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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