John Stossell, Captaining the Ship of Fools

        John Stossel apparently has a simplistic approach to op-ed. If anyone disagrees with a position he holds, his immediate response is to brand them “leftists.”  He did it defending $99 per bottled water sold by extortionate merchants in the wake of Hurricane Harvey and today he has decided anyone disagreeing with the general ban on DDT is also leftist.

        Also, as he frequently does, he spurns research, instead simply finding one other person who agrees with him (or appears to) and extrapolating that to a basic truth binding on all humanity.  Added to that is Stossel’s assertion that the true anti-science Americans are (here’s that word again)  “leftists” citing one author who may be the only person in the world who holds to Stossels’s opinion.

        Where to begin? Let’s start, as I did, by immediately recalling the Bush 43 administration's rapid move to ban any government funding of stem cell research. While I’d call that pretty damned “anti-science” Stossel’s confrere points out that even though all federal funding was cut, private researchers stepped up, so it doesn’t count. Yeah, John, it does, since the Republican administration, encouraged by the “Christian” right, was the massive moving force behind such legislation.

        Stossel devotes a fair amount of column space to slandering a dead woman – the late Rachel Carson, author of “The Silent Spring.”  He derogates her work, questioning her own four years of research, which he apparently simply doesn’t know is based on a mountain of post WW II research on DDT and other pesticides/carcinogens by a host of scientists. A short summary is necessary for those too young to have lived through it.

       

 The above photo pretty much sums up the problem generated by pesticide companies, who, like Big Tobacco would later, simply ignored and denied, when confronted with even the possibility that saturating the environment with DDT could possibly have any downside. The photo shows kids on a beach being subjected to clouds of DDT, suspected than and known absolutely now, to have the following specific properties as well as being a precursor to a host of other cancers:

Dr Suess "Flit" commercial. DDT was everywhere and on/in everything!

The USDA found DDT breakdown products in 60% of heavy cream samples, 42% of kale greens, 28% of carrots and lower percentages of many other foods.

DDT breakdown products were found in the blood of 99% of the people tested by CDC.

Girls exposed to DDT before puberty are 5 times more likely to develop breast cancer in middle age. 

       It should  be noted that Dr. Carson's work, focused on wildlife, as she was a marine biologist by training, but the human effects are just as alarming.

        Even with that damning evidence, DDT was not “banned” as Stossel implies, by “leftists, but by the Nixon administration, which also created the EPA by Nixon Executive order. Was he right to do so? Hell yes, he was; at the time streams like the Cuyahoga River, in Cleveland sometimes actually caught fire due to pools of floating refinery effluents. Lake Erie was almost dead, both of which conditions were alleviated and eventually remedied by EPA regulations. The Cuyahoga is clean, and the lake’s fishery is robust after years of decline pre-EPA. In fact, on balance, I consider the EPA Nixon’s finest hour, and maybe his only real legacy worth claiming. That is not to say that, they don’t ever “overregulate’ but every agency needs external watchdogs.  

          What Stossel omits, almost surely by intent, is the factual matter which frames the issue. There is a parallel here with another “banned” pesticide – Chlordane.

        Nothing kills termites like Chlordane……. that is, until it was banned in 1988 and safe, effective substitutes were soon found. Chlordane or the chemicals that chlordane changes into were found to accumulate in fish, birds, and mammals. Chlordane, carcinogenic like its decay products, stays in the environment for many years and is still found in food, air, water, and soil. Why? because like DDT, agriculturists operated, encouraged by the manufacturers of these poisons, on the premise that, “If a little is good against termites, why not use it on vegetables and fruits?” …and boy did they ever! Chlordane is still commonly found in some form in the fat of fish, birds, mammals, and almost all humans 30 years later! 

        The effects of DDT outlined above are significant to the point that public health concerns, accompanied by an ever-growing mountain of evidence, not, mind you any anti-science conspiracy, resulted in 2001 in a world-wide ban, by accords signed in Stockholm (damned Swedish Socialists!) Reading Stossel’s rant, one will find no evidence of any such global action, but there is a “rest of the story” also missing from his screed. While DDT is banned per the Stockholm accords and US policy that language is accompanied by one significant added caveat conveniently overlooked by John Stossel.  DDT is permitted for use for “public health and humanitarian” usage.

         Stossel mentions Malaria, a crisis illness in much of Africa, blaming it solely on lack of usage of DDT, which in truth could almost eradicate it.  There are several gaping omissions here, however.  

         First, if an African nation really wished to, it could still obtain and use DDT, as malaria is a (“the”) major public health concern in these nations. Why don’t they? Ask the leaders of these nations who live palatially while their people die of a preventable disease  

        Second, there are ongoing studies on many fronts, pesticidal, bacteriological and environmental (like cleaning up/’eliminating standing water and stocking small native fish which eat mosquito larvae.) All have exhibited some degree of success.  Combinations of these strategies have reduced malaria in some areas by more than 50%, but no strategy absent strong local government support (that damned “gummint” again!) will work, be it DDT, insecticide treated sleeping nets, any of a dozen other “approved” pesticides, or whatever.  

        Again, summarizing, John Stossel calls out “leftists” (his catchall label for anyone who disagrees with him) and smears Rachel Carson’s legacy while insulting her scientific creds. Here’s a dose of reality:  

          Attacks on Carson from groups like The Competitive Enterprise Institute and Africa Fighting Malaria portray DDT as the simple solution to malaria and blame Carson, often personally, for “millions of deaths in Africa.” Many of these DDT promoters are also in the business of denying climate change and defended the tobacco industry by denying the health harms of smoking. Folks, these cancer and climate deniers aren’t “Leftists” by any stretch. Their position seems to be that science is "good" if they profit from it, otherwise, Socialist bunk.

           Stossel’s apparent mantra is something like “Profits sighted, damn the consequences, full speed ahead, ship of fools.”