Please pass the DDT GrassTopsUSA Exclusive Commentary By Ryan Walsh 04-18-07 Forty-three years ago last Saturday, marine biologist Rachel Carson died. Known for her 1962 alarmist tome Silent Spring, which warned that the large-scale use of synthetic pesticides, such as DDT, would upset the food chain and prove carcinogenic to humans, many consider Carson’s work responsible for instigating the American environmentalist movement. Thanks to the efforts of the movement she launched, in nearly every part of the world, DDT has since been banned. Yet, as malaria continues to ravage the poor peoples of the Third World, the unavoidable question arises, “Was that a good thing?” Moreover, as a matter of science, does DDT really kill? As decades of data have demonstrated, the thrust of the research on this question runs to the contrary. According to scientific testing by Dr. Philip Butler, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Sabine Island Research Laboratory, “Ninety-two percent of DDT and its metabolites” vanish from the environment 38 days after the pesticide is sprayed. Furthermore, as the former director of the World Health Organization (WHO) acknowledged decades ago, “DDT is so safe that no symptoms have been observed among the 130,000 spraymen or the 535 million inhabitants of sprayed houses [over the years in which DDT spraying was legal]. No toxicity was observed in the wildlife of the countries participating in the malaria campaign.” In what appears to have been a last, desperate attempt to rid the world of Rachel Carson’s myth, one study commissioned in 1956 asked volunteers to eat DDT every day for two years. Amazingly, the volunteers reported no major physical maladies then or even later in life. After the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned DDT in 1972, Judge Edmund Sweeney, who was in charge of an EPA advisory body on DDT, concluded that such a ban was unnecessary: “DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man . . . . is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man . . . . [The] use of DDT under the regulations involved here [does] not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife.” So what makes DDT so indispensable in combating mallaria? Consider that before the DDT revolution of the 1950s, India experienced 800,000 deaths a year from malaria. In the later 1960s, after India had relentlessly implemented DDT spraying, annual malaria cases were down to almost zero. According to the New York Times, “In Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, 2.8 million cases of malaria per year fell to 17.” As the Times further notes, this worldwide downturn in malaria cases even led the National Academy of Sciences to proclaim that “to only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT.” Yet, by the early 1970s, Rachel Carson had captured the hearts of the WHO and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and almost instantly the chemical viewed by scientists as a sort of Holy Water in the fight against worldly plague became a cancer-causing, bird-killing, humanity-threatening scourge. In the short time it took you to read this column, over 1,000 people contracted malaria and a dozen died.