DDT...widely with great success to fight Malaria but banned when erroneously represented by Rachel Carson
From Conservapedia
Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, commonly known as DDT, is a synthetic organic chemical compound that was first made in 1874 by Othmar Zeidler, an German-Austrian chemist.
In 1939, Paul Hermann Müller, a Swiss chemist working for Geigy Pharmaceutical, discovered its pesticidal qualities. It was soon put to good use by Allied forces in World War II to help control malaria and typhus, especially in the Asian and Pacific theatres.
Following the war it was used widely with great success to eliminate the last pockets of malaria from North America and Europe. In 1955 the World Health Organization started a program to eradicate malaria worldwide, largely through the spraying of DDT declaring Brazil, Egypt, the former Soviet Union and several Asian and Caribbean countries to be malaria-free and thus removing 700 million people from risk of infection.
DDT was also widely adopted as an agricultural pesticide and it was, perhaps, overused by farmers.
Campaign to ban DDT
Although not toxic in small amounts, it was claimed that DDT accumulated in bodies through the food chain and thus it had an adverse effect on bird-life, particularly raptors. In 1962, naturalist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a bestselling book that campaigned for the regulated use of DDT.
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Rachel Carson sounded the initial alarm against DDT, but represented the science of DDT erroneously in her 1962 book Silent Spring. Carson wrote "Dr. DeWitt's now classic experiments [on quail and pheasants] have now established the fact that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction. Quail into whose diet DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched." DeWitt's 1956 article (in Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry) actually yielded a very different conclusion. Quail were fed 200 parts per million of DDT in all of their food throughout the breeding season. DeWitt reports that 80% of their eggs hatched, compared with the "control"" birds which hatched 83.9% of their eggs. Carson also omitted mention of DeWitt's report that "control" pheasants hatched only 57 percent of their eggs, while those that were fed high levels of DDT in all of their food for an entire year hatched more than 80% of their eggs.
Then, public sentiment escalated into calling for an outright ban of DDT and other synthetic pesticides.
In 1970, DDT was banned in Norway and Sweden. The U.S. banned it in 1972, and the UK in 1984. Most developed countries have banned its use but it is still used for disease control in some tropical countries where no other methods exist. The quantities required for public welfare are a small fraction of the amount previously used for agricultural purposes.
In 2001, 98 countries ratified the
Stockholm Convention, which calls for the elimination of DDT and other persistent organic chemicals after May 17, 2004, except for emergency health crises. However, in the absence of a suitable replacement, DDT is still allowed for disease vector control. In 2006 the World Health Organization announced that it will use DDT for indoor residual spraying (IRS) in epidemic and endemic areas to reduce childhood mortality from malaria.
The Lies of Rachel Carson (Dr. J. Gordon Edwards her book then later taking another look) Read further HERE.
Question: If Rachel Carson's credibility is so questioned, do we really want our school to be named after her?
Bring Back DDT, and Science With It! Dr. J. Gordon Edwards Article.
"Why was DDT banned, 30 years after its World War II introduction and spectacular success in saving lives? The reason was stated bluntly by Alexander King, founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome, who wrote in a biographical essay in 1990, “My chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” King was particularly concerned that DDT had dramatically cut the death rates in the developing sector, and thus increased population growth."
The "Silent Spring" Fraud
"The campaign to ban DDT got its start with the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962. Carson’s popular book was a fraud. She played on people’s emotions, and to do so, she selected and falsified data from scientific studies, as entomologist Dr. J. Gordon Edwards has documented in his analysis of the original scientific studies that Carson cited.2"
(Paragraph skipped)
"Two months later, without even reading the testimony or attending the hearings, EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus overruled the EPA hearing officer and banned DDT. He later admitted that he made the decision for “political” reasons. “Science, along with economics, has a role to play . .. .. [but] the ultimate decision remains political,” Ruckelshaus said."
A book with a list referencing pages in Rachel Carson's book where errors and false claims are:
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/summ02/Carson.html
"Rachel Carson’s lack of concern for human lives endangered by diseases transmitted by insects is revealed on page 187, where she writes: “Only yesterday mankind lived in fear of the scourges of smallpox, cholera and plague that once swept nations before them. Now our major concern is no longer with the disease organisms that once were omnipresent; sanitation, better living conditions, and new drugs have given us a high degree of control over infectious disease. Today we are concerned with a different kind of hazard that lurks in our environment—a hazard we ourselves have introduced into our world as our modern way of life has evolved.”
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