Steve Forbes' "Fact and Comment" column for February 28, 2005 talks about the tragedy of the ban on DDT and mentions the views of ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan:
Nearly every month almost as many people die from malaria as were killed by the tsunami waves in the Indian Ocean. Most of malaria's victims, some 2 million a year, are children under the age of five. More than 300 million annually suffer from this debilitating disease that drains survivors of their mental and physical energies. Incredibly, there's an easy, proven, and cheap way to eradicate most of the globe's malaria -- DDT. Yet in one of history's more murderously myopic ongoing actions, most advanced countries and international agencies discourage its use. Why? Blame Rachel Carson's seismically influential -- and now largely discredited -- book, Silent Spring, first published in 1962. In it she blames DDT for imperiling birds and people, portraying it as a blight of almost biblical proportions. It ain't so. As Dr. Elizabeth Whelan of the American Council on Science and Health once put it, there "has never been a documented case of human illness or death in the U.S. as a result of the standard and accepted use of pesticides."
