EPA Pesticide Bans Threaten You and the Economy

by Alan Caruba, Contributing Author: When Rachel Carson’s book, “Silent Spring”, was published, filled with totally false claims about DDT, the Environmental Protection Agency looked it over and concluded she had used manipulated data. They concluded that DDT should not be banned, but its first administrator, William Ruckleshaus, overruled the agency and imposed a ban.

Ruckleshaus was a lawyer, not a scientist. He was also politically connected enough to hold a variety of government positions. He got the nod for the EPA job from John Mitchell, Nixon’s Attorney General who later went to jail for his participation in the Watergate cover-up.

Wikipedia says, “With the formation of EPA, authority over pesticides was transferred to it from the Department of Agriculture. The fledgling EPA's first order of business was whether to issue a ban of DDT. Judge Edmund Sweeney was appointed to examine the case and held testimony hearings for seven months. His conclusion was that DDT “is not a carcinogenic hazard to man" and that "there is a present need for the essential uses of DDT". However, Ruckelshaus (who had not attended the hearings or read the report himself) overruled Sweeney's decision and issued the ban nevertheless, claiming that DDT was a ‘potential human carcinogen.’” In 2008, having returned to the practice of law, he endorsed Barack Obama.

I cite this history from the 1970s because most people believe that the EPA operates on the basis of science and, from the beginning, that could hardly have been less true. It has evolved over the years into a totally rogue government agency issuing thousands of regulations with the intent to control virtually every aspect of life in America, from agriculture to manufacturing, and, in the case of pesticides, the effort to ban them all, always claiming that it was to protect public health.

Not killing pests, insects and rodents, is a great way to put everyone’s health in jeopardy. New York City announced a new war in May against rats and will spend $600,000 to hire new inspectors to deal with an increased population. Lyme disease and West Nile Fever are just two of the diseases that require serious insect pest control. A wide variety of insects spread many diseases from Salmonella to Hantavirus. Termites do billions in property damage every year.

Thanks to the EPA ban on DDT and the nations that followed the USA action, an estimated 60 million people have died from malaria since 1970 because it was and is the most effective way to control the mosquitoes that spread it, particularly in Africa. In the West, malaria had been eliminated thanks to the use of DDT before the ban.

In the 1980s I worked with the company that produced an extraordinary pesticide, Ficam that was applied with nothing more than water. Although it had gone through the costly process of securing EPA registration, the agency told the manufacturer it would have to do so again. Because the cost could not justify re-registration it was taken off the market in the USA, but continues to be used successfully for malaria control in more than sixteen nations in Sub-Saharan Africa and against the spread of Chagas, a tropical parasitic disease in Latin American nations. Ficam can be used to control a wide variety of insect pests. But not in the USA.

In 2000, the EPA, during the Clinton-Gore administration, announced that “a major step to improve safety for all Americans from the health risks posed by pesticides. We are eliminating virtually all home and garden use of Dursban—the most used household pesticide in the United States.” It was widely used because it did a great job of controlling a wide variety of insect pests, but the EPA preferred the pests to the human species it allegedly was “protecting.” The ban was directed against chlorpyrifos which the EPA noted was “the most commonly used pesticide in homes, buildings, and schools.” It was used in some 800 pest control products.

Recently I have been receiving notices from Friends of the Earth (FOE) announcing “a new effort to help save bees. “We need to ban bee-killing pesticides now!” says one of their emails, claiming that “A growing body of science shows that neonicotinoid (neonic) pesticides are a key contributor to bee declines.” This is an outright lie. As always, FOE’s claims are accompanied by a request for a donation.

Dr. Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, was a founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology. Recently, he disputed the White House’s creation of a Pollinator Health Task Force and a directive to the EPA to “assess the effect if pesticides, including neonicotinoids, on bee and other pollinator health and take action, as appropriate.” This is the next step—a totally political one—that will deny one of the most important pesticides to protect crops from being used. “This would have disastrous effects on modern farming and food prices,” warns Dr. Miller.

“Crafted to target pests that destroy crops, while minimizing toxicity to other species, neonics,” said Dr. Miller, “are much safer for humans and other vertebrates than previous pesticides…there is only circumstantial or flawed experimental evidence of harm to bees by neonics.”

“The reality is that honeybee populations are not decline,” noted Dr. Miller, citing U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization statistics. If anything is affecting bee populations worldwide it is the increasingly cold weather than has been occurring for the past 17 years as the result of a natural cooling cycle which is the result of less solar radiation from the Sun. The other threat to bee is Varroa mites and the “lethal viruses they vector into bee colonies.”

“A ban on neonics would not benefit bees, because they are not the chief source of bee health problems today.

But the Friends of the Earth who are no friends of the humans that live on it want to ban neonics and it is clear that the White House and the EPA are gearing up, for example, to induce a major reduction in crops such as Florida’s citrus industry which is subject to the Asian citrus psyllid, an insect that spreads a devastating disease of citrus trees. Other food crops are similarly affected by insect pests and the end result of a ban would severely damage the U.S. economy.

In every way possible the environmentalists—Greens—continue to attack the nation’s and the world’s food supply and the result of that will kill off a lot of humans. The EPA’s pesticide bans are not about protecting health. They are an insidious way of increasing sickness from an ancient enemy of mankind, insect and rodent pests.
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Alan Caruba is a writer by profession; has authored several books, and writes a daily column,  Warning Signs". He is a contributor to the ARRA News Service.

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