Hat Tip:
Michael Bruno
The following article is posted on
the New Atlantis
We have discovered many preventives
against tropical diseases, and often against the onslaught of insects of all
kinds, from lice to mosquitoes and back again. The excellent DDT powder which
had been fully experimented with and found to yield astonishing results will
henceforth be used on a great scale by the British forces in Burma and by the
American and Australian forces in the Pacific and India in all theatres.
—Winston Churchill, September 24,
1944[1]
My own doubts came when DDT was
introduced for civilian use. In Guyana, within two years it had almost
eliminated malaria, but at the same time the birth rate had doubled. So my
chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the
population problem.
—Alexander
King, cofounder of the Club of Rome, 1990[2]
Rachel
Carson’s Silent Spring at Fifty
by Robert
Zubrin
by
Charles T. Rubin
In the last days of September 1943, as the U.S. Army advanced to the
rescue of Italian partisans — some as young as nine — battling the Germans in
the streets of Naples, the enraged Nazis, in a criminal act of revenge against
their erstwhile allies, deployed sappers to systematically destroy the city’s
aqueducts, reservoirs, and sewer system. This done, the supermen, pausing only
to burn irreplaceable libraries, including hundreds of thousands of volumes and
artifacts at the University of Naples — where Thomas Aquinas once taught —
showed their youthful Neapolitan opponents their backs, and on October 1, to
the delirious cheers of the Naples populace, Allied forces entered the town in
triumph.
But a city of over a million people
had been left without sanitation, and within weeks, as the Germans had
intended, epidemics broke out. By November, thousands of Neapolitans were
infected with typhus, with one in four of those contracting it dying of the
lice-transmitted disease.[3] The dead were
so numerous that, as in the dark time of the Black Death, bodies were put out
into the street by the hundreds to be hauled away by carts. Alarmed, General
Eisenhower contacted Washington and made a desperate plea for help to contain
the disaster.
Fortunately, the brass had a new
secret weapon ready just in time to deal with the emergency. It was called DDT,[4] a pesticide
of unprecedented effectiveness. First synthesized by a graduate student in
1874, DDT went unnoticed until its potential application as an insecticide was
discovered by chemist Paul H. Müller while working for the Swiss company Geigy
during the late 1930s. Acquainted with Müller’s work, Victor Froelicher,
Geigy’s New York representative, disclosed it to the American military’s Office
of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) in October 1942. Examining
Müller’s data, the OSRD’s experts immediately realized its importance. On
Guadalcanal, and elsewhere in the South Pacific, the Marines were losing more
men to malaria than they were to the Japanese, with the entire 1st Marine
Division rendered unfit for combat by the insect-borne disease. Without delay,
first Geigy’s Cincinnati factory and then the giant DuPont chemical company
were given contracts to produce the new pesticide in quantity.[5]
![]() |
Anopheles mosquito |
By January 1, 1944, the first
shipments of what would eventually amount to sixty tons of DDT reached Italy.
Stations were set up in the palazzos of Naples, and as the people walked by in
lines, military police officers with spray guns dusted them with DDT. Other
spray teams prowled the town, dusting public buildings and shelters. The
effects were little short of miraculous. Within days, the city’s vast
population of typhus-transmitting lice was virtually exterminated; by month’s
end, the epidemic was over.[6]
The retreating Germans, however, did not give up so easily on the use of insects as vectors of death. As the Allied forces advanced north from Naples toward Rome, they neared the Pontine Marshes, which for thousands of years had been rendered nearly uninhabitable by their enormous infestation of virulently malarial mosquitoes. In his most noteworthy accomplishment before the war, Mussolini had drained these marshes, making them potentially suitable for human settlement. The Germans demolished Mussolini’s dikes, quickly transforming the area back into the mosquito-infested malarial hellhole it had been for millennia. This promised to be very effective. In the brief Sicilian campaign of early summer 1943, malaria had struck 22,000 Allied troops — a greater casualty toll than that inflicted by the Axis forces themselves.[7] The malarial losses inflicted by the deadly Pontine Marshes were poised to be far worse.
But the Nazis had not reckoned on
DDT. In coordination with their ground forces, the Americans deployed airborne
crop dusters, as well as truck dusters and infantry DDT spray teams. Success
was total. The Pontine mosquitoes were wiped out. With negligible losses to
malaria, the GIs pushed on to Rome, liberating the Eternal City in the early
morning of June 5.[8]
From now on, “DDT marches with the
troops,” declared the Allied high command.[9] The order
could not have come at a better time. As British and American forces advanced
in Europe, they encountered millions of victims of Nazi oppression — civilians
under occupation, slave laborers, prisoners of war, concentration camp inmates
— dying in droves from insect-borne diseases. But with the armies of liberation
came squads spraying DDT, and with it life for millions otherwise doomed to
destruction. The same story was repeated in the Philippines, Burma, China, and
elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific theater. Never before in history had a single
chemical saved so many lives in such a short amount of time.
A Civilian Success
In recognition for his role in this
public health miracle, Paul Müller was given the Nobel Prize for Medicine in
1948. Presenting the award, the Nobel Committee said: “DDT has been used in
large quantities in the evacuation of concentration camps, of prisoners and
deportees. Without any doubt, the material has already preserved the life and
health of hundreds of thousands.”[10]
With the coming of peace, DDT became
available to civilian public health agencies around the world. They had good
reason to put it to use immediately, since over 80 percent of all infectious
diseases afflicting humans are carried by insects or other small arthropods.[11] These
scourges, which have killed billions of people, include bubonic plague, yellow
fever, typhus, dengue, Chagas disease, African sleeping sickness,
elephantiasis, trypanosomiasis, viral encephalitis, leishmaniasis, filariasis,
and, most deadly of all, malaria. Insects have also caused or contributed to
mass death by starvation or malnutrition, by consuming up to 40 percent of the
food crop and destroying much of the livestock in many developing countries.
One of the first countries to benefit
from the use of DDT for civilian purposes was the United States. In the years
immediately preceding World War II, between one and six million Americans,
mostly drawn from the rural South, contracted malaria annually. In 1946, the
U.S. Public Health Service initiated a campaign to wipe out malaria through the
application of DDT to the interior walls of homes. The results were dramatic.
In the first half of 1952, there were only two confirmed cases of malaria
contracted within the United States.[12]
Other countries were quick to take
note of the American success, and those that could afford it swiftly put DDT
into action. In Europe, malaria was virtually eradicated by the mid-1950s.
South African cases of malaria quickly dropped by 80 percent; Ceylon (now Sri
Lanka) reduced its malaria incidence from 2.8 million in 1946 to 17 in 1963;
and India cut its malaria death rate almost to zero. In 1955, with financial
backing from the United States, the U.N. World Health Organization launched a
global campaign to use DDT to eradicate malaria. Implemented successfully
across large areas of the developing world, this effort soon cut malaria rates
in numerous countries in Latin America and Asia by 99 percent or better. Even
for Africa, hope that the age-old scourge would be brought to an end appeared
to be in sight.[13]
A Bestseller Begins a Movement
But events took another turn with the
appearance of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. A former marine biologist and accomplished nature writer, Carson in
1958 contacted E. B. White, a contributor to The New Yorker,
suggesting someone should write about DDT. White declined, but the magazine’s
editor, William Shawn, suggested that Carson herself write it. The ensuing
articles, supplemented by additional material, became Silent Spring,
for which Carson signed a contract with Houghton Mifflin in August 1958.[14]
Carson based her passionate argument
against pesticides on the desire to protect wildlife. Using evocative language,
Carson told a powerful fable of a town whose people had been poisoned, and whose
spring had been silenced of birdsong, because all life had been extinguished by
pesticides.[15]
![]() |
Rachael Carson--a more successful killer than Stalin and Hitler combined! |
Published in September 1962, Silent
Spring was a phenomenal success. As a literary work, it was a
masterpiece, and as such, received rave reviews everywhere. Deeply moved by
Carson’s poignant depiction of a lifeless future, millions of well-meaning
people rallied to her banner. Virtually at a stroke, environmentalism grew from
a narrow aristocratic cult into a crusading liberal mass movement.
While excellent literature,
however, Silent Spring was very poor science. Carson claimed
that DDT was threatening many avian species with imminent extinction. Her
evidence for this, however, was anecdotal and unfounded. In fact, during the
period of widespread DDT use preceding the publication of Silent Spring,
bird populations in the United States increased significantly, probably as a
result of the pesticide’s suppression of their insect disease vectors and
parasites. In her chapter “Elixirs of Death,” Carson wrote that synthetic
insecticides can affect the human body in “sinister and often deadly ways,” so
that cumulatively, the “threat of chronic poisoning and degenerative changes of
the liver and other organs is very real.” In terms of DDT specifically, in her
chapter on cancer she reported that one expert “now gives DDT the definite
rating of a ‘chemical carcinogen.’”[16] These
alarming assertions were false as well.[17] (Carson’s
claims about the supposed pernicious effects of DDT are examined more fully
below.)
The Banning of DDT
The panic raised by Carson’s book
spread far beyond American borders. Responding to its warning, the governments
of a number of developing countries called a halt to their DDT-based
anti-malaria programs. The results were catastrophic. In Ceylon, for example,
where, as noted, DDT use had cut malaria cases from millions per year in the
1940s down to just 17 by 1963, its banning in 1964 led to a resurgence of half
a million victims per year by 1969.[18] In many
other countries, the effects were even worse.
Attempting to head off a
hysteria-induced global health disaster, in 1970 the National Academy of
Sciences issued a report praising the beleaguered pesticide:
To only a few chemicals does man owe
as great a debt as to DDT. It has contributed to the great increase in agricultural
productivity, while sparing countless humanity from a host of diseases, most
notably, perhaps, scrub typhus and malaria. Indeed, it is estimated that, in
little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to
malaria that would otherwise have been inevitable. Abandonment of this valuable
insecticide should be undertaken only at such time and in such places as it is
evident that the prospective gain to humanity exceeds the consequent losses. At
this writing, all available substitutes for DDT are both more expensive per
crop-year and decidedly more hazardous.[19]
To some, however, five hundred
million human lives were irrelevant. Disregarding the NAS findings,
environmentalists continued to demand that DDT be banned. Responding to their
pressure, in 1971 the newly-formed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
launched an investigation of the pesticide. Lasting seven months, the
investigative hearings led by Judge Edmund Sweeney gathered testimony from 125
expert witnesses with 365 exhibits. The conclusion of the inquest, however, was
exactly the opposite of what the environmentalists had hoped for. After
assessing all the evidence, Judge Sweeney found: “The uses of DDT under the
registration involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish,
estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife.... DDT is not a
carcinogenic hazard to man.... DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to
man.”[20] Accordingly,
Judge Sweeney ruled that DDT should remain available for use.
Unfortunately, however, the
administrator of the EPA was William D. Ruckelshaus, who reportedly did not
attend a single hour of the investigative hearings, and according to his chief
of staff, did not even read Judge Sweeney’s report.[21] Instead, he
apparently chose to ignore the science: overruling Sweeney, in 1972 Ruckelshaus
banned the use of DDT in the United States except under conditions of medical emergencies.[22]
Initially, the ban only affected the United States. But the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) soon adopted strict environmental regulations that effectively prohibited it from funding international projects that used DDT.[23] Around the globe, Third World governments were told that if they wanted USAID or other foreign aid money to play with, they needed to stop using the most effective weapon against malaria.[24] Given the corrupt nature of many of the recipient regimes, it is not surprising that many chose lucre over life. And even for those that did not, the halting of American DDT exports (since U.S. producers slowed and then stopped manufacturing it) made DDT much more expensive, and thus effectively unavailable for poor countries in desperate need of the substance.[25] As a result, insect-borne diseases returned to the tropics with a vengeance.
(Article continues HERE)
Ed. On February 4th of 2017, Paul Offit wrote for the Daily Beast:
“In 2006, the World Health Organization reinstated DDT as part of its effort to eradicate malaria. But not before millions of people had died needlessly from the disease.”
Ed. On February 4th of 2017, Paul Offit wrote for the Daily Beast:
“In 2006, the World Health Organization reinstated DDT as part of its effort to eradicate malaria. But not before millions of people had died needlessly from the disease.”
The Daily Beast! Not the most conservative site in the world! The environmental left is responsible for countless deaths and God knows how many illnesses thanks to the fraud perpetrated by Rachael Carson and William Ruckelshaus. But of course, the left never assume responsibility and are rarely criticized for the deaths perpetrated by their icons.
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