NOT THE SHARPEST KNIFE IN THE DRAWER: Silent Spring: Where Malaria Stalks Children, The Air Is Not Filled With The Sounds Of Them Playing In The Sun
Rachel Carson, the secular saint of environmentalism and author of the movement’s bible "Silent Spring" (1962), would have been 100 years old on May 27. A commemorative exhibit is being planned at the National Archives, among other venues, to celebrate the life of the woman whose work provided the rationale to ban the pesticide DDT worldwide. Writing for OpinionJournal.com, Katherine Mangu-Ward, associate editor at Reason magazine, re-examines Carson's legacy:
Some of Carson's star anecdotes about DDT's carcinogenic qualities turned out to be flawed: Her tale of "a housewife who abhorred spiders" spraying her basement in August and winding up dead of "acute leukemia" by October seems absurd to the modern reader, as does the man who winds up hemorrhaging in the hospital due to a "severe depression of the bone marrow" just "a short time" after spraying for roaches. Neither cancer could have been caused by DDT in so short a time.
Partly as a result of Carson's work, the U.S. banned DDT in 1972, around the same time as most of the developed world. In 2001, the Stockholm Convention, a global treaty, banned DDT as part of a "dirty dozen" of agricultural chemicals.
The convention contains a tightly circumscribed exception for continued public health use, but even that exception almost didn't make it into the final document. Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and more than 300 other environmental groups fought tooth and nail against it. …
To what effect? The World Health Organization now estimates that there are between 300 and 500 million cases of malaria annually, causing approximately one million deaths. About 80% of those are young children, millions of whom could have been saved over the years with the regular application of DDT to their environments [emphasis, The Stiletto].
Carson cannot be blamed directly for these deaths. She didn't urge total bans in "Silent Spring." Instead, on the single page obliquely acknowledging DDT as an anti-malarial agent, she writes, "Practical advice should be 'Spray as little as you possibly can' rather than 'Spray to the limit of your capacity.'"
In the National Archives exhibit, Carson is described as "a passionate voice for protecting the environment and human health." Her concerns about the effects of insect death on bird populations were well-founded. But threats to human health were central to her argument, and Carson was wrong about those. Despite massive exposure in many populations over several decades, there is no decisive evidence that DDT causes cancer in people, and it is unforgivable that she overlooked the enormous boon of DDT for malaria control in her own time.
Like global warming - let's ask the proponents of no-DDT to get their facts straight... I seem to recall reading that one of DDT's effects is actually to thicken egg shells, not thicken them. One could still argue that the chicks would have a harder time hatching, but they would EVOLVE stronger beaks etc.
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Oops...the second line should have read "to thicken egg shells, not make them THINNER."
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No worries. The Stiletto is not above typos and errant punctuation herself - and whenever readers let her know, she corrects such mistakes - even if the post is months old.
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