Editor's Note: An article appeared on Steve Milloy's Junkscience.com blog regarding the brown pelican and DDT, entitled "Times-Picayune celebrates DDT myth as history”. I saw this earlier and just didn't have the heart to do another article about this. I really felt the frustration and thought I understand why people just give up. This stuff is ubiquitous so it must really be frustrating for people like Milloy who have been fighting the battle for decades. But Steve just won’t give up. Please follow the above link. As a result I felt this article by Paul Driessen really was worth another run this week. Paul wrote the book Eco-Imperialism, Green Power, Black Death. It is an easy to read small book that will have a major impact on your mind and heart. I have purchased 25 or more to give away over the years. Enjoy!
Paul Driessen: Three Billion and Counting
By Paul Driessen
This article first appeared at here at Townhall.com. RK
We will eradicate malaria by 2010, stricken families were promised a few years ago. Well, 2010 is almost gone and, instead of eradication, we have more malaria than before, and a new target date: 2015.
Unless malaria control policies change, that date too will come and go. Billions will still be at risk of getting malaria. Hundreds of millions will continue getting the disease. Millions will die or become permanently brain-damaged. And poverty and misery will continue ravaging Third World communities.
For years, malaria strategies have been dominated by insectici War II, and completely eradicate malaria in the United States, Canada and Europe. It was then enlisted in an effort to rid the entire world of malaria. After initial successes, DDT ran into an unexpected roadblock in 1969.
As physician Rutledge Taylor chronicles in his pull-no-punches new film, “3 Billion and Counting,” Sierra Club, Audubon Society and Environmental Defense Fund enlisted DDT in their own campaign, to get it banned. They said the chemical posed unacceptable risks to people, wildlife and the environment – and used pseudo-scientific cancer and ecological horror stories, like those in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, to spook people, politicians and bureaucrats.
Along with Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund, Pesticide Action Network and other eco activists, they portrayed themselves as white knight planetary guardians. Their true motives were far less virtuous. “If the environmentalists win on DDT,” EDF scientist Charles Wurster told the Seattle Times, “they will achieve a level of authority they have never had before.”
In short, the war on DDT was never about protecting people or birds. It was, and is, about power, control, money and ideology – regardless of the resultant human misery, disease and death.
For the new Environmental Protection Agency, it was about power and politics. As the greens’ campaign to ban DDT intensified, EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus convened a scientific panel, which held six months of hearings, compiled 9,312 pages of studies and testimony, and concluded that DDT was safe and effective and should not be banned.
Nevertheless, without attending a single hour of hearings or reading a page of the report, Ruckelshaus banned US production and use of DDT in 1972 – at a time when over 80% of the chemical was being exported for disease control. He later said his decision had nothing to do with cancer. He had a political problem, he said, and he fixed it.
Carcinogenic? The International Agency for Research on Cancer lists DDT as “possibly carcinogenic” – right up there with coffee and pickles. Among products that “definitely” cause cancer, it includes birth control pills and ethanol. Mice fed DDT got 26% fewer cancers than control mice. Another study found that DDT actually cured malignant brain tumors in rabbits. Millions of war survivors were sprayed directly on their bodies; none ever contracted cancer as a result.
Bird eggshells? The original Bitman DDT studies involved diets that were 80% deficient in calcium; when the birds were fed proper diets, there was no thinning. Audubon Society annual Christmas bird counts recorded that bald eagle populations rose from 197 in 1941 to 891 in 1960, while robins increased from 19,616 in 1941 to 928,639 in 1960 – all when DDT use in America was at its historic high.
Resistance? Mosquitoes have never become resistant to DDT’s life-saving repellency properties, but they are developing resistance to the pyrethroids used in agriculture – and bed nets.
Poisonous? People have tried to kill themselves with DDT – and failed. It’s most common replacement, parathion, killed hundreds of people, who safety experts said were too used to handling DDT. But as Dr. Wurster pointed out, it “only kills farm workers and most of them are Mexicans and Negroes.”
This modern, eco-style eugenics has since been broadened to the impoverished developing world, where DDT could reduce the agony, brain damage, lost work hours, poverty and death – if it weren’t so frequently banished due to green ideologues like Wurster and the Club of Rome’s Alexander King, who worried more about over-population than human rights.
Thus the vicious cycle continues. Infected people are too sick to work, too poor to afford sprays or nets or get proper treatment. Ugandan activist Fiona Kobusingye lost her son, two sisters and four cousins to malaria. Former Black Panther Patrick O’Neal says every household in his Tanzanian village has lost at least one member of its extended family to malaria. On Sumba Island, Indonesia, one-third of all women have lost at least one child to malaria.
EDF and EPA lied. Millions of children died. How convenient, then, that UN Environment Program’s Nick Nutter can deadpan, “when someone here dies from malaria, they say God has taken them” – not baby-killing policies. How convenient that Al Gore can blame malaria on manmade global warming.
This is environmental justice? The kind championed by President Obama and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson? Eco activist groups get billions. The world’s poor get disease and death. And EPA and the greens want to be put in charge of our energy, economy, jobs, living standards and lives.
How inconvenient for them when folks like Dr. Rutledge raise questions they really don’t want to address. No wonder Ruckelshaus, Pesticide Action Network, USAID and EPA refused to grant him interviews. Stephanie from Pesticide Action did want to know who was funding the film. But when Dr. Rutledge said he was, she ended the conversation, without mentioning who funds PAN. (The Richard and Rhoda Goldman Foundation, among others.)
Three billion humans dead so far from malaria … and counting. And green ideologues work tirelessly to ensure that the callous, needless global death toll continues to rise.
See this film. Tell your friends about it. Bring it to your college, club and local theater. It will make your blood boil, and change your perspectives forever about DDT and the radical environmental movement
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