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The DDT right wing scam

 
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17736
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Mon Jan 02, 2023 10:14 pm    Post subject: The DDT right wing scam Reply with quote

I knew this was hinky when mrgybe first launched his attacks on environmentalists as "latte sipping liberals" who didn't care about those dying of disease in Africa. Now the full story has been told. You can find it here:

https:alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/2022-summer/the-man-who-loved-ddt/

I'll only post the salient parts. It is not clear to me whether gybe is part of the grift, or just so eager to believe the worst of liberals that he spreads it happily. It matters not, it's all a tissue of lies.

The DDT Ban didn’t stop Jukes’s crusade. Over the next several years, he wrote articles disparaging the “organic food cult” as well as the “propaganda” and “misinformation” it spread about the hazards of pesticides and other chemicals used in food production. They stirred up a level of controversy he was used to by now. They also caught the attention of Fredrick Stare, the widely revered founder of Harvard’s nutrition department.

Stare was writing a book with one of his star graduate students, Elizabeth Whelan, and Jukes’s arguments squared perfectly with what they wanted to say: that Americans’ food fears were irrational fads, unsupported by science. Their book, Panic in the Pantry, was published in 1975. Whelan was so good at promoting it that she soon had a syndicated radio show and nonstop invitations to write for popular magazines. She and Stare saw an opportunity: They founded an organization dedicated to advancing the ideas that chemicals in food and the environment were safe and that existing regulations on both needed to be rolled back. They called it the American Council on Science and Health.

ACSH got off the ground in 1978 with funding from a handful of conservative foundations devoted to moving the country’s politics to the right. Among them was the John M. Olin Foundation, whose founder was a longtime manufacturer of DDT. To establish ACSH’s scientific bona fides, Whelan and Stare gave ACSH a Scientific Advisory Board in addition to the standard Board of Directors. They invited Jukes to join both—as their “pesticide expert.” Despite not having carried out any pesticide research, Jukes readily joined the Scientific Advisory Board, along with Edwards and Borlaug.


Though Whelan and Stare initially touted ACSH as independent, within a few years, generous checks were coming in from a long list of companies, from Coca-Cola and Frito-Lay to Dow Chemical and Exxon. The companies valued the organization’s messaging: that pesticides, food dyes, artificial sweeteners, and other chemicals were perfectly safe, and that those claiming harm were untrustworthy alarmists.

A man named Roger Bate, head of a conservative think tank in Jukes’s native England, found the feud between the health and environmental scientists ripe for exploitation. He drafted a proposal for a media campaign to spread the message that DDT bans were the reason so many people were dying of malaria in Africa. The campaign, funded by the tobacco industry, painted environmentalists as self-serving and undercut public confidence in environmental regulations generally. It was enormously successful: In the early 2000s, journalists from the evening news to the New York Times reported that it was time, as Nicholas Kristof put it, “to spray DDT.” Some commentators were more strident, likening the ban, as Jukes long had, to genocide; some accused Rachel Carson of having caused more deaths than Hitler.

Jukes took on other crusades over the course of his career—against the teaching of creationism in schools, for example, and against Linus Pauling’s views on vitamin C. As gratified as he would have been to see his DDT defense find traction in the new millennium, though, he likely would have been taken aback by Big Tobacco’s role in it. Jukes championed the idea that DDT was safe; industry used his message to spread the idea that all environmental chemicals were safe. Jukes believed he was defending all of science in defending DDT—but the industry players who spread his message did so to undermine it. They called research like that documenting DDT’s harms to animals—and eventually people—“junk science.

There's those Exxon folks again. And the DDT manufacturers. Folks like Techno will insist that the credibility of the sources doesn't matter. He is wrong.
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techno900



Joined: 28 Mar 2001
Posts: 4161

PostPosted: Tue Jan 03, 2023 9:52 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Says Mac: "Now the full story has been told." - Hardly - it was banned in the US 50 years ago (with a rare exception - see below), and now some history for the uniformed.

Quote:
The History Of DDT Use

Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, popularly referred to as DDT, is an organochlorine that was first synthesized in 1874. It was first used as a pesticide in the 1940s to control mosquitos from spreading malaria among soldiers in the Second World War. DDT was effective in preventing malaria and other insect-borne human diseases. Through its use, the number of soldiers dying from malaria dropped from 400,000 in 1946 to less than 10 in 1950. DDT use was later adopted by the public who used it to control insects in crops, institutions, gardens, homes, and livestock. Due to the massive overuse of the pesticide, insects became resistant. To compensate for the resistance, people used a large amount of the pesticide. By the late 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had begun raising concern over the use of DDT due to the mounting evidence of the insecticide’s ineffectiveness and the increasing environmental and toxicological effects.

Banning DDT

In 1972, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a cancellation order for the pesticide due to the adverse effects it had on humans and wildlife, realizations that were brought to light by a book called Silent Spring by marine biologist Rachel Carson. Researchers also believed that there was a relationship between the pesticide and human reproduction after they discovered that it led to the development of liver tumors in animals. It began to come to light that DDT was a carcinogen.

In the decades since its ban in the US, the concentration of DDT in the environment has declined. However, much residue remains. After the product had been banned in the US, other nations particularly Hungary, Norway, Sweden and West Germany banned it from agricultural use. The UK banned the product in 1984 and by 1991, more than 26 countries had placed a total ban on the product. In 2004, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants restricted the use of DDT. 170 countries ratified the convention.

Is DDT Still Being Used?

Although the pesticide was banned in many countries, some countries in Africa, Asia, and South America needed the pesticide for mosquito control in order to reduce the risk of malaria. In 2006, WHO supported the indoor use of DDT in African countries where malaria remained a major challenge. The organization stated that the benefits of the pesticides to African countries outweighed the adverse effects it had on the environment. India and North Korea have continued the use of the pesticides for agricultural use despite the ban. Approximately 4,000 tons of DDT are produced annually for the vector control program. It is legal to manufacture DDT in the US, though it can only be exported for use in foreign nations. DDT can only be used in the US for public health emergencies, such as controlling vector disease. Today, DDT is manufactured in North Korea, India, and China. India remains the largest consumer of the product for vector control and agricultural use. China produces 4,500 metric tons of the product of which 80–90% is used to produce Dicofol, an acaricide. African countries do not use the product for agricultural purposes but countries such as Ethiopia, South Africa, Uganda, and Swaziland use it to control malaria.


https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/is-ddt-still-being-used.html
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