Jon Christian Ryter

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From The Mailbag

20 years

October 8, 2002

     In 1962 Rachel Carson wrote a book entitled "Silent Spring" in which she hypothesized that pesticides, in particular, DDT, caused high instances of leukemia and liver tumors in mice and that it caused eggshell thinning in birds (who are the major predator of insects worldwide). Carson's book, heavily promoted by the Rockefeller Foundation and, thus, the liberal media, and the Rockefeller-Carnegie endowed World Wildlife Fund (the world's largest anti-human environmentalist group) trumpeted Carson's book as the most authoritative work on pesticides in the world.
     Carson, an ecological extremist who was cited constantly by Al Gore in his own ecoalarmist book, Earth In The Balance, claimed that DDT was so dangerous that, eventually, through the thinning of egg shells of birds, that entire species of birds would become extinct and Biblical plagues of insects would destroy all of the food crops of the world causing mass starvation within decades. Carson, with a degree in marine biology, was not an expert in pesticides nor was she an expert in non-marine life. She was simply an ecoalarmist whose "time" had come. She served the needs of the Rockefeller Foundation which was convinced that the world was overpopulated and that mankind was using up the Earth's resources--both foods and fuels--too rapidly. The Rockefeller Foundation decided to capitalize on Carson's unscientific views the same way they capitalized on the flawed 1968 work of Paul Ehrlich: The Population Bomb in which another unqualified author claimed that by the year 2000, half of the world would be dying of starvation and the other half would be killing each other for what little food existed. Once again Ehrlich's book was heavily promoted as fact by the liberal media, and thousands of copies of it were purchased by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and the Carnegie Trust and given to schools to use as a factual text book.
     In the case of Carson's Silent Spring, the environmentalists touted the book as fact to such a degree that pressure was successfully applied by the media on Congress to hold hearings on whether DDT and several other pesticides should be banned.
     DDT was invented at the end of World War II from a formula used by the Swiss to kill moths. DDT became the safest and most effective pesticide against the world's war on mosquitoes and mosquito-carried viruses and plagues. The World Health Organization has stated that DDT is attributed to saving hundreds of millions of lives in the thirty year period that it was used universally, with as many as 5 million people per year being saved from mosquito-carried plagues in the emerging nations. The synthesizer of DDT, Dr. Paul Mueller, received the Nobel Peace Prize for medicine in 1948. Thanks to Mueller, crop yields grew substantially and millions of people who would have otherwise died, lived.
     The United States Congress, greatly pressured by lobbyists for the oil giants, the Rockefeller, Ford, and Pew Foundations and the Carnegie Trust, banned the use of DDT in 1970. This was against the argument of the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Science in the United States and the Environmental Protection Agency who argued that "sound science" found no evidence that DDT is a carcinogenic hazard to man, nor they insisted, is there any evidence that DDT causes eggshell thinning in birds. After seven months of hearings and over 9,000 pages of recorded testimony, the scientific community in the United States concluded that "...DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard...The use of DDT under the regulations involved...does not have a deterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or the wildlife."
     The EPA judge who heard the case (interestingly, Congress managed to keep the issue out of the federal court system thereby limiting the media coverage and investigation by interested parties other than environmental groups) issued findings that concluded that: "...sound science...gave in to special interest pressure..." and brought about the ban of DDT. The judge said: "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. In a little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that otherwise would have been inevitable."The chemophobics won.
     The third world lost.
     Today, one in every 20 children in sub-Sahara Africa die from malaria. In the jungles of southern Asia, the death rate from mosquito carried viruses is thought to be much higher although no accurate records exist to accurately gauge the death toll. If DDT was still being used, none of those children would have died--at least, not from a mosquito-borne illness.

Chemophobia
Chemophobics like Rachel Carson won the battle against DDT. While the ecoalarmists view Carson as a hero, her face is the visage of the grim reaper to millions of third world children who have fallen victim to mosquito-borne diseases. Carson, who claimed she was only trying to save the birds from extinction by banning pesticides, has inadvertently caused the death of millions of birds worldwide. Birds, which are the most fragile members of the ecosystem, are easy prey for mosquitoes. Millions of birds each year die from bacterial or viral infections caused by mosquito bites. Carson, who has become an icon of the left for her battle to protect birds single-handedly caused th

e deaths of millions of these feathered friends of mankind by making them victims of the insects which they feed upon.

Mosquito Plagues
In 1793 a Yellow Fever plague struck Philadelphia. Ten percent of Philadelphia's population died. Five thousand five hundred people out of Philadelphia's 55 thousand residents perished because nobody knew that Yellow Fever was spread by mosquitoes. In 1853 a Yellow Fever plague hit New Orleans. Twenty thousand died. In 1878 another epidemic, claiming another 20 thousand. During the American Civil War over 10 thousand Union soldiers died from malaria. Malaria was the leading cause of death of the workers who built the Panama Canal, with over a thousand construction workers contracting the disease during the "ditch digging" in the Isthmus of Panama. When DDT began to be mass produced in 1946, 2.7 million per year were dying just from malaria alone.

West Nile Virus
     Contrary to the idiots who claim that the West Nile Virus was "invented" by the U.S. Military at Fort Detrick, Maryland and given to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s to use against the Shi'ites in Iran, West Nile was first identified in a woman in the West Nile District of Uganda in 1937. West Nile fever comes from the flaviviridae family of viruses that contain lipoprotein coverings. This type of virus is more unstable than almost any other type of virus and is easier to kill with disinfectants and mild pesticides. West Nile is an arbovirus (meaning it is a virus that can only be transmitted by insects, thus eliminating the fantasy created by those who see West Nile as a "secret weapon" created by the military and tested by Saddam Hussein against both the Iranians and the Kurds). West Nile first appeared in the United States in 1999--in New York City. Before the first epidemic waned, seven people died and over 30% of all the birds in the Bronx Zoo died.
     When West Nile first appeared in the United States, researchers at the National Institute of Medicine declared in a press release that "...the primary goal at the onset of mosquito-borne disease epidemics is to eliminate the infective mosquitoes as quickly as possible. Transmission can only be stopped by the effective application of a pesticide that kills adult mosquitoes."
     Pressure applied by environmental chemophobes (usually citing Rachel Carson's book as authoritative proof that pesticides are killers) has curtailed the use of pesticides to kill the mosquitoes before an epidemic is facing the community or the nation. That's what happened in August, 2001 when West Nile mosquitoes were discovered in East Meadow and Hempstead, New York.
     While the Long Island, New York Health Department initially wanted to spray the communities to kill the mosquitoes, chemophobic politicians were intimidated by anti-spray activists who then pressured the health officials, who buckled. After intervention by local environmental activists, the Health Department announced that they believed "The risk of infection for residents remains quite low," and used that statement to justify doing nothing. Adeline Bisignano and Karl Fink, who lived in East Meadow, believed the health officials and went about life not realizing that because the Health Department allowed itself to be intimidated by the chemophobe activists, their lives would end.
     Both were bitten by West Nile mosquitoes.
     Both died.
     Today most Americans shudder at the words "West Nile Virus." Tomorrow they will become petrified when they hear the phrases "Japanese Encephalitis," "Rift Valley Fever," and "Ross Valley Fever." All three are headed for the United States. There is a vaccine today that will cure Japanese encephalitis but there is no vaccine, nor any cure for either Rift Valley or Ross Valley Fever. Both are fatal diseases. All three are mosquito-borne viruses. All three can be easily eradicated with DDT or several other forms of pesticides.
     The problem is that within the liberal bureaucracy of government in the United States, the chemophobes control political policy. Their view is that if any portion of Rachel Carson's views are even remotely possible, the toll in human life notwithstanding, then a complete ban on all pesticides must stand.
     If the ban on DDT remains in effect much longer, mankind will soon find itself wishing to return to the days when all they had to worry about was the West Nile virus.