Washington Times‘ owner, the Unification Church, put the paper up for sale earlier this year — tired of losing north of $30 million a year on the thing. It appears that, in a cost-cutting move, the paper has laid off all its fact checkers and most of its editors.
And anyone with a brain.
DDT use in the U.S. peaked in 1959, with 70 million pounds of the stuff used in that year. This ad for a French product containing DDT comes from about that time.
How do we know?
Our old friend Stephen Milloy complains about Time Magazine’s “50 Worst Inventions” list, including, especially the listing of DDT, as discussed earlier. It’s wrong, and silly. Good fact checkers, and good editors, wouldn’t let such claptrap make it into print.
Milloy packed an astounding number of whoppers in a short paragraph about DDT:
From 1943 through its banning by the EPA in 1972, DDT saved hundreds of millions of lives all over the world from a variety of vector-borne diseases. Even when Environmental Protection Agency Administrator (and closeted environmental activist) William D. Ruckelshaus banned DDT in 1972, he did so despite a finding from an EPA administrative law judge who, after seven months and 9,000 pages of testimony, ruled that DDT presented no threat of harm to humans or wildlife. Today, a million children die every year from malaria. DDT could safely make a tremendous dent in that toll.
Let us count the errors and falsehoods:
1. DDT was used against typhus from 1943 through about 1946, and against bedbugs; it saved millions, but not hundreds of millions. Death tolls from typhus rarely rose over a million a year, if it ever did. Bedbugs don’t kill, they just itch. If we add in malaria after 1946, in a few years we push to four million deaths total from insect-borne diseases — but of course, that’s with DDT being used. If we charitably claim DDT saved four million lives a year between 1943 and 1972, we get a total of 117 million lives saved. But we know that figure is inflated a lot.
Sure, DDT helped stop some disease epidemics. But it didn’t save “hundreds of millions of lives” in 29 years of use. The National Academy of Sciences, in a book noting that DDT should be banned because its dangers far outweigh its long-term benefits, goofed and said DDT had saved 500 million lives from malaria, and said DDT is one of the most beneficial chemicals ever devised by humans. 500 million is the annual infection rate from malaria, with a high of nearly four million deaths, but in most years under a million deaths. Malaria kills about one of every 500 people infected in a year. That’s far too many deaths, but it’s not as many lives saved as Milloy claims.
NAS grossly overstated the benefits of DDT, and still called for it to be banned.
The question is, why is Milloy grossly inflating his figures? Isn’t it good enough for DDT to be recognized as one of the most beneficial substances ever devised?
My father always warned that when advertisers start inflating their claims, they are trying to hide something nasty.
2. Ruckelshaus didn’t ban DDT on his own — nor was he a “closeted” environmentalist. He got the job at EPA because he was an outstanding lawyer and administrator, with deep understanding of environmental issues — his environmentalism was one of his chief qualifications for the job. (Maybe Milloy spent the ’70s in a closet, and assumes everyone else did, too?) But EPA acted only when ordered to act by two different federal courts (Judge David Bazelon ordered an end to all use of DDT at one of the trials). At trial, DDT had been found to be inherently dangerous and uncontrollable. Both courts were ready to order DDT banned completely, but stayed those orders pending EPA’s regulatory hearings and action.
In fact, regulatory actions against DDT began in the 1950s; by 1970, scientific evidence was overwhelming (and it has not be contradicted:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, the federal agency with responsibility of regulating pesticides before the formation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, began regulatory actions in the late 1950s and 1960s to prohibit many of DDT’s uses because of mounting evidence of the pesticide’s declining benefits and environmental and toxicological effects. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962 stimulated widespread public concern over the dangers of improper pesticide use and the need for better pesticide controls.
In 1972, EPA issued a cancellation order for DDT based on adverse environmental effects of its use, such as those to wildlife, as well as DDT’s potential human health risks. Since then, studies have continued, and a causal relationship between DDT exposure and reproductive effects is suspected. Today, DDT is classified as a probable human carcinogen by U.S. and international authorities. This classification is based on animal studies in which some animals developed liver tumors.
DDT is known to be very persistent in the environment, will accumulate in fatty tissues, and can travel long distances in the upper atmosphere. Since the use of DDT was discontinued in the United States, its concentration in the environment and animals has decreased, but because of its persistence, residues of concern from historical use still remain.
3. Judge Sweeney ruled that DDT is dangerous to humans and especially wildlife, but that DDT’s new, Rachel-Carson-friendly label would probably protect human health and the environment. EPA Administrative Law Judge Edmund Sweeney presided at the hearings in 1971. As in the two previous federal court trials, DDT advocates had ample opportunity to make their case. 32 companies and agencies defended the use of DDT in the proceeding. Just prior to the hearings, DDT manufacturers announced plans to relabel DDT for use only in small amounts, against disease, or in emergencies, and not in broadcast spraying ever. This proved significant later.
Judge Sweeney did not find that DDT is harmless. Quite to the contrary, Sweeney wrote in the findings of the hearing:
20. DDT can have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish and estuarine organisms when directly applied to the water.
21. DDT is used as a rodenticide. [DDT was used to kill bats in homes and office buildings; this was so effective that, coupled with accidental dosing of bats from their eating insects carrying DDT, it actually threatened to wipe out some species of bat in the southwest U.S.]
22. DDT can have an adverse effect on beneficial animals.
23. DDT is concentrated in organisms and can be transferred through food chains.
DDT use in the U.S. had dropped from a 1959 high of 79 million pounds, to just 12 million pounds by 1972. Hazards from DDT use prompted federal agencies such as the Department of Agriculture and Department of Interior to severely restrict or stop use of the stuff prior to 1963. Seeing the writing on the wall, manufacturers tried to keep DDT on the market by labeling it very restrictively. That would allow people to buy it legally, and then use it illegally, but such misuse can almost never be prosecuted.
Sweeney wrote that, under the new, very restrictive label, DDT could be kept on the market. Ruckelshaus ruled that EPA had a duty to protect the environment even from abusive, off-label use, and issued a ban on all agricultural use.
4. More DDT today won’t significantly reduce malaria’s death toll. Milloy fails to mention that DDT use against malaria was slowed dramatically in the mid-1960s — seven years before the U.S. banned spraying cotton with it — because mosquitoes had become resistant and immune to DDT. DDT use was not stopped because of the U.S. ban on spraying crops; DDT use was reduced because it didn’t work.
Milloy also ignores the fact that DDT is being used today. Not all populations of mosquitoes developed immunity, yet. DDT has a place in a carefully-managed program of “integrated vector management,” involving rotating several pesticides to ensure mosquitoes don’t evolve immunity, and spraying small amounts of the pesticide on the walls of houses where it is most effective, and ensuring that DDT especially does not get outdoors.
To the extent DDT can be used effectively, it is being used. More DDT can only cause environmental harm, and perhaps harm to human health.
Most significantly, Milloy grossly overstates the effectiveness of DDT. Deaths from malaria numbered nearly 3 million a year in the late 1950s; by the middle 1960s, the death rate hovered near 2 million per year. Today, annual death rates are under a million — less than half the death rate when DDT use was at its peak. Were DDT the panacea Milloy claims, shouldn’t the death numbers go the other way?
Milloy gets away making wild, misleading and inaccurate claims when editors don’t bother to read his stuff, and they don’t bother to ask “does this make sense?” Nothing Milloy claims could be confirmed with a search of PubMed, the most easily accessible, authoritative data base of serious science journals dealing with health.
Obviously, Washington Times didn’t bother to check. Were all the fact checkers let go?
Even more lunatic
Milloy also attacked the decision to get lead out of gasoline. Ignoring all the facts and the astoundingly long history of severe health effects from lead pollution, Milloy dropped this stinking mental turd:
As to leaded gasoline, we can safely say that leaded gasoline helped provide America and the world with unprecedented freedom and fueled tremendous prosperity. We don’t use leaded gasoline in the United States anymore, but more because people simply don’t like the idea of leaded gasoline as opposed to any body of science showing that it caused anybody any harm. It’s the dose that makes the poison, and there never was enough lead in the ambient environment to threaten health.
The U.S. found that getting lead out of gasoline actually improved our national IQ. Lead’s health effects were so pervasive, there was an almost-immediate improvement in health for the entire nation, especially children, when lead was removed. Denying the harms of tetraethyl lead in gasoline goes past junk science, to outright falsehood.
What is Milloy’s fascination with presenting deadly poisons as “harmless?” Why does he hate children so?
Why do publications not catch these hallucination-like errors and junk science promotions when he writes them?
Antidote to DDT poisoning in humans: Spread the facts:
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
Welcome, Pharyngulites!
March 29, 2010You’ll find one of the posts I mentioned at P.Z.’s house, here.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.