Sunday, June 18, 2017

Rachel Carson's DDT ban killed millions

Millions Died Thanks to the Mother of Environmentalism - Foundation for Economic Education - Working for a free and prosperous world - Paul A. Ofit :

June 17, 2017 - "On Jan. 24, 2017, PBS aired a two-hour special on Rachel Carson, the mother of the environmental movement....  Unfortunately, the PBS documentary neglected to mention that in her groundbreaking book, Silent Spring, Carson had made one critical mistake – and it cost millions of people their lives....

"According to Carson, children suffered sudden death, aplastic anemia, birth defects, liver disease, chromosomal abnormalities, and leukemia – all caused by DDT. And women suffered infertility and uterine cancer.... Carson made it clear that she wasn’t talking about something that might happen – she was talking about something that had happened.....

"In May 1963, Rachel Carson appeared before the Department of Commerce and asked for a 'Pesticide Commission' to regulate the untethered use of DDT. Ten years later, Carson’s “Pesticide Commission” became the Environmental Protection Agency, which immediately banned DDT....

"Although DDT soon became synonymous with poison, the pesticide was an effective weapon in the fight against an infection that has killed – and continues to kill – more people than any other: malaria....

"Since the mid 1970s, when DDT was eliminated from global eradication efforts, tens of millions of people have died from malaria unnecessarily: most have been children less than five years old. While it was reasonable to have banned DDT for agricultural use, it was unreasonable to have eliminated it from public health use.

"Environmentalists have argued that when it came to DDT, it was pick your poison. If DDT was banned, more people would die from malaria. But if DDT wasn’t banned, people would suffer and die from a variety of other diseases, not the least of which was cancer. However, studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States have since shown that DDT didn’t cause the human diseases Carson had claimed.... DDT was arguably one of the safer insect repellents ever invented – far safer than many of the pesticides that have taken its place....

"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."

Read more: https://fee.org/articles/millions-died-thanks-to-the-mother-of-environmentalism/
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