Undemocratic by Jay Sekulow

Author:Jay Sekulow
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Howard Books

The EPA’s Own War on Science: The Lessons of Banning DDT

Before I deal with the modern EPA, let me go back a bit—back to World War II and the introduction of a “miracle pesticide” called DDT.

Although it was first synthesized in 1874, DDT wasn’t used on a mass scale until the latter days of World War II. 17 While medicine had advanced greatly by the 1940s, the U.S. Army still faced prohibitive casualties from disease. In fact, disease is traditionally a more deadly killer in wartime than combating the enemy. In the Civil War, for example, far more Confederate and Union soldiers fell to diseases like typhoid and dysentery than they did to bullets—in even the war’s bloodiest battles.

In World War II, malaria was still a profound threat to American forces, claiming lives and health, as soldiers faced long, debilitating illnesses that sapped their strength and American fighting power. DDT, by killing the mosquitoes that carried malaria, promised relief.

But DDT—developed for American troops—also proved its worth helping civilians.

Italy surrendered to the Allies in September 1943, more than a year before the Allies finally conquered Nazi Germany, but that surrender hardly meant that Italy was out of the war. The German army occupied most of the Italian peninsula and—for the rest of the war—fought a fierce and savage defensive battle as it slowly retreated north toward the Italian Alps.

All along the way, the Germans brutalized the Italian population, in some cases engaging in what amounted to deliberate biological warfare by blowing up dikes and destroying public utilities—causing public sanitation to degrade, swarms of mosquitoes to descend, and triggering lice epidemics, with all the disease that follows.

The American army responded as it always has—by rushing to rescue the vulnerable and defenseless. Vast quantities of the new pesticide were shipped forward, citizens were dusted, newly created marshes were sprayed, and disaster was averted. Writing in the New Atlantis, here’s how Robert Zubrin described the reaction:

From now on, “DDT marches with the troops,” declared the Allied high command. The order could not have come at a better time. As British and American forces advanced in Europe, they encountered millions of victims of Nazi oppression—civilians under occupation, slave laborers, prisoners of war, concentration camp inmates—dying in droves from insect-borne diseases. But with the armies of liberation came squads spraying DDT, and with it life for millions otherwise doomed to destruction. The same story was repeated in the Philippines, Burma, China, and elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific theater. Never before in history had a single chemical saved so many lives in such a short amount of time. 18

DDT was so successful that Paul Müller, the chemist most responsible for its public use, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1948, with the Nobel committee declaring that he was responsible for preserving “the life and health of hundreds of thousands.” 19

When DDT went into widespread civilian use after World War II, the number of lives saved climbed from the hundreds of thousands to the millions.

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