Got Zika? Thank an Environmentalist

Posted on June 28, 2016 by Hank Campbell @ The American Council on Science and Health

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Zika is either a looming threat for the United States or the biggest health scare since Swine Flu BPA Trans Fats Bird Flu SARS Cell Phones Glyphosate Bacon Ebola. Right now, all cases have been sexually transmitted, which, if you are in science and not mainstream media, is actually a lot scarier than mosquitoes. But if mosquitoes are about to become the big threat for Zika transmission in the U.S., the obvious answer to prevent that is killing the ecologically-useless bugs using pesticides.

Yet environmentalists have already begun invoking “Agent Orange” and claiming if we kill these bugs we are going to get prostate cancer, because that is the kind of scary thing they do to raise money. There’s no reason to fix what isn’t broken, they have been using that strategy successfully for over 40 years, which is what has caused the revenue of these anti-science groups to approach $1 billion a year.

Richard Tren, founder of Africa Fighting Malaria, writes in the Washington Examiner that a new watered-down Zika Vector Control Act is going to do nothing to solve the Zika problem, since pesticides used will not be exempt from litigation. And since any chemical can be detected in water using parts-per-quadrillion, lawsuits will be easy to file under the Clean Water Act.

The thought of sue-and-settle groups like Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) waiting with an army of lawyers is a deterrent and, Tren notes, such anti-science deterrents have been harming the public since the 1970s. He quotes Margaret Chan, head of the World Health Organization: “Above all, the spread of Zika, the resurgence of dengue, and the emerging threat from chikungunya are the price being paid for a massive policy failure that dropped the ball on mosquito control in the 1970s.”

She is talking about DDT, of course. Activists railed against it decades ago, costing millions of lives. Meanwhile, our own EPA keeps it banned in the U.S. while drafting guidelines for how residents of other countries can spray it inside their homes. But the science was at least unclear then, and we can assume that those original environmentalists meant well.

Their descendants are nothing like those founders — Greenpeace now denies the very existence of Patrick Moore — even though the science is clear about pesticides, vaccines and GMOs they will bounce from cause to cause, looking for new things to scare the public about, new lawsuits to file, new regulations to lobby for, all to block progress rather than protect the public.

You know which country has no Zika? Cuba. They also have no environmentalists using fearmongering to scare people about science and public health. That’s maybe the only thing communist dictatorships get right.