Typical leftist, wanting to silence those you disagree with.
DDT has never been found to be a threat to the environment. Study after study has proven this.
It is noteworthy that two years before he outlawed the pesticide, Ruckelshaus (in an August 31, 1970 U.S. Court of Appeals hearing) had stated unequivocally that “DDT has an amazing an exemplary record of safe use, does not cause a toxic response in man or other animals, and is not harmful. Carcinogenic claims regarding DDT are unproven speculation.”
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After seven months of hearings in 1971, which produced 125 witnesses and 9,362 pages of testimony, EPA Judge Edmund Sweeney concluded that according to the evidence:
“DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man ... is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man ... [and 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.”
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Just as empirical evidence discredits the notion that DDT led to a decline in bird populations, so do the facts contradict claims that the pesticide is harmful to humans and other animals. Said the director of the World Health Organization in 1969 (three years prior to the EPAÂ’s 1972 ban on DDT):
“DDT is so safe that no symptoms have been observed among the 130,000 spraymen or the 535 million inhabitants of sprayed houses [over the past 29 years of its existence]. No toxicity was observed in the wildlife of the countries participating in the malaria campaign. Therefore WHO has no grounds to abandon this chemical which has saved millions of lives, the discontinuation of which would result in thousands of human deaths and millions of illnesses. It has served at least 2 billion people in the world without costing a single human life by poisoning from DDT. The discontinuation of the use of DDT would be a disaster to world health.”
According to Dr. Philip Butler, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Sabine Island Research Laboratory, “92 percent of DDT and its metabolites disappear” from the environment within 38 days after they have been sprayed.
In 1985 the International Agency for Research on Cancer concluded that “DDT has had no significant impact on human cancer patterns and is unlikely to be an important carcinogen for man at previous exposure levels, within the statistical limitations of the data.”
In 1997 the New England Journal of Medicine stated, “Our data do not support the hypothesis that exposure to [DDT] and PCBs [polychlorinated biphenyls] increases the risk of breast cancer.”
In August 1998, the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine reported: “Data from three studies in four Midwestern states [Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas] showed no strong consistent evidence for an association between exposure to DDT and risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”
In June 1999, the journal Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention stated, “Even after 20 years of follow-up, exposure to relatively high concentrations of DDE or PCBs showed no evidence of contributing to an increased risk of breast cancer.”
One long-term study examined 35 workers who, for periods ranging from 9 to 19 years, were exposed to DDT levels that were 600 times greater than those to which average Americans were exposed; no ill effects were observed.
In another study of male subjects who voluntarily ingested 35 milligrams of DDT daily for nearly two years, the subjects “developed no adverse effects.”
According to the Journal of Cancer Research and Clinical Oncology, when primates were exposed to quantities of DDT that were more than 33,000 times greater than the average daily human exposure to the pesticide (as estimated in 1969 and 1972), the results were “inconclusive with respect to a carcinogenic effect of DDT in nonhuman primates.” Another study found that exposure to DDT reduced the size of tumors in animals.
“The scientific literature does not contain even one peer-reviewed, independently replicated study linking DDT exposures to any adverse health outcome [in humans],” said Dr. Amir Attaran, a malaria expert formerly employed by the World Health Organization and currently affiliated with Harvard University's Center for International Development.
Former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Harold M. Koenig said, “As far as I know, there is no known association between DDT or any other insecticide and cancer. To categorize [Rachel] Carson’s work as research is a big stretch. It was really just hysterical speculation.”
You've been lied to. The question is, now that you know the truth, will you continue to bitterly cling to the lies?