It took Ed Darrell a good half-dozen emails in which he has called Steven Milloy a liar to actually provide a concrete example within a piece of correspondence. The drought has now ended, however, and an example has been given.
Here, try this one; Milloy says:
6. “To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT… In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable.”
[National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Research in the Life Sciences of the Committee on Science and Public Policy. 1970. The Life Sciences; Recent Progress and Application to Human Affairs; The World of Biological Research; Requirements for the Future.]
Now, if you know anything about mathematics, that should get your hackles up. 500 million lives saved? Malaria kills about a million people a year by most estimates — that would be 500 years of deaths. It’s 250 years of deaths if we go for a doubling the usual death rate. Of course, DDT has been used for only 50 years. So Milloy is arguing that 10 million people a year die from malaria.
Obviously that figure is wrong. YOu can see it. Milloy knows it, too (since I sent him the math). But of course, he might rely on the NAS as a source — which he would, I’m sure, if he were an honorable man who gave a whit about the honor of a 14-year old Boy Scout — but
he doesn’t.
The publication is available on line. Sure enough, NAS goofed.
But you need to read the entire publication. Milloy presents it as the NAS agreeing with his view that Carson was in error. NAS takes the opposite position. They argue that Carson is right, and that she was right to urge more research to find a replacement for DDT, since,
in their estimation DDT use provided some value.
You can read my criticism, with citations, here: http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2007/08/09/fisking-junk-
sciences-campaign-against-ddt-point-6/
NAS calls DDT “the poster child” of chemcials that are hazardous.
Is that Milloy’s point?
All one needs to do is pay atetntion to the headlines. Milloy ignores them. I ask that you be more honest than Milloy. He’s a lost cause in my book.
President Kennedy’s Council of Science Advisors reveiwed Carson’s findings, and they recommended to Kennedy that he act sooner rather than waiting as Carson had proposed, because the chemicals including DDT were more dangerous than Carson had alleged.
Why doesn’t Milloy mention that? I don’t know.
But I think you are duty bound to act more honorably than Milloy. Why don’t you mention it? Why don’t you mention the 1,000 studies that verify Carson’s claims, and refute Milloy’s?
I’ve given you the pointers. Check the citations — not just to see if they exist, but to see if they verify what Milloy says. Lazy academics is equal to academic fraud in this case. Don’t be lazy about it.
First, let’s be clear — malarial death rates are on the order of approximately 2.7 million a year, not the 1 million Ed notes above. Of course, that is still far short of the 10 million a year that would be necessary to achieve the 500 million saved that the NAS erroneously quoted.
And yes, Milloy does quote the NAS report as a source, and so makes mention of the 500 million. Within that limited scope, Milloy is indeed incorrect, but only insofar as he quoted another source that was incorrect. And the scope of the error is likewise narrow; the 500 million figure could be dismissed as hyperbole, and the fact that it is not an accurate number in no way argues against what would seem to be the concrete fact that DDT usage, in its day, did prevent millions of malaria-related deaths.
And here we have to ask, I think, what Steven Milloy’s true intent in posting the quotation from the National Academy of Sciences study was; was he intending to hold up the 500 million number as accurate, or was he merely citing one more study which asserted that yes, DDT usage in an anti-malarial role saves many lives? I’m a charitable guy; I tend to believe that the latter possibility is Milloy’s probable rationale.
Ed does correctly point out that the NAS ultimately did side with Rachel Carson’s conclusions about a rollback in DDT usage, and I’ve said before that even I’m not in favour of willy-nilly use the stuff. But here’s an interesting question: can people, even when they start out well, still get things wrong? Richard Dawkins argues in favour of the theory of evolution, and I think he does very well at it; strictly on the science, I agree with him. But Richard Dawkins ultimately draws out of that otherwise very excellent science a conclusion that God is just a delusion, and that organized Religion is a form of child abuse. Is he still right, despite the fact that his science is impeccable?
No, of course he is not. So what I wonder is this: the NAS acknowledged that DDT played a valuable role in combatting malaria, and that it was because DDT was so damnably effective at killing or driving away mosquitos that millions of malarial deaths were being prevented world-wide thanks to its use. But in the end, they sided with Rachel Carson and argued in favour of diminishing the use of DDT. Could they too have made the transition from right-minded to wrong-minded somewhere? It’s certainly possible, isn’t it?
And maybe Steven Milloy had no other intent in quoting the NAS source than to suggest exactly that. Or maybe he had very malicious reasons. Ed certainly attributes malice to Milloy’s actions. But then, Ed is himself biased.
The fact is, the NAS is, I don’t think, correct in calling DDT the “poster child” of hazardous chemicals, first and foremost because that sort of statement is rhetorical, not academic. Certainly, it is not a scientific statement. And as some of the articles of Milloy’s that I found sources for note, the claim that DDT is über-harmful seems more and more questionable, as several studies have now demonstrated no identifiable connection between DDT concentration in the body and rates of cancer development.
Ed claims that there are a thousand studies that confirm Carson’s claims. Personally, I don’t see them — certainly Ed doesn’t link to all of them (in fact, between the two incredibly lengthy articles of his that I have now linked to, he links to very few studies indeed). I’ve found, within half an hour, eight studies that suggest that DDT isn’t as harmful, to humans at least, as was previously thought. Given more time, is it possible that I might find a hundred such articles? Or a thousand?
Do I need to find more than one article, as long as the article I find is right?
I notice that Ed has dropped his unfair accusation that I edit emails (probably in the face of the threat of being exposed as a fraud yet again — and yet I am the passive-aggressive one?), and I’m going to admit to making one edit to the above message from him; I changed none of the spelling, but I did turn the provided URL for his blog post into a proper hyperlink. That required adding an ‘a’ tag; none of Ed’s original text has been deleted.
I notice that Ed’s article is supposed to be one in a series of entries fisking the DDT FAQ at Junk Science. I further notice that Ed hasn’t really addressed all that many of the points made in said FAQ, despite his stated goal of doing so, and despite the fact that it’s been half a year since he posted the article he provides a link to (above). What should this tell us, O Reader? Could it possibly be that Ed is being dishonest again and not admitting that some of Milloy’s points cannot be fisked, at least not by Ed Darrell?
So at this point, I turn it over to the reader. There’s been a fair bit of discussion on this blog about DDT over the last few days. We’re all intelligent people here; we can make our own decisions and draw our own conclusions.
