Deadly Green
HEMINGWAY, MARK
Deadly Green In his final days Clinton protected vermin a lot more dangerous than Marc Rich BY MARK HEMINGWAY B ill Clinton's most wanton closing act had nothing to do with pardoning tax cheats...
...Before long, the rest of the industrialized world followed suit...
...Worse, it reaffirms the widespread belief among the world's politicians that there is just no saying no to Green idiocy, no matter how deadly...
...agreement will do, even with the U.S...
...Deadly Green In his final days Clinton protected vermin a lot more dangerous than Marc Rich BY MARK HEMINGWAY B ill Clinton's most wanton closing act had nothing to do with pardoning tax cheats or drug dealers...
...So it was included in the Persistent Organic Pollutants treaty, approved by over 120 countries, now ignominiously including the U.S...
...Armed with new charges that DDT is an "endocrine disrupter"—a laughably vague dragnet describing a myriad of health problems—a coalition of 260 environmental groups including Greenpeace, Worldwide Fund for Nature and the Physicians for Social Responsibility made a ban on DDT a top priority for the United Nations Environmental Program...
...a handful of developing nations will be allowed to continue using DDT for now...
...with hundreds of millions more taken ill and sentenced to lifelong recurrences since there is no cure...
...reading Silent Spring in high school is still a formation rite for growing Greens...
...Kilamanjaro...
...Within three years a resistant strain of mosquitoes began invading a province in South Africa that had not seen malarial mosquitoes since the 1940s...
...aboard...
...Wealthy countries in the temperate zone had little to lose, as they are notoriously short on malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquitoes...
...Agency for International Development soon started blackmailing countries that do have lots of the mosquitoes into banning the insecticide, on pain of losing their foreign aid...
...the literature has not even one peer reviewed, independently replicated study linking exposure to DDT with any adverse health outcome...
...Malaria deaths reached an all time high in Africa last year...
...Given the already strenuous anti-DDT pressure from the U.S...
...Bizarrely, the case against DDT depends almost entirely on one rather embarrassing (for the author) book, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the 1962 tearjerker that passionately and imaginatively argued DDT was harming birds and other wildlife...
...perhaps they thought it was an endangered species...
...Malaria, alas, not only thrives on poverty, it causes it...
...Anti-DDT sentiment reached a fever pitch in 1971, when a seven month long trial was held before an EPA administrative judge...
...The crusades, however, are not...
...Carson had no real evidence and none has turned up since...
...But they will be burdened by costly regulations that are no small matter for desperately poor African nations whose total annual government expenditures on all health programs may amount to a few dollars per person...
...not one has turned 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ April 2001 out to be nearly as effective, or, crucially, affordable...
...By 1961 there were fewer than 500,000 new cases reported...
...Inevitably Al Gore wrote the introduction to the 30th anniversary edition...
...In a recent article in the British Medical Journal, Amir Attran of Harvard and Rajendra Maharaj of the South African Department of Health concluded: "Although hundreds of millions (and perhaps billions) of people have been exposed to raised concentrations of DDT...
...The ban on DDT was never universal...
...DDT was not "a hazard to man...
...Once nearly eradicated, the disease now kills some 2.7 million people a year...
...The resurgence of the disease is entirely due to restrictions on DDT...
...In 1996, for example, under pressure from environmental groups, the national malaria control program in South Africa abandoned DDT in favor of an experiThe scientific literature has not even one peer-reviewed study linking DDT to any adverse health outcome...
...Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, examining the disease's cost and effects on productivity, suggests that the GNP of sub-Saharan Africa would be nearly a third higher today had malaria been wiped out in 1965...
...it is not clear how much more damage the U.N...
...He concluded freedom, and science under wraps, the U.S...
...Quickly the disease mounted a comeback worthy of our ex-President...
...South Africa went back to using DDT, and the problem is subsiding...
...So needless are these deaths, given DDT's effectiveness, that Dr.Wenceslaus Kilama, chairman of the Malaria Foundation International, compares the malaria epidemic to "filling up seven Boeing 747 airliners every day and then deliberately crashing them into Mt...
...DDT opponents are always full of news about brand-new DDT substitutes...
...The number of cases increased nearly seven-fold...
...Johns Hopkins just concluded the most recent of eight independent studies which failed to connect DDT and breast cancer...
...But the treaty affirms a deadly policy and encourages the belief that truth is no defense against the Greens, a point the Bush administration might usefully dispute...
...mental program utilizing more expensive insecticides...
...ban on "Persistent Organic Pollutants," which would outlaw a number of lifesaving chemical agents on dubious environmental grounds, will contribute to the deaths of millions of people...
...In Sri Lanka, after 20 years of spraying, annual cases dropped from 2.8 million to only 17...
...At various times it has been portrayed as a threat to wildlife, a carcinogen, a mutagen and various other unpleasant things, all the while without scientific proof...
...His quiet decision to sign the U.N...
...DDT has long been banned by the United States and other industrial countries for fear that, well, they're not really sure...
...So naturally Nixon's EPA administrator, William Ruckelshaus, a supporter of the Environmental Defense Fund, banned its use in the U.S...
...or other wildlife...
...The ban is still not total...
...But its publication was a landmark event in the history of modern environmental-ism...
...True to its mission of imposing all the most feckless ideas of Western liberals on the Third World, while keeping capitalism, "Bob's very intelligent, but it's a covert intelligence...
...This is because old DDT substitutes never work...
...The most conspicuous victim of the UN agreement is the already devastat-ingly restricted insecticide DDT, used to control malarial mosquitoes...
...In 1951, when India began spraying with DDT, 75 million cases of malaria a year were reported, with nearly a million 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ April 2001 deaths...
Vol. 34 • April 2001 • No. 3
