I hate to be that guy. But this reminds me hysteria around DDT, now it is estimated that DDT ban is responsible for 20M deaths due to malaria.
But how strong is link between that chemical and negative effects? This guy works on this for 15 years, other confirm his result. But there is no lawsuit or anything which requires strong evidence.
Also the lethal dosage is 3 grams/kg for rats, that is far from poisoning. In EU it was banned not because of toxicity, but because it degrades slowly in ground waters.
> I hate to be that guy. But this reminds me hysteria around DDT, now it is estimated that DDT ban is responsible for 20M deaths due to malaria.
You're inadvertently offering a GREAT example of the behaviour described in the article. DDT was known to be losing its effectiveness as early as the 1950s because heavy use was rapidly selecting for resistance in the mosquito population. The claim that the DDT ban lead to a large number of human deaths was created and marketed as part of an attack on Rachel Carson and the concept of public health programs in general:
Note that the DDT stories rely heavily on the same Steven Milloy mentioned in this article. One of the less immediately obvious sources of money was actually the tobacco companies, who are trying to discredit public health organizations whose anti-smoking campaigns are cutting into profits.
Banning DDT did, however, open the door for research and development of other pest control techniques. Since chemical controls lead to resistance in the affected populations, biological techniques were investigated, such as breeding captive populations and releasing sterile individuals (usually males that cause less damage in the wild). This has already been used on screwworm and fruit fly, and as soon as the checks clear, will probably also be used on zoonoses carrier mosquitoes. For similar reasons, phage research may be able to mitigate antibiotics resistance.
Given that maintaining a population of sterile males can cause wild populations to crash, anything proven to exhibit mutagenic or teratogenic effects on any animal--especially when the result is lowered fertility--is of greater long-term concern than chemicals that simply kill you.
With my foil hat on, I might come to the conclusion that a chemical that reduces the fertility of the human serfs while turning a profit is a win-win for the lizard-people running the planet. Of course they would turn the resources of the vast global conspiracy to protecting it.
Without my foil hat on, this is just company execs being enormous, rabid, jerkwad ass-mimes, which is pretty normal these days. I'm more upset that they are willing to pump millions of dollars into the destruction of scientific integrity and credibility than the possibility that they are systematically poisoning millions of people through agricultural runoff. And that is pretty bad all by itself.
It is unlikely that the negative consequences of banning DDT are nearly as much as that. Malaria nets and pyrethoids are each more effective than DDT, to which mosquitos quickly become resistant - making continued use of DDT wholly negative.
Regarding the figures you state, I am copying and pasting the relevant section of Wikipedia:
Robert Gwadz of the National Institutes of Health said in 2007, "The ban on DDT may have killed 20 million children." In his novel State of Fear, author Michael Crichton wrote "Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler." These arguments have been dismissed as "outrageous" by former WHO scientist Socrates Litsios. May Berenbaum, University of Illinois entomologist, says, "to blame environmentalists who oppose DDT for more deaths than Hitler is worse than irresponsible." Investigative journalist Adam Sarvana and others characterize this notion as a "myth" promoted principally by Roger Bate of the pro-DDT advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM).
That's a moot point. Science isn't about banning dangerous chemicals. It is about providing politicians the facts they need to make an educated decision regarding whether a chemical should be banned or not.
This is simply another another example of a long tradition of standing behind scientists when their findings agree with you, only to shun, ignore and discredit them when their findings are inconvenient. Tobacco, DDT, asbestos, deep sea diving, global warming.
Science rarely cares about what to do. It's only about finding out what is true. If politicians read Haynes's research and concludes that this is an acceptable tradeoff, there's no problem. If they are unaware of Haynes's research and make a decision on incorrect assumptions, that is a problem.
Multinationals will be able to sue countries for their business obstructing laws concerning environmental legislation etc., thereby conveniently bypassing democratic process.
Multinationals will be able to sue countries for their business obstructing laws concerning environmental legislation etc., thereby conveniently bypassing democratic process.
That's a ridiculously stupid idea. We are now all going to be vulnerable to the most gullible among us.
Not well known in the US, but I've read some history on the Norwegian petroleum industry.
There was a big political tug-of-war here in the 1980s when it became evident that current procedures for deep sea diving caused delibitating long-term injuries to the nervous system of the divers. This was very inconvenient for the oil companies and national authorities, because building a deep-sea pipeline was necessary if the nation was to have control over its petroleum exports.
There was a very intense campaign (however not necessarily a conspiracy; thousands of people had economic incentives to ignore these findings) of discrediting the scientist who made the findings. The research was initially the result of the single Ph.D. at the Department of Medicine at the University of Bergen. Lawsuits concerning reparations to divers who kept working after these findings were made, are in fact still ongoing. But the science was quite clear at the time, and it has become clearer still afterwards.
I wouldn't be surprised if similar controversies happened over this in the US. But it hasn't become a public debate to the same degree.
You're claiming that 20m people in the US have died from malaria since DDT was banned? Because the scientists who got DDT banned in the US never pushed for it to be banned for fighting malaria in countries with malaria problems, and it in fact was never banned for this purpose. You're just spreading the same bullshit corporate propaganda this article is about.
That's a very important thing to say. In any such case a risks/returns analysis must be made.
I think it's too simple to just blame the ban on DDT for 20 million malaria deaths, the reasons for dying of malaria are plenty, some within the control of the western world.
But within the context of the article, directly banning azantine could have some negative effects as well, it's not clear why those farmers who use it don't use the Monsanto product instead.
That also raises an interesting question. If Monsanto really does have a directly competing product, why didn't Monsanto come to the aid of Hayes? Not that I'm super liberal or something, but that would be proper capitalism wouldn't it?
From a species-health perspective, doses between the teratogeneic/mutagenic level and the lethal level are more dangerous than dose that simply kill everyone. Dead individuals do not prevent healthy, fertile, and possibly resistant individuals from replacing them, whereas sterile individuals will displace future breeders until they die.
If you want to eradicate a population, you stop the breeding and not the breathing.
But how strong is link between that chemical and negative effects? This guy works on this for 15 years, other confirm his result. But there is no lawsuit or anything which requires strong evidence.
Also the lethal dosage is 3 grams/kg for rats, that is far from poisoning. In EU it was banned not because of toxicity, but because it degrades slowly in ground waters.