in a 1956 study human volunteers ate DDT every day for over two years with no ill effects then or since.
<font size=4>Reject Environmentalism, Not DDT<font size=3>
Thursday September 2, 2004
By: Keith Lockitch - ARI
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Environmental ideology demands opposition to DDT despite the millions of malaria deaths its use could prevent.
The West Nile virus deaths being reported across North America are a grim echo of a larger tragedy. Each year a million lives are taken worldwide by another mosquito-borne killer: malaria.
Though nearly eradicated decades ago, malaria has resurged with a vengeance. But the real tragedy is that its horrific death toll is largely preventable. The most effective agent of mosquito control, the pesticide DDT, has been essentially discarded--discarded based not on scientific concerns about its safety, but on environmental dogma.
The environmental crusade against DDT began with Rachel Carson’s antipesticide diatribe <font color=blue>“Silent Spring,”<font color=black> published in 1962 at the height of the worldwide antimalaria campaign. The widespread spraying of DDT had caused a spectacular drop in malaria incidence--Sri Lanka, for example, reported 2.8 million malaria victims in 1948, but by 1963 it had only 17. Yet Carson’s book made no mention of this. It said nothing of DDT’s crucial role in eradicating malaria in industrialized countries, or of the tens of millions of lives saved by its use.
Instead, Carson filled her book with misinformation--alleging, among other claims, that DDT causes cancer. Her unsubstantiated assertion that continued DDT use would unleash a cancer epidemic generated a panicked fear of the pesticide that endures as public opinion to this day.
But the scientific case against DDT was, and still is, nonexistent. Almost 60 years have passed since the malaria-spraying campaigns began--with hundreds of millions of people exposed to large concentrations of DDT--yet, according to international health scholar Amir Attaran, the scientific literature <font color=blue>“has not even one peer reviewed, independently replicated study linking exposure to DDT with any adverse health outcome.”<font color=black> Indeed, in a 1956 study human volunteers ate DDT every day for over two years with no ill effects then or since.
Abundant scientific evidence supporting the safety and importance of DDT was presented during seven months of testimony before the newly formed EPA in 1971. The presiding judge ruled unequivocally against a ban. But the public furor against DDT--fueled by <font color=blue>“Silent Spring”<font color=black> and the growing environmental movement--was so great that a ban was imposed anyway. The EPA administrator, who hadn’t even bothered to attend the hearings, overruled his own judge and imposed the ban in defiance of the facts and evidence. And the 1972 ban in the United States led to an effective worldwide ban, as countries dependent on U.S.-funded aid agencies curtailed their DDT use to comply with those agencies’ demands.
So if scientific facts are not what has driven the furor against DDT, what has? Estimates put today’s malaria incidence worldwide at around 300 million cases, with a million deaths every year. If this enormous toll of human suffering and death is preventable, why do environmentalists--who profess to be the defenders of life--continue to press for a global DDT ban?
The answer is that environmental ideology values an untouched environment above human life. The root of the opposition to DDT is not science but the environmentalist moral premise that it is wrong for man to <font color=blue>“tamper”<font color=black> with nature.
The large-scale eradication of disease-carrying insects epitomizes the control of nature by man. This is DDT’s sin. To Carson and the environmentalists she inspired, <font color=blue>“the ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy.”<font color=black> Nature, they hold, is intrinsically valuable and must be kept free from human interference.
On this environmentalist premise the proper attitude to nature is not to seek to improve it for human benefit, but to show <font color=blue>“humility” before its “vast forces”<font color=black> and leave it alone. We should seek, Carson wrote, not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides, but to find instead <font color=blue>“a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves.”<font color=black> If the untouched, <font color=blue>“natural<font color=black>” state is one in which millions contract deadly diseases, so be it.
Carson’s current heirs agree. Earth First! founder Dave Foreman writes: <font color=blue>“Ours is an ecological perspective that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as ‘disease’ (e.g., malaria) and ‘pests’ (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere.”<font color=black>
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In the few minutes it has taken you to read this article, over a thousand people have contracted malaria and half a dozen have died. This is the life-or-death consequence of viewing pestilent insects as a <font color=blue>“necessary”<font color=green> component of a <font color=blue>“vibrant biosphere”<font color=green> and seeking a <font color=green>“reasonable accommodation”<font color=green> with them.
To stop this global health catastrophe, the ban on DDT must be rescinded. But even more important is to reject the environmental ideology on which the ban is based.
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Keith Lockitch is a Ph.D. in physics and a writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, |
