Remember all those environmental activist reports that cropped up around Earth Day, alleging that prenatal exposure to certain pesticides will decrease your child’s IQ? Well, ACSH’s Dr. Gilbert Ross was sufficiently disturbed by the hype that he quickly decided to compose an op-ed pointing out the overwhelming body of evidence attesting to the safety of these pesticides for agricultural use. Dr. Ross further underscores that these environmental groups also attack the anti-malaria pesticide DDT:
They don’t care that their politically based prohibition of DDT has led directly to the needless deaths of perhaps 50 million human beings, mostly women and children under the age of five in sub-Saharan Africa. The ban spared those of us in malaria-free North America and Europe, lands where superior sanitation and DDT had already done their job. Worst of all, DDT has been shown, over and over again, to be a safe chemical, free of the heinous but fallacious charges leveled against it by Rachel Carson and her acolytes. Activists calling themselves “environmentalists” continue to agitate against DDT’s use; yet, when used as part of a multi-tiered approach, DDT could finally help to eradicate malaria and other insect-borne diseases.
The attack on organophosphates, DDT, BPA, mercury, biotech, and more springs from the same environmentalist agenda—if there’s a shade of a doubt of a substance’s safety, ban it, never mind the consequences—which supersedes science and petty human concerns and is to be promulgated by any means necessary.
The attack on organophosphates, DDT, BPA, mercury, biotech, and more springs from the same environmentalist agenda—if there’s a shade of a doubt of a substance’s safety, ban it, never mind the consequences—which supersedes science and petty human concerns and is to be promulgated by any means necessary.
Be sure to read Dr. Ross’ earth-friendly — and people-friendly — piece in today’s The American, a publication of the American Enterprise Institute.