By Alan Caruba
When Rachel Carson’s book, “Silent
Spring”, was published, filled with totally false claims about DDT, the
Environmental Protection Agency looked it over and concluded she had used
manipulated data. They concluded that DDT should not be banned, but its first
administrator, William Ruckleshaus, overruled the agency and imposed a ban.
Ruckleshaus was a lawyer, not a
scientist. He was also politically connected enough to hold a variety of
government positions. He got the nod for the EPA job from John Mitchell, Nixon’s
Attorney General who later went to jail for his participation in the Watergate
cover-up.
Wikipedia says, “With the
formation of EPA, authority over pesticides was transferred to it from the
Department of Agriculture. The fledgling EPA's first order of business was
whether to issue a ban of DDT. Judge Edmund Sweeney was appointed to examine the
case and held testimony hearings for seven months. His conclusion was that DDT
“is not a carcinogenic hazard to man" and that "there is a present need for the
essential uses of DDT". However, Ruckelshaus (who had not attended the hearings
or read the report himself) overruled Sweeney's decision and issued the ban
nevertheless, claiming that DDT was a ‘potential human carcinogen.’” In 2008, having returned to the
practice of law, he endorsed Barack Obama.
I cite this history from the 1970s
because most people believe that the EPA operates on the basis of science and,
from the beginning, that could hardly have been less true. It has evolved over
the years into a totally rogue government agency issuing thousands of
regulations with the intent to control virtually every aspect of life in
America, from agriculture to manufacturing, and, in the case of pesticides, the
effort to ban them all, always claiming that it was to protect public
health.
Not killing pests, insects and
rodents, is a great way to put everyone’s health in jeopardy. New York City
announced a new war in May against rats and will spend $600,000 to hire new
inspectors to deal with an increased population. Lyme disease and West Nile
Fever are just two of the diseases that require serious insect pest control. A
wide variety of insects spread many diseases from Salmonella to Hantavirus.
Termites do billions in property damage every year.
Thanks to the EPA ban on DDT and the
nations that followed the USA action, an estimated 60 million people have died
from malaria since 1970 because it was and is the most effective way to control
the mosquitoes that spread it, particularly in Africa. In the West, malaria had
been eliminated thanks to the use of DDT before the
ban.
In the 1980s I worked with the company
that produced an extraordinary pesticide, Ficam that was applied with nothing
more than water. Although it had gone through the costly process of securing EPA
registration, the agency told the manufacturer it would have to do so again.
Because the cost could not justify re-registration it was taken off the market
in the USA, but continues to be used successfully for malaria control in more
than sixteen nations in Sub-Saharan Africa and against the spread of Chagas, a
tropical parasitic disease in Latin American nations. Ficam can be used to
control a wide variety of insect pests. But not in the
USA.
In 2000, the EPA, during the
Clinton-Gore administration, announced that “a major step to improve safety for
all Americans from the health risks posed by pesticides. We are eliminating
virtually all home and garden use of Dursban—the most used household pesticide
in the United States.” It was widely
used because it did a great job of controlling a wide variety of insect pests,
but the EPA preferred the pests to the human species it allegedly was
“protecting.” The ban was directed against chlorpyrifos which the EPA noted was
“the most commonly used pesticide in homes, buildings, and schools.” It was used
in some 800 pest control
products.
Recently I have been receiving notices
from Friends of the Earth (FOE) announcing “a new effort to help save bees. “We
need to ban bee-killing pesticides now!” says one of their emails, claiming that
“A growing body of science shows that neonicotinoid (neonic) pesticides are a
key contributor to bee declines.” This is an outright lie. As always, FOE’s
claims are accompanied by a request for a donation.
Dr.
HenryI. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, a fellow at Stanford
University’s Hoover Institution, was a founding director of the FDA’s Office of
Biotechnology. Recently he disputed the White House’s creation of a Pollinator
Health Task Force and a directive to the EPA to “assess the effect if
pesticides, including neonicotinoids, on bee and other pollinator health and
take action, as appropriate.” This is
the next step—a totally political one—that will deny one of the most important
pesticides to protect crops from being used. “This would have disastrous effects
on modern farming and food prices,” warns Dr.
Miller.
“Crafted to target pests that destroy
crops, while minimizing toxicity to other species, neonics,” said Dr. Miller,
“are much safer for humans and other vertebrates than previous pesticides…there
is only circumstantial or flawed experimental evidence of harm to bees by
neonics.”
“The reality is that honeybee
populations are not decline,” noted Dr. Miller, citing U.N. Food and
Agricultural Organization statistics. If anything is affecting bee populations
worldwide it is the increasingly cold weather than has been occurring for the
past 17 years as the result of a natural cooling cycle which is the result of
less solar radiation from the Sun. The other threat to bee is Varroa mites and
the “lethal viruses they vector into bee colonies.”
“A ban on neonics would not benefit
bees, because they are not the chief source of bee health problems
today.
But the Friends of the Earth who are
no friends of the humans that live on
it want to ban neonics and it is clear that the White House and the EPA are
gearing up, for example, to induce a major reduction in crops such as Florida’s
citrus industry which is subject to the Asian citrus psyllid, an insect that
spreads a devastating disease of citrus trees. Other food crops are similarly
affected by insect pests and the end result of a ban would severely damage the
U.S. economy.
In every way possible the
environmentalists—Greens—continue to attack the nation’s and the world’s food
supply and the result of that will kill off a lot of humans. The EPA’s pesticide
bans are not about protecting health. They are an insidious way of increasing
sickness from an ancient enemy of mankind, insect and rodent
pests.
© Alan Caruba, 2014
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