ENVIRONMENTALISM KILLS: WEST NILE FEVER SPREADS
By Alan Caruba
August 10, 2002
NewsWithViews.com
It has taken a scant three and a half years since West Nile Fever made its appearance in New York State and has spread to States west of the Mississippi River. It has killed five people in Louisiana and a state of emergency has been declared to fight it with widespread spraying of insecticide.
Centers for Disease Control director, Julie Gerberding, was reported by the Associated Press saying "officials should spray for mosquitoes as much as possible", noting that people shouldn't worry that pesticides being used to kill mosquitoes pose a health threat. "There are very, very few if any health consequences. Basically they're safe and the risks they present are outweighed by the benefits of reducing the mosquito population."
The one insecticide not available is DDT, banned on June 30, 1972 by then director William Ruckelshouse without a scintilla of scientific evidence to support its loss. Here's the scary part, behind closed doors, the American Mosquito Control Association fears this nation will lose virtually all of the insecticides still available to defend people against the new plague of West Nile Fever and the return of Malaria to the US. Will Yellow Fever return as well?
You can blame the environmentalists for this and you can lay the deaths from West Nile Fever at their doorstep. You can blame their icon, Rachel Carson, author of "Silent Spring", for misusing data to make her case against DDT. She is personally responsible for the needless deaths of millions of people around the world.
You can blame the US Environmental Protection Agency that ignored the findings of hearings held in 1971-72 which concluded, after seven months and 9,000 pages of testimony, that "DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man. DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to me. The use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife."
The Greens are never deterred by facts. Their goal is to reduce the Earth's human population in order to "protect" and "save" it.
How bad is the toll of Malaria in the world today? Harvard University's Amir Attaran offered the following comparison. "Imagine seven jumbo jets, each packed with women and children, crashing into the ground every day, day after day, year after year, adding up to more than two million deaths a year. Now imagine that many, if not most, of those deaths could have been prevented with limited use of DDT" Malaria, spread by mosquitoes in the same fashion as West Nile Fever, is contracted by 300 to 500 million people very year. And every year, at least two million die from it, mostly pregnant women and children under the age of five.
Now the question is this: how many more Americans will have to die from West Nile Fever before the EPA reverses its ban on DDT and permits its use to defend people against a new disease sweeping across the nation? The "unintended consequences" of environmentalism are killing people and will continue to do so until their lies are buried along with their victims.
© 2002 Alan Caruba - All Rights Reserved
Alan Caruba writes a weekly column, "Warning Signs", posted on
www.anxietycenter.com, the web site of The National Anxiety Center, a clearinghouse for information about scare campaigns.