Take that,
Rachel Carson. And William Ruckelshaus, the Nixon-appointed EPA
director who actually banned DDT’s use in the United States, ignoring
the lack of evidence that DDT was harmful. The Sierra Club and the
Audubon Society were also complicit, urging a worldwide ban, which the
World Health Association imposed. As a result, tens of millions have
died of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases, all in the name of
junk science.
As the DDT alarmists ranted during the ’70s, I
remembered when I was a kid in Augusta, Ga., in the ’50s we used to
ride our bicycles behind the DDT fogging truck that came through our
neighborhood periodically. I guess the harmful effects take a
while to manifest themselves.
UPDATE:
Reader Dallas Wood emails to say that WHO never actually banned DDT as
the above-linked story states, and that the only change is that WHO is
now promoting its use. It was banned, however, in the US and later in
many other countries. It is agruable, though, that WHO discouraged its
use by such things as pointing to evidence that it harmed reproductive
and endocrine systems in humans.
