It is certainly correct that many of Carson's claims about the environmental effects of DDT cannot be substantiated. Carson, who had trained as a biologist but made a career as a nature journalist, was interested in raising public awareness of the deterioration of the environment through industrial products, at a time when such ideas were novel and went against the general belief in scientific progress at all cost. She was successful to such a degree that her book is now widely considered to mark the beginning of the environmental movement. That she argued her case with wild exaggerations and several wrong claims may be understandable for someone who can see the future of a world with an unrestrained chemical industry but is met with hostility wherever she goes, but that does not exonerate her from having employed dishonest means.
Edwards' claim of scientific fraud is another matter. As Edwards reports himself, the DDT hearing of the EPA, which lasted seven months, came to the conclusion that DDT does not pose a threat to human or animal health and recommended to allow its use as a pesticide; but the recommendation was overruled by the EPA Administrator, who had links with an environmental group. There was thus no scientific fraud: Science came to the correct conclusion. The fault lay with the administration, i.e. in the political domain.
Edwards' paper is not completely free from misleading claims. It focuses on DDT use for mosquito control in malaria eradication, describes the early successes with DDT spraying between 1945 and 1960 and says: "After the U.S. ban on DDT, there is a global malaria burden of 300 to 500 million cases and 1 to 2.5 million deaths annually, mostly among young children. Malaria kills an African child every 30 seconds." As Edwards describes it, the ban on DDT can only be seen as a crime against humanity.
This picture is far from the truth for several reasons:
- The use of DDT for malaria control represented a very small proportion of general DDT use of the 1950s and 1960s. Widespread use of DDT in agriculture, while possibly of no harm to humans, can only increase resistance to it and is therefore only a temporary gain, while the quantity of DDT in the environment accumulates. DDT is very persistent in the environment, and the low doses recommended by the EPA science assessment may eventually be exceeded by large amounts.
- The ban on DDT refers only to agricultural use; its use in malaria control has always been permitted. The World Health Organization recommends DDT for indoor spraying, a use that was formally included in the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants in May 2004, 6 months before Edwards' paper was published. (Indoor spraying – the coverage of walls and ceilings with a thin DDT layer - prevents mosquitoes entering buildings but does not kill them; it acts as a barrier between mosquitoes and humans.)
- The claim that continued use of DDT would have saved millions of lives cannot be verified. Many mosquito populations have developed resistance to DDT (in Sri Lanka, India and many other countries as early as 10 years before DDT was banned). Effective malaria control now requires the use of alternatives such as pyrethroids (synthetic chemical compounds that emulate the natural chemical pyrethrins produced by certain Chrysanthemum flowers and are used in many insect repellents). Ironically, the rapid loss of effectiveness in the 1960s was mainly the result of agricultural DDT spraying, which used much larger quantities than malaria control. This suggests that DDT effectiveness for malaria control could have been maintained much longer if agricultural use of DDT would have been banned 20 years earlier.
References:http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
Carson R. (1962): Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, Mass.
Edwards, J. G. (2004): DDT: a case study in scientific fraud. Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 9 (3), 83-88; available as PDF file.
World Health Organization (2004): WHO position on DDT use in disease vector control under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. WHO/HTM/RBM/2004.53 rev.1, available as PDF file
More information and debate at http://timlambert.org/category/science/ddt
4 comments:
It is certainly correct that many of Carson's claims about the environmental effects of DDT cannot be substantiated.
I don't find that to be true at all. Quite the contrary, I can't think of any claim she made that has not been corroborated overwhelmingly in the years since.
Did you have one in mind?
Oh, this isn't accurate, either:
Edward's claim of scientific fraud is another matter. As Edwards reports himself, the DDT hearing of the EPA, which lasted seven months, came to the conclusion that DDT does not pose a threat to human or animal health and recommended to allow its use as a pesticide; but the recommendation was overruled by the EPA Administrator, who had links with an environmental group. There was thus no scientific fraud: Science came to the correct conclusion. The fault lay with the administration, i.e. in the political domain.
Judge Sweeney determined that DDT is probably carcinogenic, and certainly deadly to animals other than insects. Sweeney determined that the registration for agricultural use was reasonable, assuming the rules then in effect which would have banned DDT from use on cotton, and otherwise severely restricted DDT use. In short, if all the abuses were stopped, DDT wasn't a huge problem.
But two federal courts had already ordered EPA to look at human health effects and end the danger. Allowing the danger to continue, even in a reduced state, was not allowed under the court rulings.
Sweeney wrote that, as a matter of law, he did not have the authority to ban DDT, since it was a useful chemical and it could be controlled. Ruckelshaus overruled Sweeney on that part.
Science's conclusion, as the Sweeney record clearly shows, was that DDT was dangerous and damaging, and once released in the wild, uncontrollable. Sweeney ruled he lacked authority to act against it; Ruckelshaus overruled Sweeney on that point, but stuck with Sweeney's findings.
Discover magazine noted a few weeks ago that more than 1,000 studies since 1962 have corroborated and strengthened Rachel Carson's carefully researched claims. Her science was solid then, and still is.
It is good to get responses from people who may know more detail about the issues contained in my lectures (which after all cover some 5000 years of science, so I cannot know every issue in detail) than I.
From my study of the literature it seems to me that the thinning of egg shells, observed in the 1970s and quoted by Carson as evidence of deleterious effects from DDT, was not convincingly shown to be the result of DDT in the environment; many other pollutants could have been responsible.
As far as Ed's second comment is concerned, I was not talking about Judge Sweeney's statements but about the statements that came out of the science hearing. It may be that those statements included some concern about DDT, but not an overwhelming major concern. In any case, the issue here is whether the process of banning DDT was based on scientific fraud, and I repeat: There was no scientific fraud involved. The problem was the political administration, not science.
It should be clear from my arguments on Edwards' paper that I do not support the lifting of the ban on DDT; on the contrary, I think that it should have occurred much earlier.
Carson didn't write about eggshell thinning. The mechanisms by which DDT kills birds were not well understood when she wrote Silent Spring. Carson offered only the research then available that showed DDT killed birds.
Eggshell thinning was studied in the late 1960s, and the papers establishing that it was a killer especially of predator birds at the top of food chains were published in the middle 1970s. Carson died in 1964.
I repeat, I can find nothing in Carson's writings that was not firmly established at the time she wrote, nor has any of those claims been demonstrated inaccurate by research since. You may want to check out the research into Carson's accuracy by the President's Science Advisory Council. President Kennedy asked them to check Carson's book out; their report was published on May 15, 1963, and it verified Carson's findings.
Judge Sweeney was the administrative law judge who presided at EPA's "science" hearings. As a matter of law here in the U.S., had Sweeney not accurately summarized the science, his opinion would have been overturned on later appeal. In the two appeals of EPA's final rule, no one ever questioned Sweeney's findings on the science.
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