Suppose that next week one of those cute cars or trucks labeled "for official use only'' that we see all over our highways (the label means that we pay for the vehicle with involuntary taxes, but it is illegal for us to use it) were to drive upwind of an American city and release a few canisters of aerosol-borne anthrax spores and that the resulting epidemic of suffering from this disease killed 2 million American men, women, and children. Moreover, at his subsequent press conference, the President announced that he was pleased by the success of this project and had ordered that it become a yearly event. Each year, two million innocent Americans would be murdered by disease. He explains that he is acting on an Environmental Protection Agency reportconcluding that the environment is suffering from the impact of too many people, so the obvious solution is to kill some of them. Being a moderate in all things (and this being an election year), the President has decided to kill only 2 million per year. In the ensuing debate, he is supported by the ever-loyal press, but an undercurrent of dissatisfaction develops because the two million dead happen to include a racially unbalanced mix of people and a large proportion of voters from the political party opposed to the President. A compromise is reached. Henceforth the anthrax will instead be released upon countries outside of the United States. A couple more aircraft carriers are budgeted for the fleet in case anyone objects. This series of events is unthinkable. Right? Well, the details are
"Yesterday's Malaria Wars'' by Robert S. Desowitz in
Nature 383, p 135 (1996), reviews a book The Tomorrow of Malaria by S. Litsios which gives an "account of malaria's current annual toll - 300 million cases with 2 million deaths. DDT is gone.'' Green and Gold 6, No. 7, September 1996, p 4, P. O. Box 74416, Lynwood Ridge, Pretoria 0040, South Africa, quotes a 1994 World Health Organization report that the number of countries considered to be malarial rose from 90 in 1992 to 140 in 1994. In 1994, the 140 included 33% of the world. WHO estimated the annual cases at 500 million, with 2 million deaths and 90% of the cases occurring in Africa."Remembering Silent Spring and Its Consequences'' by J. Gordon Edwards, available by preprint from Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, Department of Biological Sciences, San Jose State University, One Washing-ton Square, San Jose, CA 95192-0100, should be in every biology class. Edwards gives the science, nonscience and politics behind the EPA ban of DDT even though the EPA's own investigations concluded that DDT was not harmful to man, fish, birds, or other wildlife.
Edwards writes that a reporter asked Charles Wurster, chief "scientist'' for the Environmental Defense Fund, if a DDT ban wouldn't result in the greater use of much more toxic pesticides that had a long history of killing people. Wurster's response, "So what? People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them and this is as good a way as any.'' He was then asked: "Doctor, how do you square the killing of people with the mere loss of some birds [although the science showed birds were not being harmed by DDT]?'' Wurster answered: "It doesn't really make a lot of difference, because the organo phosphate acts locally and only kills farm-workers, and most of them are Mexicans and Negroes.'' Ah well, so there were unwise statements by extremists. Right! Except that the DDT ban, currently in effect and completely under the control of the President of the United States and his employees at the EPA, is still killing 2 million people per year and causing suffering for hundreds of millions more - and most of them just happen to be South and Central Americans and Negroes (and some other races in Asia).
As Marjorie M. Hecht reports in "Bring Back DDT to Defeat Malaria and Save Lives'' in
21st Century Science and Technology, available from P. O. Box 16285, Washington, DC 20041, even in localities where mosquito strains have developed resistance to DDT, it is effective in repelling these insects from treated houses if not in killing them.According to the National Academy of Sciences, DDT saved 500 million lives before it was banned. This is an ongoing story of political power, nonscience, and genocide on a scale rivaled only by the mass killings under Stalin and Mao. It is not mitigated by the claims from the EPA and the President that they are acting with good intentions.
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Vol. 24, No. 3
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 24, No. 3 Date: October 01, 1996 01:04 PM (For actual publication date see newsletter.) Title: Human Bandwidth
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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