by Steve Milloy
A committee of the National Academy of Sciences wrote in 1970, “To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT.... 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.”
DDT was not banned because there was evidence it harmed wildlife or humans. In fact, the EPA administrative law judge who listened to 9,000 pages of testimony over seven months concluded, “DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man... DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man... The use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife.”
Despite the findings of the EPA judge, EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus banned DDT in 1972. Ruckelshaus never attended a single hour of the seven months of EPA hearings on DDT. His aides reported he did not even read the transcript of the EPA hearings on DDT. Ruckleshaus was a member and fund-raiser for the Environmental Defense Fund - a group that - according to deposition in a federal lawsuit - conspired to discredit the scientists who defended DDT.
But it gets more sinister.
Population control advocates blamed DDT for increasing third world population. In the 1960’s, World Health Organization authorities believed there was no alternative to the overpopulation problem but to assure that up to 40 percent of the children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the Agency for International Development stated, “Rather dead, than alive and riotously reproducing.”
DDT should be hailed as one of the greatest achievements in public health. Instead, unscrupulous activists have made it the poster child for the environmental apocalypse.
Steve Milloy
www.junkscience.com
Reprint permission given by AgAir Update, P.O. Box 850, Perry, GA 31069 - an international agricultural aviation publication.
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