As reported in the Investor’s Business Daily (9/18/06) The World Health Organization reversed its 30 year opposition to the use of DDT a very effective pesticide.  This is good news for millions of 3rd World citizens, millions of whom have died from malaria, yellow fever, typhus, dengue, plague, encephalitis, and other insect-borne diseases. 

It is bad news for those who have willfully helped withhold the extraordinarily beneficial chemical from those who needed it most.  The 30 to 50 million deaths since the 1972 ban are on the hands of environmental groups who have promoted the continuing ban for decades. 

It is also bad news for the thousands of bureaucrats, lawyers, and scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), many state environmental agencies, and international agencies such as the WHO which collectively created, then enforced the ban.  Even the European Union (EU) was deeply involved with enforcement of the ban through economic sanctions.  This disastrous decision stood through 34 years of Republican and Democratic administrations, state and federal indifference. Doesn’t anybody read anymore, count bodies, look at the death tolls, review past decisions, or improve regulations with new findings?

Over the past 35 years scientific fraud has become a major governmental problem in the US and around the world.  It is having horrific consequences.  In terms of millions of deaths, decades of human misery, destruction of families, and loss of human productiveness, the DDT ban has been one of the cruelest “environmental” programs ever devised by that powerful yet questionable movement.  It still has its believers, even after the body counts roll in.  The movement still has lots of practitioners with friends in government, media, and Hollywood, still inflicting harm on the US and the world at enormous costs, on the basis of little or no science. 

The ban of DDT in the United States was completed in the spring of 1972.  The forces arrayed in support of the ban were largely groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund (now called Environmental Defense).  This was deemed a political victory for the environmental movement and put them on the political map in the US as a powerful, political (and dangerous) force.    

DDT was first introduced widely in 1944 and was used for 28 years until its ban in 1972. It was used directly on humans, on those poor wretches who survived the Nazi concentration camps. 

When released in 1945 in addition to being starved, these people were crawling with lice, fleas, and bedbugs, which carried many diseases such as typhus.  The author still remembers the newsreels of the 40s showing the released prisoners being sprayed in a fog of DDT powder to kill these vermin. No adverse health effects were found in these humans as a result of their large DDT exposures.

A centerpiece of this ban was the EPA hearings in late 1971 and early 1972.  The hearings judge was Edmund Sweeney appointed by EPA administrator Ruckelshaus.  After months of hearings and receiving more than 9000 pages of testimony from 150 scientists, Judge Sweeney recommended that DDT NOT be banned because of the benefits, the effectiveness in controlling many deadly diseases.

Then without reading a page of the 9000 pages of testimony or visiting the hearings once, Ruckelshaus over-ruled Judge Sweeney and decreed the DDT ban.  While most of these pages have been lost or made otherwise unavailable, for reasons known only to the folks at the EPA.  However, some parts were retained by people such as Drs. J. Gordon Edwards and Thomas Jukes who were among the few who fought for sanity (and for the lives of millions) against the ban. 

Also the last 300 pages of “Ecological Sanity” by Klaus and Bollander is also a comprehensive analysis of the indefensible junkscience which was used to support the ban.  Also at the Steve Milloy website is a short summary of the DDT issues which should be read by all.  It called “100 Things You Should Know About DDT”. (http://www.junkscience.com/ddtfaq.htm). 

J. Gordon Edwards himself wrote in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, an excellent analysis of the DDT war entitled; DDT:  A Case Study in Scientific Fraud. (http://www.jpands.org/vol9no3/edwards.pdf#search=%22DDT%20scientific%20fraud%22).  Edwards himself was an insect expert, world class entomologist working at the time at the J. Gordon Entomology Museum, which San Jose State University named after him. 

We need to be reminded that DDT was so effective against these diseases that its inventor Paul Muller won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1948.  A nominal 80% of human infectious diseases are carried by such insects as mosquitoes, lice, fleas, and bedbugs.  Because of DDT’s effectiveness in disease control the National Academy of Sciences in 1970 stated: “To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT.  In little more than 2 decades DDT has prevented 500,000,000 human deaths due to malaria that would have otherwise been inevitable”.   

Tests on humans showed it was not a human carcinogen.  Tests on many bird species showed that dietary DDT did not contributed to the demise of any known bird species.  Even extreme dietary doses far beyond those found in the environment, were not notably toxic.  Raptors such as eagle and falcons were not affected and showed little or no health effects such as egg-shell thinning.  In fact a number of tests on bird species showed some egg shells were actually thickened slightly from the dietary DDT. Anyone who has raised farm birds such as chickens knows that egg shell thinning is common and has a number of well known causes having nothing to do with DDT.

There were problems among some raptors such as hunting, habitat destruction, falconry, and the wide practice of egg collecting from such raptors. Many bird counts by the Audubon Society showed bird counts increasing (some manifold) during the years of heaviest DDT use.

Even “environmental groups” promoted the killing of raptors in the 1920s and 1930s.  Peregrine falcons were deemed undesirable in the early 20th century. Dr. William Hornaday of the New York Zoological Society referred to them as birds that "deserve death, but are so rare that we need not take them into account."  (Ref. Hornaday, WT. 1913. Our Vanishing Wild Life. New York Zoological Society, p. 226).

Thanks to a number of political forces such as the environmental movements, their allies in state and federal agencies, the media, the lowered quality of education of the public, genocidal harm has been visited for 34 years on those who still suffer from these easily controlled and manageable diseases.  To the extent this movement still is among us, still powerful, still working its agendas for dominance, we need to understand their impacts, their power, their agendas, and their influence, their willingness to distort and lie, even to the point of sacrificing millions in their pursuit of political power.

Michael R. Fox, Ph.D., is the Director Center for Science, Climate and Environment. He can be reached via email at mfox@grassrootinstitute.org