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Hi, I'm Amanda! My family farms corn and soybeans in Southwest Michigan. I'm also a practicing attorney.

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The Silent Spring that Never Was

October 25, 2012

If you’ve heard of Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” which sparked the environmental movement as we know it today, you may know that it turns 50 this year. The book condemned the use of DDT, which eradicated malaria in the United States and other areas of the world. However, partly because of the book, DDT was banned here and in other parts of the world (with a little good old fashioned US strong arming). 

I wasn’t aware of some of the facts I found in this article, so I thought it was definitely worth a share. If anything else, I hate when people have misinformation.

“Consider some numbers: U.S. automobile deaths in 2011 — 32,310, yet millions of us get behind the wheel every day; deaths from preventable medical mistakes and hospital infections, 200,000 annually, but people still go to doctors and hospitals; 400 deaths annually from penicillin, still one of the most useful antimicrobial drugs in the medical arsenal; 5,000 deaths annually from food poisoning, but no one stops eating.

Contrast these to: Number of deaths from DDT since it was first widely used by the U.S. military in World War II for prevention of malaria and other insect-borne diseases to present day — exactly zero.

The most vilified pesticide on the planet, long banned in the U.S., yet one of the most effective against malaria, including the eradication of the disease in this country and Europe, not one single case of human death due to DDT has been documented over almost a 70-year period. (There is the oft-cited study where human volunteers ingested up to 35 milligrams of DDT daily for nearly two years with no adverse effects.) In 1948, Swiss chemist Paul Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize for its discovery and its “enormous value in combating malaria and typhus.”

Keep reading here.

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: celebrities, environment, EPA, regulations, science, truth

Hi, I'm Amanda. My family farms corn and soybeans in Southwest Michigan. I'm an attorney and I'm passionate about agriculture!

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