. The DDT Myth, John Day Co., N.Y. 201 pages; Anon. 1971. Hawk Chalk 10(3):47-57; Cade, TJ. 1960. Ecology of the peregrine and gyrfalcon populations in Alaska. Univ Calif Publ Zool 63(3): 151-290]

57.

Simple restraint interferes with the transport of calcium throughout the body of birds, preventing adequate calcium from reaching the shell gland and forming good shells.

[Sykes, AH. 1955. Poultry Science 34:622-628]

58.

Uncovering eggs after parent birds are removed or frightened off exposes eggs to potentially fatal chilling, especially in northern or high altitude locations.

[Cade, TJ. 1960. Ecology of the peregrine and gyrfalcon populations in Alaska. Uni Calif Publ Zool 63(3):151-290]

59.

Phosphorus deficiency is associated with thinner shells.

[Crowley, TA et al. 1963. Poultry Science 54: 350-368]

60.

Calcium deficiency is associated with thinner shells.

[Greely, F.. 196 (Effects of calcium deficiency) J Wildlife Management 70:149-153; Romanoff, AL and AJ Romanoff. 1949. The Avian Egg, Wiley & Sons; Scott, ML. 1975. Poultry Science 54:350-368; Taylor, TG. 1970. How and eggshell is formed. Scientific American 222:89-95; Tucker, RK and HA Tucker. 1970. Bull Environ Contamin Toxicol 5(3):1191-194]

61.

Egg shell deficiencies were attributed to DDT and DDE by U.S. Fish and Wildlife researchers even though the birds had been placed on low-calcium diets.

[Bitman, J et al. 1969. Nature 224: 44-46; Bitman, J et al. 1970. Science 594-595. ]

62.

Cutting illumination from 16 hours daily to 8 hours daily at the same time as DDT feeding began had no significant adverse effect on shell quality. Shell quality was only adversely impacted after large amounts of DDE were injected into birds.

[Peakall, DB. 1970. Science 168:592-594]

63.

DDT was blamed for egg shell thinning even though a known egg shell thinner (dieldrin) was also added to the diet.

[Porter, RD and SN Wiemeyer. 1969. Science 165: 199-200]

64.

No significant correlation between DDE and egg shell thinning in Canadian terns even though the eggs contained as much as 100 parts per million of DDE.

[Switzer, BG et al. 1971. Can J Zool 49:69-73]

VII. Bald eagles

DDT was blamed for the decline in the bald eagle population.


65.

Bald eagles were reportedly threatened with extinction in 1921 -- 25 years before widespread use of DDT.

[Van Name, WG. 1921. Ecology 2:76]

66.

Alaska paid over $100,000 in bounties for 115,000 bald eagles between 1917 and 1942.

[Anon. Science News Letter, July 3, 1943]

67.

The bald eagle had vanished from New England by 1937.

[Bent, AC. 1937. Raptorial Birds of America. US National Museum Bull 167:321-349]

68.

After 15 years of heavy and widespread usage of DDT, Audubon Society ornithologists counted 25 percent more eagles per observer in 1960 than during the pre-DDT 1941 bird census.

[Marvin, PH. 1964 Birds on the rise. Bull Entomol Soc Amer 10(3):184-186; Wurster, CF. 1969 Congressional Record S4599, May 5, 1969; Anon. 1942. The 42nd Annual Christmas Bird Census. Audubon Magazine 44:1-75 (Jan/Feb 1942; Cruickshank, AD (Editor). 1961. The 61st Annual Christmas Bird Census. Audubon Field Notes 15(2):84-300; White-Stevens, R.. 1972. Statistical analyses of Audubon Christmas Bird censuses. Letter to New York Times, August 15, 1972]

69.

No significant correlation between DDE residues and shell thickness was reported in a large series of bald eagle eggs.

[Postupalsky, S. 1971. (DDE residues and shell thickness). Canadian Wildlife Service manuscript, April 8, 1971]

70.

Thickness of eggshells from Florida, Maine and Wisconsin was found to not be correlated with DDT residues.


Data from Krantz, WC. 1970. Pesticides Monitoring Journal 4(3):136-140.
State Thickness (mm) DDE residue (ppm)
Florida 0.50 About 10
Maine 0.53 About 22
Wisconsin 0.55 About 4


71.

U.S. Forest Service studies reported an increase in nesting bald eagle productivity (51 in 1964 to 107 in 1970).

[U.S. Forest Service (Milwaukee, WI). 1970. Annual Report on Bald Eagle Status]

72.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists fed large doses of DDT to captive bald eagles for 112 days and concluded that "DDT residues encountered by eagles in the environment would not adversely affect eagles or their eggs."

[Stickel, L. 1966. Bald eagle-pesticide relationships. Trans 31st N Amer Wildlife Conference, pp.190-200]

73.

Wildlife authorities attributed bald eagle population reductions to a "widespread loss of suitable habitat", but noted that "illegal shooting continues to be the leading cause of direct mortality in both adult and immature bald eagles."

[Anon.. 1978. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Endangered Species Tech Bull 3:8-9]

74.

Every bald eagle found dead in the U.S., between 1961-1977 (266 birds) was analyzed by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists who reported no adverse effects caused by DDT or its residues.

[Reichel, WL. 1969. (Pesticide residues in 45 bald eagles found dad in the U.S. 1964-1965). Pesticides Monitoring J 3(3)142-144; Belisle, AA. 1972. (Pesticide residues and PCBs and mercury, in bald eagles found dead in the U.S. 1969-1970). Pesticides Monitoring J 6(3): 133-138; Cromartie, E. 1974. (Organochlorine pesticides and PCBs in 37 bald eagles found dead in the U.S. 1971-1972). Pesticides Monitoring J 9:11-14; Coon, NC. 1970. (Causes of bald eagle mortality in the US 1960-1065). Journal of Wildlife Diseases 6:72-76]

75.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists linked high intake of mercury from contaminated fish with eagle reproductive problems.

[Spann, JW, RG Heath, JF Kreitzer, LN Locke. 1972. (Lethal and reproductive effects of mercury on birds) Science 175:328- 331]

76.

Shooting, power line electrocution, collisions in flight and poisoning from eating ducks containing lead shot were ranked by the National Wildlife Federation as late as 1984 as the leading causes of eagle deaths.

[Anon. 1984. National Wildlife Federation publication. (Eagle deaths)]

VIII. Peregrine falcons

DDT was blamed for the decline in the peregrine falcon population.


77.

The decline in the U.S. peregrine falcon population occurred long before the DDT years.

[Hickey JJ. 1942. (Only 170 pairs of peregrines in eastern U.S. in 1940) Auk 59:176; Hickey JJ. 1971 Testimony at DDT hearings before EPA hearing examiner. (350 pre- DDT peregrines claimed in eastern U.S., with 28 of the females sterile); and Beebe Florida. 1971. The Myth of the Vanishing Peregrine Falcon: A study in manipulation of public and official attitudes. Canadian Raptor Society Publication, 31 pages]

78.

Peregrine falcons were deemed undesirable in the early 20th century. Dr. William Hornaday of the New York Zoological Society referred them as birds that "deserve death, but are so rare that we need not take them into account."

[Hornaday, WT. 1913. Our Vanishing Wild Life. New York Zoological Society, p. 226]

79.

Oologists amassed great collections of falcon eggs.

[Peterson, RT. 1948. Birds Over American, Dodd Mead & Co., NY, pp 135-151; Rice, JN. 1969. In Peregrine Falcon Populations, Univ. Of Wisconsin Press, pp 155-164; Berger, DD. 1969. In Peregrine Falcon Populations, Univ. Of Wisconsin Press, pp 165-173]

80.

The decline in falcons along the Hudson River was attributed to falconers, egg collectors, pigeon fanciers and disturbance by construction workers and others.

[Herbert, RA and KG Herbert. 1969. In Peregrine Falcon Populations, Univ. Of Wisconsin Press, pp 133- 154. (Also in Auk 82: 62-94)]

81.

The 1950's and 1960's saw continuing harassment trapping brooding birds in their nests, removing fat samples for analysis and operating time-lapse cameras beside the nests for extended periods of time), predation and habitat destruction.

[Hazeltine, WE. 1972. Statement before Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, March 16, 1972; Enderson, JH and DD Berger. 1968. (Chlorinated hydrocarbons in peregrines from Northern Canada). Condor 70:149-153; Enderson, JH.. 1972. (Time lapse photography in peregrine nests) Living Bird 11: 113- 128; Risebrough, right-wing. 1970. (Organochlorines in peregrines and merlins migrating through Wisconsin). Canadian Field-Naturalist 84:247-253]

82.

Changes in climate (higher temperatures and decreasing precipitation) were blamed for the gradual disappearance of peregrines from the Rocky Mountains.

[Nelson, MW. 1969. Peregrine Falcon Populations, pp 61-72]

83.

Falconers were blamed for decimating western populations.

[Herman, S. 1969. Peregrine Falcon Populations, University of Wisconsin Press]

84.

During the 1960's, peregrines in northern Canada were "reproducing normally," even though they contained 30 times more DDT, DDD, and DDE than the midwestern peregrines that were allegedly extirpated by those chemicals.

[Enderson, JH and DD Berger. 1968. (Chlorinated hydrocarbons in peregrines from Northern Canada) Condor 70:170-178]

85.

There was no decline in peregrine falcon pairs in Canada and Alaska between 1950 and 1967 despite the presence of DDT and DDE.

[Fyfe, right-wing. 1959. Peregrine Falcon Populations, pp 101-114; and Fyfe, right-wing. 1968. Auk 85: 383-384]

86.

The peregrine with the very highest DDT residue (2,435 parts per million) was found feeding three healthy young.

[Enderson, JH. 1968. (Pesticide residues in Alaska and Yukon Territory) Auk 85: 683]

87.

Shooting, egg collecting, falconry and disruption of nesting birds along the Yukon River and Colville River were reported to be the cause of the decline in peregrine falcon population.

[Beebe, Florida. 1971. The Myth of the Vanishing Peregrine Falcon: A study in manipulation of public and official attitudes. Canadian Raptor Society Publication, 31 pages; and Beebe, Florida. 1975. Brit Columbia Provincial Museum Occas. Paper No. 17, pages 126-144]

88.

The decline in British peregrine falcons ended by 1966, though DDT was as abundant as ever. The Federal Advisory Committee on Pesticides concluded "There is no close correlation between the declines in populations of predatory birds, particularly the peregrine falcon and the sparrow hawk, and the use of DDT."

[Wilson report. 1969. Review of Organochlorine pesticides in Britain. Report by the Advisory Committee on toxic chemicals. Department of Education and Science]

89.

During 1940-1945, the British Air Ministry shot about 600 peregrines (half the pre-1939 level) to protect carrier pigeons.

90.

Peregrine falcon and sparrow hawk egg shells thinned in Britain prior to the use of DDT.

[Redcliff, DH. 1967. Nature 215: 208-210; Redcliff, DH. 1970 J Applied Biology 7:67; and Redcliff, DH. 1967. Nature 215: 208-210]

IX. Brown pelicans

DDT was blamed for the decline in the brown pelican population.


91.

Brown pelicans declined in Texas from a high of 5,000 birds in 1918 to a low of 200 in 1941, three years before the presence of DDT.

[Pearson TG. 1919. Review of reviews. Pp. 509-511 (May 1919); Pearson TG. 1934. Adventures in Bird Protection, Appleton- Century Co., p. 332; Pearson TG. 1934 (Discussion of 1918 survey) National Geographic pp. 299-302 (March 1934); Allen RG. 1935. Auk 52: p.199;]

92.

Disappearance of the brown pelicans from Texas was attributed to fisherman and hunters. Gustafson AF. 1939. Conservation in the United States, Comstock Publ. Co., Ithaca, NY. (Repeated in U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Report No. 1, 1970)]

93.

Brown pelicans experienced no difficulty in reproducing during the DDT years.

[See Banks, RC. 1966. Trans San Diego Soc Nat Hist 14:173-188; and Schreiber right-wing and RL DeLong. 1969. Audubon Field Notes 23:57-59]

94.

Brown pelicans did suffer reproductive problems following the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. Oil on eggs is a known cause of embryo death

[See e.g., National Wildlife Federation . 1979. Embryonic mortality from oil on feathers of adult birds. Conservation News, pp. 6-10 (October 15, 1979); Hartung, R. 1965. (Oil on eggs reduces hatch ability by 68 percent). J Wildlife Management 29: 872-874; King, KA 1979. (Oil a probable cause of pelican mortality for six weeks after spill). Bull Environ Contam. Toxicol 23:800-805; and Dieter, MP. 1977. (5 micro liters of oil on fertile egg kills 76 percent to 98 percent of embryos within. Interagency Energy-Environment Research and Development Program Report, pp 35-42]

95.

Among brown pelican egg shells examined (72 percent), there was no correlation between DDT residue and shell thickness.

[Switzer, B. 1972. Consolidated EPA hearings, Transcript pp. 8212-8336; and Hazeltine, WE. 1972. Why pelican eggshells are thin. Nature 239: 410-412]

96.

An epidemic of Newcastle disease resulted in millions of birds put to death to eradicate the disease.

[United Press International. "Newcastle disease epidemic in California (April 1972)] The epidemic among U.S. birds was caused by the migration of sick pelicans along the Mexican coast.

[Hofstad MC. 1972. Diseases of Poultry. Iowa State Univ. Press]

X. Bird populations increase during DDT years

Widespread declines in bird populations during the DDT years is a myth.


97.

In congressional testimony, Charles Wurster, a biologist for the Environmental Defense Fund, noted the abundance of birds during the DDT years, referring to "increasing numbers of pheasants, quail, doves, turkeys and other game species."

[Wurster, C.F. 1969 Congressional Record S4599, May 5, 1969]

98.

The Audubon Society's annual bird census in 1960 reported that at least 26 kinds of birds became more numerous during 1941 - 1960.

[See Anon. 1942. The 42nd annual Christmas bird census." Audubon Magazine 44;1-75 (Jan/Feb 1942), and Cruicjshank, AD (editor) 1961. The 61st annual Christmas bird census. Audubon Field Notes 15(2); 84-300]

99.

Statistical analysis of the Audubon data bore out the perceived increases.

[White-Stevens, R. 1972. Statistical analyses of Audubon Christmas bird censuses. Letter to New York Times, August 15, 1972]

100.

The white-tailed kite, a raptor, was "in very real danger of complete extirpation in the U.S." in 1935, but "by the 1960's, a very great population increase and range expansion had become apparent in California and the breeding range had extended through the Central American countries."

[Eisenmann, E. 1971. Range expansion and population increase of the White-tailed kite. American Birds 25(3):529-535]

101.

Great increases inmost kinds of hawks during the DDT years were reported by the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary Association (Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania).

[Taylor, JW. Summaries of Hawk Mountain migrations of raptors, 1934 to 1970. In Hawk Mountain Sanctuary Association Newsletters]

102.

National forest studies from Wisconsin and Michigan reported an increase in nesting osprey productivity from 11 young in 1965 to 74 young in 1970.

[U.S. Forest Service, Milwaukee. 1970. Annual report on osprey status in national forests in Wisconsin and Michigan]

103.

A study of fish-eaters at Funk Island (on the North Atlantic coast) reported that, despite diets contaminated with DDT, gannet and murres pairs increased by 1,500 percent and 10,000 percent from 1945 to the early 1970s.

[Bruemmer, F. 1971. Animals Magazine, p.555, April]

104.

Herring gulls reportedly increased from 2,000 pairs in 1941 to 35,000 pairs in 1971. Ironically, the Massachusetts department of Natural resources permitted the Audubon Society to poison 30,000 of the pairs on Tern Island. The Audubon-ers preferred terns. Audubon Society scientist William Drury stated, "it's kind of like weeding a garden."

[Graham, F. 1985. Audubon Magazine, p.17, January 1985]

105.

Some birds multiplied so well during the DDT years that they became pests:


*

6 million blackbirds ruined Scotland Neck, North Carolina in 1970, polluting streams, depositing nine inches of droppings on the ground and killing the forest where they roosted at night.

[Associated Press, March 18, 1970]

*

77 million blackbirds roosted within 50 miles of Ft. Campbell, KY increasing the risk of histoplasmosis in humans.

[Louisville Courier-Journal, December 1975.]

*

Ten million redwings were reported in a small area of northern Ohio.

[Graham, F. 1971. Bye-bye blackbirds? Audubon Magazine, pp. 29-35, September]

*

The Virginia Department of Agriculture stated, "We can no longer tolerate the damage caused by the redwing ... 15 million tons of grain are destroyed annually enough to feed 90 million people."

[Bulletin of the Virginia Department of Agriculture, May 1967]

*

The phenomena of increasing bird populations during the DDT years may be due, in part, to (1) fewer blood-sucking insects and reduced spread of avian diseases (avian malaria, rickettsial-pox, avian bronchitis, Newcastle disease, encephalitis, etc); (2) more seed and fruits available for birds to eat after plant-eating insects were decimated; and (3) Ingestion of DDT triggers hepatic enzymes that detoxify carcinogens such as aflatoxin.

XI. Erroneous detection

Gas chromatography was universally used for pesticide analysis in the mid-1960's.
But it often failed to differentiate between DDT residues and other chemicals.


106.

Gas chromatography detected DDT in samples of wildlife and soil collected before DDT was even produced.

[Scott, ML et al. 1975. Poultry Science 54: 350-368 ("Many reports relating reproductive declines of wild birds (and body stores in those birds) to DDT and DDE were based on analytical procedures that did not distinguish between DDT and PCBs."); Sherman, right-wing. 1973. Artifacts and mimics of DDT and other insecticides. J New York Entomol Soc 81:152-163 (Robin collected in 1938); Coon, Facebook. 1966. Electron capture gas chromatograph analyses of selected samples of authentic pre-DDT origin. Presented at the Conference of American Chemical Society in New York (Gibbon collected in 1935); Frazier, BE et al. 1970. Pesticides Monitoring J 4:67-70, 1970 (Soil collected in 1911); Bowman, MC et al. 1965. J Econ Entomology 58: 896-902 (Soil collected in 1940); Hom, W. 1974. Science 184:1197-1199 (1930-vintage Santa Barbara basin sediment)]

107.

DDT was mistaken for other organochlorines.

[Glotfelty, DE.. 1970. Anal Chem 42:82-84 (Misidentifications of DDT resulted from interference by "pigment-related natural products in photosynthesic tissues."); Hylin, JW. 1969. Residue Reviews 26:127 ("Organochlorine compounds in plants can cause interference in residue analyses "); Sims, JJ. 1977. Press release, June 15, 1977 (Certain marine algae produce halogen compounds that are detected by gas chromatography and may be misidentified as DDT metabolites);George JL and DEH Frear. 1966. Pesticides in the Antarctic. J Appld Ecology 3 (suppl): 155-167 (Antarctic samples of fish and birds widely touted as containing DDT residues likely contained PCBs instead that leached from the plastic containers they were stored in for 6 months prior to analysis)]

108.

Laboratory fluorescent lights containing liquid PCBs and plastic tubing leaching PCBs erroneously led to PCBs misidentified as DDT or DDE.

[Gustafson, CG. 1970. Environ Sci Technology 4(10):814-819; Lisk, DJ. 1970. Analysis of pesticide residues: methods and problems. Science 170:589-593; Anderson, my wife et al. 1969. Can Field-Naturalist 83:91-112 (Samples reported in 1965 to be contaminated with DDT were acknowledged in 1969 to actually have been contaminated with PCBs. Faulty analytic methods were blamed); National Audubon Society, Research Dept. 1968. Brown Pelican Newsletter (Tavernier, Florida) No. 1, page 9 (The Audubon Society was aware of the problem of PCB interference in announcing its warning: "DO NOT BRING PLASTICS INTO CONTACT WITH THE SPECIMEN.")]

109.

The coating of aluminum foil used to wrap specimens, formalin, and sodium sulfate may also have contained PCBs or oils that might have interfered with analyses.

[Risebrough, right-wing. 1971. Presentation to International Symposium on Identification and Measurement of Environmental Pollutants, Ottawa, Canada, June 15, 1971]



Note: The information presented here has been largely drawn from materials compiled by J. Gordon Edwards, professor of entomology at San Jose State University. Dr. Edwards testified at the 1971-1972 EPA hearings on DDT. Some research and all editing/formatting was done by Steven J. Milloy, publisher of junkscience.com.

Copyright 1999 junkscience.com.


When Politics Kills: Malaria and the DDT Story
On Point
by Roger Bate and Kendra Okonski
February 23, 2001

(This On Point is adapted from the paper, “When Politics Kills: Malaria and the DDT Story,” published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, January 2001, and available for download in PDF at http://www.fightingmalaria.org/.)



Malaria kills over one million people every year, many of them children, and the number of deaths is increasing, predominantly in developing countries.



Yet while these countries ought to have every method available to control this disease, political leaders and environmental groups recently came very close to banning an important weapon in the fight against malaria: DDT. In December 2000, international delegates and observers met in South Africa to negotiate the Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, a list of 12 chemicals, including DDT, which will soon be banned worldwide. Fifteen countries requested exemptions for their usage of DDT in public-health programs—but even they will have to comply with the treaty’s potentially onerous regulatory restrictions. In May, delegates from the United States and more than 100 other countries will meet in Stockholm, Sweden, to sign the treaty, a legally binding instrument.



Many methods of protection against the disease have been devised. International public-health officials currently favor a regimen of anti-malarial drugs for foreign visitors to malarial areas, and pesticide-impregnated bed nets for local people. These methods are designed to try to prevent infection—the prophylaxis method.



But one of the most effective methods, and probably the cheapest, is to spray inside houses and buildings with insecticides to repel, irritate, and kill the mosquito that carries the malaria parasite—the vector control method. One of the oldest pesticides is still the best for controlling mosquitoes; this is dichlorodiphenyltrichlorethane, commonly known as DDT. Despite a surge in malaria incidence in the developing world, DDT production is decreasing, and its use is limited to those few countries that still have stockpiles or whose governments produce the chemical.



Donor countries frown on DDT. The reason for this baffling disparity is that DDT has been damned by environmentalists. Gradually, governments in industrialized nations have been persuaded to restrict DDT because of fears of damage to the reproductive process of birds of prey. The heroic malaria-eradication program of the post-war years used DDT as its primary weapon. This program succeeded in North America and southern Europe, and greatly reduced incidence in many other countries. But eradication was not possible for many developing nations. Public-health activity in these countries is wholly or partly reliant on funding from overseas aid agencies. Since donor countries frown on DDT, these agencies are extremely reluctant to countenance its use in other countries. Belize, Mozambique, and Bolivia stopped using DDT in their public-health programs, because they feared the loss of aid from international agencies.[1] It is highly likely that other countries have also succumbed to these pressures. The urge for donor nations to dictate how donations are spent is obviously compelling, but if aid is really to save lives, the recipients must be allowed to decide for themselves what is good for them. The advice and technical assistance that developed nations can give to these countries is invaluable, but policies that are right for wealthy nations may not be right for poor ones.



Spraying DDT in houses and on mosquito breeding grounds was the primary reason that rates of malaria around the world declined dramatically after the Second World War. Nearly one million Indians died from malaria in 1945, but DDT spraying reduced this to a few thousand by 1960. However, concerns about the environmental harm of DDT led to a decline in spraying, and likewise, a resurgence of malaria. Today there are once again millions of cases of malaria in India, and over 300 million cases worldwide—most in sub-Saharan Africa. Cases of malaria in South Africa have risen by over 1000 percent in the past five years. Only those countries that have continued to use DDT, such as Ecuador, have contained or reduced malaria.[2]



Human tragedy, economic disaster. Malaria is clearly a human tragedy, but it is also an economic disaster. According to Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard’s Center for International Development, malaria costs about 1 percent of Africa’s wealth every year. In many countries, malaria halves the economic growth that would otherwise have occurred.[3]



While there is some evidence that DDT causes environmental harm, damage occurred only during widespread agricultural use of DDT in the 1950s and 1960s. It was alleged that DDT led to egg-shell thinning and other effects in certain birds; these problems were shown to be reversible. No study in the scientific literature has adequately shown any human health problem resulting from DDT. Therefore, low-dose use of DDT indoors is unlikely to cause any significant harm to the environment or people.



The politics of malaria and DDT. Yet in 1995, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) proposed an international treaty to reduce and/or eliminate 12 Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), including DDT, from worldwide production and use. The result of such a process is obvious. As environmentalists have pushed to eliminate DDT over the years, the relationship between falling DDT use and increasing malaria cases is very clear (click here for graph).[4]



Restrictions on DDT use have been the inevitable result of its listing on the POPs register.



DDT alternatives and their costs. Malaria is a severe health problem in the world, partly because the world’s poorest countries have few financial resources to control it. This is most striking in Africa, where very poor and malarious countries such as Benin, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, The Gambia, and others have annual public-sector health budgets of under $8 per capita.[5] That is not much more than the retail price of a single pill of Lariam, a leading malaria drug[6]; and it is a negligible amount of resources with which poor countries must somehow deal not only with malaria, but also with water-borne diseases, AIDS, and other health needs.



The danger to poor countries of banning or restricting DDT must be understood in light of this poverty. Although DDT is relatively cheap, for an extremely impoverished country even DDT may be expensive to use—and alternative, costlier insecticides are out of the question. The increased reporting requirements of the POPs convention[7] will probably harm thousands, potentially millions, of people. Although DDT is produced only in socialist countries for government monopoly use, it is not disputed that DDT is a very much less expensive and often more effective insecticide than its alternatives. The evidence includes the following:



· In a recent study, the World Health Organization estimated that malathion, the cheapest alternative to DDT, costs more than twice as much as DDT and must be sprayed twice as often. Deltamethrin, an alternative recommended by environmental groups, is more than three times as expensive as DDT. Propoxur, which is often highly effective, costs 23 times as much as DDT.[8]



· The government of India, within its National Anti-Malaria Program (NAMP), uses a number of insecticides, including DDT, malathion, deltamethrin, and others. India has reported to the World Health Organization that malathion and the pyrethroid insecticides continue to cost at least three times as much as DDT. NAMP concluded that it cannot use these more expensive insecticides without leaving tens of millions of Indians unprotected from malaria (click here for graph).[9]



These experiences show that DDT costs less than pyrethroid insecticides. There are also large costs in phasing out DDT house spraying and instead relying on strategies such as insecticide-treated bed nets or pharmaceutical drugs. Bed nets typically cost about $4 each to buy and must be treated with insecticide periodically, and each person in a house needs a bed net. Similarly, to ensure the lowest disease-resistance to drugs, each drug should be administered by health-care workers at clinics, which is very expensive.



In sum, there is no alternative to DDT that poor countries can switch to without encountering significant new costs, costs that cannot be met out of their current health budgets. Switching to an alternative is difficult even for a fairly developed country such as South Africa, and it may verge on impossible for the poorer countries. In addition to the costs already discussed, any alternative will require further costs for training, technical advice, and so on.



Conclusion. DDT use must be allowed to continue until it becomes redundant through technological advances. Developed nations (and their aid agencies and environmental groups) pressuring countries to abandon DDT for public-health uses will kill thousands of people and cost millions of dollars. It’s a mistake that does not need to be made.



[1] Avertino Barreto, Deputy National Health Director, Head of the Department of Epidemiology and Endemics, Ministry of Health, Mozambique, personal communication, 24 May 2000; John Dyson, “DDT Should Not Be Banned,” Readers Digest (South Africa, December 2000).

[2] D.R. Roberts, S. Manguin, and J. Mouchet, “DDT house spraying and re-emerging malaria,” The Lancet, vol. 356, no. 9226, 22 July 2000, pp. 330-332.

[3] Jeffrey Sachs and John Gallup, The Economic Burden of Malaria (Harvard: Center for International Development at Harvard University, October 1998); available at http://www2.cid.harvard.edu/cidpapers/mal_wb.pdf.

[4] Figure from A. Attaran, et al., “Balancing risks on the backs of the poor,” Nature Medicine 6 (2000), pp. 729-731. Cumulative malaria cases derived from Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) data for Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Venezuela. Components of calculations were: number of slides examined annually = a; number of positive slides annually = b; annual proportion of positive slides = b/a = c; annual population for five countries = d; baseline ABER (annual blood examination rate) = e; standardized number of slides examined = f; and standardized number of malaria cases annually = g. Two time periods, of high (1965-79) and low (1980 on) house spraying were defined for comparison (the World Health Organization de-emphasized house spraying in 1979). The baseline ABER (or e) is the number of slides examined per 100 population (sampling effort). Using the average values of a and d over the high spray period, (a/d)100 yields an e value of 2.525, which was used to standardize f for each later year: f = 100ed. The value f was used to estimate g: g = fc. The graph presents the cumulative (running total) values of g for all years. House spray rates (HSRs) are houses sprayed per 1000 population, calculated from d and the number of houses sprayed annually in all five countries. PAHO stopped publishing HSRs after 1992, though DDT use since then has been minimal.

[5] World Health Report (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2000), Table 8. All data reported at the official exchange rate.

[6] Eight pills of Lariam sell for $37 at British Airways Clinic, February 8, 2001.

[7] See http://irtpc.unep.ch (UNEP/POPS/INC.5/1, page 31) for a description of the reporting requirements for DDT proposed in the POPS process.

[8] J.A. Rosendaal, Vector control methods for use by individuals and communities (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1997).

[9] Data from National Anti-Malaria Programme, India, presented at World Health Organization Expert Consultation, Geneva, 16-18 June 1999. World Health Organization Document SDE/PHE/DP/04.



Rachel Carson's Ecological Genocide
By Lisa Makson
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 31, 2003

A pandemic is slaughtering millions, mostly children and pregnant women -- one child every 15 seconds; 3 million people annually; and over 100 million people since 1972 --but there are no protestors clogging the streets or media stories about this tragedy. These deaths can be laid at the doorstep of author Rachel's Carson. Her1962 bestselling book Silent Spring detailed the alleged "dangers" of the pesticide DDT, which had practically eliminated malaria. Within ten years, the environmentalist movement had convinced the powers that be to outlaw DDT. Denied the use of this cheap, safe and effective pesticide, millions of people -- mostly poor Africans -- have died due to the environmentalist dogma propounded by Carson's book. Her coterie of admirers at the U.N. and environmental groups such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund and the Environmental Defense Fund have managed to bring malaria and typhus back to sub-Saharan Africa with a vengeance.

"This is like loading up seven Boeing 747 airliners each day, then deliberately crashing them into Mt. Kilimanjaro," said Dr. Wenceslaus Kilama, Malaria Foundation International Chairman.

"[M]ost politicians today are more concerned about getting re-elected rather than doing what is right. [M]any of them have very poor scientific backgrounds and do not understand the impact of the policy decisions they are making . [and] are not able to teach their constituents that there will
be severe consequences to their decisions," said former Surgeon General and retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Dr. Harold M. Koenig.

"These poor public policies [i.e. prohibiting use of DDT] are being implemented because it is easier for politicians to go along with the noise coming from the hysterics rather than to learn the whole story and educate the general electorate that there are ways agents like DDT can be used
safely," said Koenig, who is currently president of the Annapolis Center, a nonprofit educational organization that "promotes responsible environmental, health, and safety decision-making by applying a science foundation" to the public policy process.

Although DDT "provides the most effective, cheapest, and safest means of abating and eradicating" infectious diseases, all changed with the 1962 publication of Carson's tome Silent Spring. And just as the world's leading scientists predicted 30 years ago, Carson's crusade against DDT has
caused the world's deadliest infectious diseases such as typhus and malaria, which "may have killed half of all the people that ever lived" according to the World Health Organization, to make a deadly comeback that will soon threaten the United States and Europe again.

"The resurgence of a disease that was almost eradicated 30 years ago is a case study in the danger of putting concern for nature above concern for people," said Nizam Ahmad, an analyst from Bangladesh that focuses on problems affecting developing countries.

"It's worse than it was 50 years ago," said University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill malaria expert Dr. Robert Desowitz said.

According to the WHO, "more people are now infected [with malaria] than at any point in history," with "up to half a billion cases [being reported] every year." The National Institute of Health reports that "infectious diseases remain the leading cause of death" in the world and is "the third leading cause of death in the United States." WHO estimates put the number of people in Africa dying from malaria annually is equal to the number of AIDS' deaths over the last 15 years combined!

"Carson and those who joined her in the crusade against DDT have contributed to millions of preventable deaths. Used responsibly, DDT can be quite safe for man and the environment," Koenig said, summing up what many infectious disease experts believe.

The discovery of DDT by scientist Paul Herman Muller, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948, was originally hailed as a major public health success because DDT kills mosquitoes, lice and fleas, which are carriers for more than 20 serious infectious diseases like the bubonic plague, typhus, yellow fever, encephalitis and malaria.

"To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. It is estimated that, in little more than two decades DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that would otherwise have been inevitable," a statement from the National Academy of Sciences said. Before DDT, infectious diseases spread like wildfire, leaving millions dead in their wake. During World War I, typhus epidemics killed 3 million Russians and millions elsewhere in European. But during World War II, before it was blacklisted by Carson and her crew, DDT saved millions of Allied troops from becoming ill and/or dying from infectious diseases such as malaria, typhus and the plague. Plus, DDT also saved the lives of recently liberated Nazi concentration camp survivors by killing off typhus-causing lice.

Other reasons for DDT being hailed as a modern day miracle are legion. For starters, it is extremely cheap to produce, costing $1.44 to spray one house for a whole year. Alternative pesticides being pushed by the U.N. and environmentalists are 10 to 20 times more expensive.

"DDT is the best insecticide we have today for controlling malaria," said malaria expert Dr. Donald Roberts of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. "DDT is long-acting, the alternatives are not. DDT is cheap, the alternatives are not. End of story."

Another reason DDT is such a blessing is that it enables developing countries to make significant economic progress, thanks to plunging infectious disease rates. According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control, "The unparalleled benefits stemming from [public health] programs [in developing countries] are due almost entirely to the use of DDT. DDT provides the only safe, economically feasible eradication measure available today [that helps to promote economic development."

The nation of India provides an illustrative example. Before the World Health Organization began its worldwide malaria eradication program in the 1940s, India had more than 100 million cases of malaria and 2.5 million deaths annually; produced less than 25 million tons of wheat per year; was host to widespread starvation; and spent 60 percent of its GDP on malaria control. But by the '60s, India's malaria cases dropped to fewer than 100,000 reported cases, with less than 1,000 deaths. Thanks to this stability, India produced more than 100 million tons of wheat annually.

But most importantly, DDT is also not hazardous to humans or the environment -- despite all the propaganda to the contrary. According to tests conducted by Dr. Philip Butler, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service's Sabine Island Research Laboratory, "92 percent of DDT and its metabolites disappear" from the environment after 38 days. (See Environmental Protection Agency's DDT hearings transcript, page 3,726.) Plus, humans have nothing to worry about small exposures to DDT.

"DDT is so safe that no symptoms have been observed among the 130,000 spraymen or the 535 million inhabitants of sprayed houses [over the past 29 years of its existence]. No toxicity was observed in the wildlife of the countries participating in the malaria campaign," said the WHO director in 1969. "Therefore WHO has no grounds to abandon this chemical which has saved millions of lives, the discontinuation of which would result in thousands of human deaths and millions of illnesses. It has served at least 2 billion people in the world without costing a single human life by poisoning from DDT. The discontinuation of the use of DDT would be a disaster to world health."

The only reason millions of lives are being lost to infectious disease is because of Carson's crusade against DDT in her 1962 doomsday book "Silent Spring." Carson predicted that pesticides -- namely DDT -- would cause "practically 100 percent" of the human population would be wiped out from a cancer epidemic after one more generation. This would come about because a race of super-insects, impervious to pesticides, would come about threatening U.S. farms. Desperate farmers then would triple the amount of pesticides they were using so they could stop the super-bugs from destroying their crops. As a result, DDT would eventually work its way up the food chain, killing off first the bugs, then the worms, then the birds (hence her title), the fish and finally mankind.

Although this sounds pretty scary, all of this was mere speculation on Carson's part, based upon erroneous analysis of data (junk science). For example, Carson argued that the rise in cancer rates from 1940-1960 was proof that DDT was the cause because spraying began in 1940 and continued. However, if Carson would have looked at Center for Disease Control data from the 1900-1960, she would have noticed that her theory was way off the mark because cancer rates started to skyrocket in direct correlation to a surge of tobacco use.

"Sure more people are dying now of cancer than did in the past, because they are no longer dying of other causes at earlier ages, especially infectious diseases. The longer people live, the greater chances they have of dying of cancer," Koenig said. "We know of some things that have greater association with cancers. These include the use of tobacco in any form, excessive sun
exposure, obesity, stress and lack of exercise. There are a few chemicals that are suspected to be carcinogenic. As far as I know there is no known association between DDT or any other insecticide and cancer. To categorize Carson's work as research is a big stretch. It was really just hysterical speculation."

Despite the constant banshee call of environmentalists that DDT causes cancer -- their main reason for justifying a worldwide DDT ban -- there is no scientific data to back that up.

"The scientific literature does not contain even one peer-reviewed, independently replicated study linking DDT exposures to any adverse health outcome [in humans]," said Dr. Amir Attaran, who is with Harvard University's Center for International Development and is a former WHO expert on malaria who used to support the environmentalists' call for using alternatives to DDT. Attaran changed sides on the DDT debate after he witnessed what happened when South Africa. After intense U.N. and environmentalist pressure, South Africa stopped using DDT and switched to
the U.N. Environmental Program's alternative pesticides as a way to control malaria. But the mosquitoes quickly developed resistance to the new pesticides and malaria rates increased 1,000 percent. And despite UN threats to cut off funding for South Africa's public health programs, the nation started DDT again because its politicians could not stand idly by and allow millions of its citizens to become sickened and/or die from malaria. "They really tried to phase this stuff out, and had the budget to afford the alternatives," Attaran said. "[But if] South Africa can't get by without DDT, it's pretty much as if to say that nobody can."

In addition to Carson's unfounded cancer claims, Silent Spring is also chock full of other "untruthful and misleading" statements that have absolutely no grounding in scientific reality whatsoever, said San Jose State University entomologist Dr. J. Gordon Edwards. Edwards is an environmentalist "with a desire to keep truth in science and environmentalism." He has even has a book published by the Sierra Club.

Edwards at first supported Carson but quickly changed his mind once he began checking her sources. What he discovered was not only did Carson rely upon "very unscientific sources," but she cited many of the same sources over and over again in order to make her book appear incontrovertible. Even more startling is that Edwards "found" many of Carson's statements based upon sound, scientific sources were actually -- his word -- "false."

"They did not support her contentions about the harm caused by pesticides," Edwards said. "She was really playing loose with the facts, deliberately wording many sentences in such a way as to make them imply certain things without actually saying them, carefully omitting everything that failed to support her thesis that pesticides were bad, that industry was bad, and that any scientists who did not support her views were bad. It slowly dawned on me that Rachel Carson was not interested in the truth about those topics, and that I really was being duped, along with millions of other Americans."

For example, Carson wrote that the Audubon Society's annual bird census from 1940-1961 showed widespread declines in the bird population so since this was the same time period that DDT spraying began, DDT was to blame. However, Edwards noted that the Audubon census figures actually show the inverse -- bird populations were increasing! In fact, some birds were benefiting so much from DDT, such as the blackbird and redwings, that they had become "pests."

"The phenomena of increasing bird populations during the DDT years may be due, in part, to (1) fewer blood-sucking insects and reduced spread of avian diseases (avian malaria, rickettsial-pox, avian bronchitis, Newcastle disease, encephalitis, etc); (2) more seed and fruits available for birds to eat after plant-eating insects were decimated [by DDT]; and (3) Ingestion of DDT triggers hepatic enzymes that detoxify carcinogens such as aflatoxin," stated a May 1967 Virginia Department of Agriculture Bulletin.

Yet, despite Carson's research inconsistencies and dearth of solid scientific evidence, DDT was eventually banned in the U.S. This is due to the work of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William Ruckelshaus, an attorney with ties to the Environmental Defense Fund. Ruckelshaus ordered a hearing on a possible ban of DDT after EDF, which was started and financed by Audubon, and Audubon launched a lawsuit against the U. S. Department of Agriculture and the newly created EPA because of DDT.

After seven months of hearings, which produced 9,362 pages of testimony by 125 witnesses, EPA Judge Edmund Sweeney ruled against EDF, Audubon and the Carson coterie, saying that according to the evidence, "DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man...is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man...[and the] use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife." But Ruckelshaus quickly overruled Sweeney and banned DDT on Jan. 1, 1972. His decision had nothing to do with science or concern for the American people -- Ruckelshaus never attended a day of the hearings and admitted that he never read the transcripts. Instead, it was due to Ruckelshaus' ties to EDF and environmentalists.

"The ultimate judgment [on DDT] remains political," Ruckelshaus wrote to American Farm Bureau Federation President Allan Grant on April 26, 1979. "Decisions by the government involving the use of toxic substances are political with a small 'p.' In the case of pesticides in our country, the power to make this judgment has been delegated to the administrator of the
Environmental Protection Agency."

Although the ban was appealed, Ruckelshaus' ban on DDT remained intact because Ruckelshaus stacked the deck in the environmentalists' favor -- he appointed himself as the appeal judge. After the appeal was foiled, Ruckelshaus began soliciting donations on behalf of EDF on his personal
stationery, writing: "EDF's scientists blew the whistle on DDT by showing it to be a cancer hazard, and three years later, when the dust had cleared, EDF had won." Scientists decried the decision.

"The news that the Environmental Protection Agency of the U.S.A. has now imposed almost a total ban on the use of DDT may be welcomed by partisans of the antipollution movement, but will cause concern to well-informed public health workers, since it increases the difficulty of controlling several tropical arthropod-borne diseases," said Dr. L. J. Bruce-Chwatt in the British medical journal, The Lancet. "The rich countries, preoccupied with their own environmental problems and degenerative illnesses related to affluence should be reminded of the fact that the old plagues have not been banished from the world and that any apparently beneficial move may have an unexpected rebound effect and jeopardize the health gains achieved elsewhere over the years."

Thirty years later, Ruckelshaus' legacy is alive and well. The Green lobby, lead by the WWF and Greenpeace, refuse to stop Carson's crusade against DDT until DDT is banned worldwide. They almost succeeded in 1999 when Germany, which held the European Union presidency, threw its weight behind the issue and began lobbying the UN Environmental Program. Although the resulting Persistent Organic Pollutants treaty never passed, in the meantime, environmentalists and UN politicians from the West are determined to do what they can to stop DDT use.

For example, Mexico, which was one of the few remaining producers of DDT in the world, was forced by the Clinton Administration to stop producing DDT if it wanted the North American Free Trade Agreement to pass. The U.S. State Department's Agency for International Development, under intense pressure from environmentalists, even changed its funding priorities in developing nations, noting that DDT funding would no longer be supported (but birth control would).

The reason for this shift away from DDT towards an emphasis on population control reveals the Malthusian philosophy behind the anti-DDT movement.

"[Any known alternative to DDT] only kills farm workers, and most of them are Mexicans and Negroes. So what? People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them and this is as good a way as any," said Dr. Charles Wurster, chairman of the Environmental Defense Fund's Scientific Advisory Council and a key promoter of the DDT ban.

Another anti-DDT Malthusian is Sierra Club director Michael McCloskey, who said that the "Sierra Club wants a ban on pesticides, even in countries where DDT has kept malaria under control...[because by] using DDT, we reduce mortality rates in underdeveloped countries without the consideration of how to support the increase in populations."

This rationale of the anti-DDT crusaders is much like Carson's Silent Spring -- it is based on nothing more than a pack of unscientific hypothesizing. Much like Silent Spring, Thomas Robert Malthus' Principles of Population paints a horrific doomsday scenario: a worldwide "population explosion" will occur, but man's food production cannot keep pace, so millions will die from starvation. But just like Carson, Malthus only used data that supported his argument, citing birthrates from affluent areas where population was growing, while ignoring birthrates (and death rates) in all areas. And just as with Silent Spring,"environmentalists bandy about Malthus' notions even though he made these predictions before the Industrial Revolution and the widespread availability of contraception. It is interesting to note that despite the anti-DDT crowd's banshee-like cries of overpopulation, statistics -- yet again -- show that the opposite is true: deaths are outpacing births worldwide by a wide margin. So much so that many countries in Europe are trying to encourage their citizens to have more children. For example in Spain, which has the lowest birthrate of all European nations, the government is even awarding families in rural communities highly valuable Serrano pigs; in Valencia, women are given a "fertility" reward of $3,000 just for having a second child.

Today's anti-DDT crusaders' actions, which have caused the deaths of millions, are portrayed as compassionate. "Unquestionably [the DDT ban] places an unfair burden on poor countries," Koenig said. "In fact, this is just a modern day form of imperialism, the more developed and richer nations forcing the poor of the world to do their bidding just to survive."

It is impossible for developing countries to survive on their own without DDT because their populations, those who actually survive the deadly infectious diseases, never regain their full health.

"We have got to stop pressuring countries to stop using DDT," Roberts said. "It is immoral."

"Malaria perpetuates poverty by debilitating people. Unable to work, its victims cannot afford to feed themselves or their children. Sick and malnourished, they are prone to a vicious cycle of future infection and debilitation," said Dr. Roger Bate, author of When Politics Kills: Malaria and the DDT Story. "To break the cycle, to save lives, it is imperative that we have all the tools, including DDT, that work to help control malaria, protect health and ensure development."

Sujatin, a resident from the Irian Jaya province Indonesia, told Smithsonian Magazine what it is like to live with malaria. "My husband works as a logger in the jungles. He's gone for weeks at a time and he gets malaria. It is a terrible thing to have. Sweating. Very bad headaches. High, high fever. You vomit. You are so weak...when malaria comes every few days, you feel like you want to die," she said.

"Malaria keeps Africa down, and down is where the rest of the world wants us to be. If this was a disease of the West, it would be gone," Mamadou Kasse, medical editor of Senegal's largest newspaper, Le Soleil, told Atlantic Monthly's Ellen Ruppel Shell for her August 1997 article, "Resurgence of a Deadly Disease."

If Carson's crusaders are really concerned about saving lives and helping developing countries, then must allow DDT to be used without repercussions.

"Malaria kills a few million every year; each life lost is a potential Mandela, Shakespeare, or Edison, and nothing is less reversible than death, nor more tragic than the death of a child," Dr. Roger Bate said. "Hundreds of millions suffer chronic illness, which creates a painful economic burden and perpetuates poverty. This may not be the intention of those who are debating a DDT ban, but it surely will be the outcome."

If that is not enough to convince them, Carson's crusaders should realize that their actions against DDT might eventually boomerang.

"[B]anning DDT worldwide is beyond ignorance, it is just plain stupid," Koenig said. "[Although m]alaria still is prevalent in the countries in the equatorial regions . [it] is only a matter of time, a short time, before we see these diseases again in the regions between the tropics and the poles."

Until that time comes, the malaria plague seems to be off the public radar. However, let there be no mistake: Rachel Carson and the worldwide environmentalist movement are responsbile for perpetuating an ecological genocide that has claimed the lives of millions of young, poor, striving African men, women and children, killed by preventable diseases.

And you may want to check out:

http://www.who.int/malaria/docs/FAQonDDT.pdf

http://www.emro.who.int/rbm/pdf/PositionPaper.pdf

And here's an interesting blog page involving a give and take between anti and pro-DDT opponents that has direct relevance to Harmony's completely vacuous claim that DDT was never banned. It was in this country. In the Third World, there was some direct banning (South Africa, for example) but mostly the monstrous reappearance of Malaria after the discontinuance of DDT across the tropics and Africa was a result of convention and NGO pressures through the U.N. as well as U.S government, and now, E.U. resistance to the reintroduction of DDT.

http://rwdb.blogspot.com/2006/08/ddt-ex ... eluxe.html

And another essay:

http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/a ... 2/DDT.html

And:

http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/a ... arson.html

http://www.malaria.org/ddtlancet.html

http://www.malaria.org/tren.html

http://allanschapirablog.blogspot.com/2 ... ished.html

http://www.biology.missouri.edu/courses ... ng2000.pdf


We could go on and on, but to what purpose? For the most part, liberals cannot be corrected, they cannot be taught, and they cannot be reasoned with. Their ideas can only be defeated and restrained.

Loran