Death By Good Intentions

Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring in 1962. One of the targets of her book was the chemical DDT, commonly used to kill mosquitos, effectively wiping out malaria. In the US, DDT had been used since 1939. It was shipped overseas during WW2 and proved itself effective in killing head, body, and crab lice as well as mosquitos. When the chemical was shared with Europe, cases of malaria plummeted and hundreds of thousands of lives were saved.

After Carson's book, where she blamed DDT for thinning the eggs of birds, thereby causing their deaths and eventual extinction, the EPA carried out hearings to determine if DDT was safe or not. It was found to not be carcinogenic, but was declared carcinogenic anyway by William Ruckelshaus, EPA administrator. No test ever done has shown DDT to cause cancer in humans, but Ruckelshaus was on an anti-DDT mission. The year before this hearing, the National Academy of Sciences declared that we owed a great debt to DDT and that "in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths..."

But the birds and nature must be saved... even at the cost of human life, and so DDT was banned. Further studies showed that even the thinning of bird's eggshells wasn't due to DDT but to a calcium deficient diet... but DDT was banned and that was that. One million people a year die in Africa alone due to malaria -- preventable deaths that occur because of the good intentions of those who wanted to save the birds.

Malaria is coming back to the US. Maps of the disease show it once again moving into Europe and North America. It is still rare, but the rate of increase indicates that we will have a serious -- and fatal -- problem with malaria and other mosquito borne illnesses within twenty five years. Will we overturn the ban now that it has been found to be a safe and effective chemical; one that has no carcinogenic effects or deleterious environmental effects? Hard to say.

Remember the airbags mandated in the eighties and early nineties? They were too powerful and it was against the law to turn them off so they ended up killing and injuring about the same number of children they were installed to save.

Remember banning guns? The United Kingdom tried it and now gun crime is going up 10-40% a year (there are three official, governmental offices for the reporting of crime and each has a different percentage!). Australia banned almost all guns and their murder and robbery rate has jumped. For the first time in history, the rate of murder, robbery, and hot burglary (that is a burglary committed while the homeowners are present) in England is higher than in the US. In the case of hot burglary, it is nearly twice our rate (again, one agency in the UK says it is 4x our rate). Banning guns didn't make the society safer; it turned it over to the wolves. It seems that no one noticed that nearly every case of public shooting was stopped by other men with guns.

We saw hungry children and families who had a hard time making it financially and our hearts went out to them. But, rather than opening our wallets, we demanded politicians take money from other people to give to those we cared about... and then give us some... and then some more. Now the entitlement mentality is so huge that overhauling the tax code, stopping the plague of unwed mothers children abandoned to live wild on the streets, or teaching self reliance is an almost hopeless cause.

All of these were caused by good intentions. God cautions all of us who want to make rules for others, to place barriers or laws where He did not, or to consider ourselves "teachers" and exert authority over others that such is dangerous and has far reaching consequences. "The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority among them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that..." (Luke 22:25,26)

[for more info on the DDT ban and other junk science, check out Junk Science Judo by Steven Milloy (plus his website at www.junkscience.com) or the excellent The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science by Tom Bethell]