Over 800,000 individuals die each year from malaria, the majority of which are pregnant women and children in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, DDT has the potential to keep 80 to 90 percent of mosquitos out of households when sprayed just twice a year. And yet, as Paul Driessen, ACSH friend and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power Black death, points out in his article in Townhall.com, the campaigns of radical environmentalist groups are denying people access to this lifesaving chemical, and worse, conspiring to hide and discredit scientific evidence, and wage a campaign of disinformation and outright lies, to ban the most effective weapon yet devised to prevent malaria and other vicious diseases.
The Audubon Society one of the radical environmentalist groups Driessen discusses conducted its own research on DDT and found that bird and animal populations were actually growing during the time when DDT was used widely yet they never announced these findings publicly. And numerous other studies have documented the safety of DDT for human and wildlife (see e.g., this book: The Excellent Powder, which examines DDT in exquisite detail). As Driessen highlights, An EPA scientific panel conducted six months of hearings, compiled 9,312 pages of studies and testimony, and concluded that DDT was safe and effective, and was not carcinogenic, and should not be banned. Yet, EPA administrator William Rucklehaus banned US production and use of DDT in 1972.
Worse still, Driessen discusses these groups motive of banning DDT as a death rate solution to the uncontrolled growth they see as the biggest problem facing Planet Earth. They continue to falsely link DDT with low birth-weights, slow reflexes and weakened immune systems in babies, and premature birth and lactation failure in mothers, when the real culprit is the malaria, and compared to the death and devastation DDT could prevent, the alleged DDT risks are irrelevant.
The bottom line is this: By denying Earth s most impoverished and powerless people access to modern life-saving technologies...they [radical environmentalist groups] are killing millions every year.
As Dr. Ross has said previously on the subject, The zealots who continue to attack DDT, inspired originally by Silent Spring, seem to never give up whatever the evidence shows, and regardless of the vast loss of life and health their know-nothing crusade has caused. The real shame is that official groups, exemplified by the UN Environment Program, and (of course) Greenpeace and similar anti-chemical groups, seem to wish for the continued devastation of malaria while failing to recognize the power of tiny amounts of DDT to protect homes from mosquitoes. After a decade of study of the subject, I can assert that DDT has no adverse effects on human health, period.
