Is Zika a sign it’s time, again, for DDT?

By WND Staff

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WASHINGTON – The Zika virus, ravaging the world today, was eradicated before – in Brazil, of all places, where the Olympics today are taking place under watchful concern about its spread to so many international visitors.

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, notes that Brazil used DDT to knock out Zika during the 1950s and ’60s.

“They did it successfully but they did it in a way that would be almost non-feasible today – very heavy use of DDT,” he said recently. “So it can be done. But historically it was done in a way that might not be acceptable now.”

Of course, that raises an obvious question: Why wouldn’t it be acceptable today?

The answer, say experts, is simply politics and irrational public fears stoked by a popular environmentalist treatise published in 1962 – Rachel Carlson’s “Silent Spring.” The proven mosquito killer was banned in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1972 – even though it had saved the lives of tens of millions from malaria around the world.

Carlson convinced the public that DDT represented a threat to bald eagles. She attributed thinner eggshells to DDT spraying, though the evidence never persuaded many scientists.

Dr. Jane Orient is one of the voices urgently calling on renewed use of DDT spraying to fight the Zika plague. She got her B.A. in chemistry with honors, a B.S. in mathematics, summa cum laude at the University of Arizona, Tucson, in 1967, before earning her medical degree at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1974. She also serves as the managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons and is a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness.

Find about what the Bible has to say about health, in “Bible Health Secrets,” by Reginald Cherry.

“If we do nothing,” she says, “a lot of people will get Zika [and] some will get Guillain-Barre Syndrome, which causes a potentially fatal paralysis.”

Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control, she says, calls for not getting pregnant, wearing long-sleeve clothing and applying mosquito repellent.

But it’s not working very well, she says.

“I would say the biggest obstacle to Zika control is unwillingness to do adequate vector control, and refusal to even consider the weapon that worked in the past – DDT,” says Dr. Orient.

Created in 1874 by a German chemist, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane wasn’t found to be an effective insecticide until 1939 when Swiss chemist Paul Müller started publicizing its usefulness as an eradicator of mosquitoes and various vermin. Müller justifiably won the 1948 Nobel Prize “for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several anthropods.”

Use of DDT became widespread. Typhus that had ravaged U.S. forces during World War II was largely eliminated. In the United States, sickness and death caused by malaria shrank from 15,000 cases in 1947 to compete eradication by 1951. The use of DDT in Africa and elsewhere proved sensationally effective against malaria and other mosquito borne diseases.

Dr. Orient says DDT saved at least 500 million lives without killing anyone – except mosquitos.

“Current insecticides are less effective, far more expensive, and far more toxic – both to humans and the environment,” she says. “After widespread massive overuse use in agriculture, we know a lot about DDT. It was not killing off the birds. DEET, recommended by the CDC, is probably more harmful.”

Less than a century since DDT was first sprayed, the spread of the Zika virus through mosquitoes has left others wondering whether regulators were too quick to move away from the chemical.

“It’s a difficult question, and it’s a very controversial question,” says Jonathan Chevrier, an assistant professor at McGill University, of how policymakers weigh the use of DDT to protect public health. “What the Zika virus is potentially doing is terrible. But using any pesticide needs to be considered very, very carefully.”

Jillian Kay Melchior, political editor at Heat Street and a fellow with the Independent Women’s Forum, is not so equivocal.

“The Zika virus outbreak makes it clearer than ever: It’s time to end the ban on DDT – a ban that was never sensible in the first place, but now is downright unjustifiable,” she wrote in the New York Post. “Unfortunately, alarmism has led to a decades-long ban on the most effective pesticide against the disease-spreading mosquito, even though science has proven it reasonably safe. Mosquitoes are responsible for more deaths than any other creature on Earth.”

DDT kills mosquitoes most effectively; in the 1960s, the National Academy of Sciences said that “to only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT,” adding that it had prevented as many as the 500 million death cited by Dr. Orient.

She attributes the ban to environmental hysteria in the early 1970s – when the first Earth Day was declared.

“Numerous studies directly contradicted environmentalists’ claims that the chemical caused cancer,” she wrote. “Likewise, thousands of studies examining other purported health risks produced results that were ‘weak, inconclusive or contradictory; in other words there is no evidence of harm,’ Namibian health minister Richard Nchabi Kamwi noted in the Wall Street Journal.”

She adds: “Yet Carson’s junk science won out, and not just in the United States.”

“Globally, discouraged use of DDT has come at enormous human cost,” she wrote. “Dr. Rutledge Taylor’s documentary estimated that the DDT ban could be linked to as many as 1.5 million unnecessary deaths a year.”

Malaria was nearly wiped out by DTT, but in a 2001 study published by the London-based Institute for Economic Affairs, “Malaria and the DDT Story,” Richard Tren and Roger Bate found that “Malaria is a human tragedy,” adding, “Over 1 million people, mostly children, die from the disease each year, and over 300 million fall sick.”

Some actually applauded the DDT ban because it saved so many lives.

Alexander King, founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome, wrote in a biographical essay in 1990: “My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.”

Dr. Charles Wurster, one of the major opponents of DDT, is reported to have said, “People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this (referring to malaria deaths) is as good a way as any.”

Dr. Orient reminds that “extensive hearings were held on DDT before an Environmental Protection Agency administrative law judge, Edmund Sweeney, who concluded in 1972, ‘DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man. … DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man … the uses of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife.'”

“But the EPA hearing examiner was overruled by EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus – a lawyer and politician, not a scientist,” she says. “He reportedly did not attend a single hour of the seven months of hearings, nor did he read any of the transcripts, according to aides.”

In fact, according to Orient, the latest scientific study on DDT, published in 1985, found no correlation between DDT and cancer. A 1972 study actually found it reduced tumors in animals.

Nevertheless, even those calling for the return of DDT in the fight with Zika are not optimistic about a change in the political climate.

After all, it only saved 500 million lives – human, that is.

Find about what the Bible has to say about health, in “Bible Health Secrets,” by Reginald Cherry.

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