How the DDT Ban Is Killing Millions

“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 would otherwise have been inevitable.” – National Academy of Sciences, 1970 There is a sad and disturbing truth behind DDT. This pesticide, which was once heralded as a godsend that would end the scourge of worldwide malaria – even winning the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1948 – went on to astound the post-war world by improving agriculture and saving millions of lives. And then it was banned. We are living in an age when social policy determines our economic strategies, and science has been co-opted as a propaganda tool to promote the agendas of political “ecomaniacs.” Social justice, special interests, and global government are dismantling capitalism and national sovereignty. It’s not surprising, then, that the truth surrounding DDT and the inhumane downside of the nearly 40-year ban seem to have no influence on restoring sanity within an omni-political reality. The thousands who are dying from malaria everyday have no voice in this political farce, and their silent scream has now been ignored for almost four decades. To be sure, in our Age of Innocence after the war and before our environmental conscience was awakened, there was abuse and overuse of this chemical. Indiscriminate spraying may have taken a toll on a few isolated fish and wildlife populations. A century earlier, in the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, we had factories belching black smoke and raining particulate soot onto the people and city streets below. Rather than pulling the plug on industrialization, we simply injected some good old-fashioned common sense and responsibility into the marketplace to minimize any ill effects from industry. We filtered out the soot and moved factories to less populated venues. But that is not what happened with DDT. Instead of getting the accolades it has earned, it is now a political prisoner with little hope of release. Prior to World War II, two-thirds of the world’s population lived in areas tormented by malaria, a deadly disease spread by mosquitoes. It was not just a tropical disease, as cities as far north as London and Boston were under the threat of malaria until the early twentieth century. Historically, forensic medicine specialists believe that malaria is the single largest killer of any disease in the history of mankind, including the Black Plague. By the most conservative estimates, it would take ten to twenty Hitlers to eradicate as many innocent lives as those lost as a direct result of the 1972 DDT ban. Some suggest that the purpose of continuing the ban may be as evil and genocidal as Hitler’s Final Solution. But far away in Third World countries, the silent scream of those dying humiliating and senseless deaths cannot be heard, and the ruling elite sleep like babies. Miraculous changes occurred between WWII and 1970, the heyday of DDT use. Malarial mosquitoes were eradicated in North America and Europe in the 1940s, with civilization and some help from DDT. Malaria cases in Greece dropped from nearly two million a year to near zero. India’s malaria case rate dropped from a million in 1945 to just a few thousand 15 years later. Sri Lanka (Ceylon at the time) famously had only 17 cases of malaria in 1964 (and no deaths) compared to 2.8 million in 1948 (with thousands of deaths). Then DDT use was halted there, and the malaria rate had a horrific rebound to 2.5 million cases by 1969. Well, then, it must have terrible side effects for people and nature. In point of fact, there are no known cases of DDT harming or killing anyone. Continued studies try to create links to various cancers, but the evidence is weak at best. And DDT has been eliminated as a possible cause for many cancers and diseases. High dosage overkill of DDT used in the 1950s is linked to some asthma problems, but so are peppermint and peanuts. Common sense could fix that problem. In World War II, troops were dusted with DDT to kill lice that carried typhoid; they suffered no ill effects and many lives were saved. The late Dr. Gordon Edwards, Ph.D. and medical entomologist at San Jose State University, once ate DDT by the spoonful, 200 times the level considered to be safe, without any ill effects whatsoever. He later wrote a journal article, DDT: A Case Study in Scientific Fraud, in which he stated, after years of painstaking research: The chemical compound that has saved more human lives than any other in history, DDT, was banned by order of one man, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Public pressure was generated by one popular book and sustained by faulty or fraudulent research. Widely believed claims of carcinogenicity, toxicity to birds, anti-androgenic properties, and prolonged environmental persistence are false or grossly exaggerated. The worldwide effect of the U.S. ban has been millions of preventable deaths. The 1972 ban on DDT was just another example of the triumph of politics over science. The “one man” that Dr. Gordon referred to was William Ruckleshaus, Pres. Nixon’s EPA chief. “Science, along with economics, has a role to play,” said Ruckleshaus, but “…the ultimate decision remains political.” If you were dying a painful death from malaria in a hut in Africa, you might prefer the wisdom of science over the ivory tower agenda of politics. Ruckleshaus’ decision, amazingly, disregarded the science of his own EPA hearings. After seven months and 9,000 pages of testimony, Hearing Examiner, Edmund Sweeney, concluded that, based on scientific evidence, DDT should not be banned. He told Ruckleshaus and the committee, “DDT is not carcinogenic, mutagenic, or teratogenic to man [and] these uses of DDT do not have a deleterious effect on fish, birds, wildlife, or estuarine organisms.” So much for science and reason. The “popular book” that set off the storm against DDT and began the politically-driven environmentalist movement was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. The “Villain and Victim” politics of pity and fear from leftwing scociocrats was underway, wending its way to the present day, carrying more and more radical social agendas as their power grows. Political power bases and cash cows disguised as environmental advocacy groups and scientific think tanks are the offspring of Carson’s seminal movement. An Inconvenient Truth is the godson of Silent Spring. And global warming is the behemoth catch-all epitome of doom and power constructed on the foundation and template of the 1962 book. The fraudulent and skewed science used by Carson has been the inspiration for today’s government-controlled “science” of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and East Anglia University. The passionate religious zeal behind the snake oil science drives caring hearts and concerned minds to donate and vote their freedom and future away in the name of social justice. And all the while that Al Gore is counting his billions and politicians around the world are congratulating each other while taking public money and stealing power, more than 5,000 children in Africa are needlessly dying from malaria everyday. Their silent scream is deafening, except to the deaf.