"Look Who's Ignoring Science Now"

Read Sebastian Mallaby's Op-Ed piece in the October 10 Washington Post:

"The flip side of Bush cronyism is hostility toward experts -- toward people who care about what's what rather than who's who. Economists have depressingly little influence on the Bush economic policy. Climate scientists are incidental to the Bush climate-change policy. Health experts seldom decide issues like the provision of clean needles to HIV-vulnerable drug addicts or poor countries' access to generic AIDS drugs. But it's not just the Bush administration that spurns data and evidence. Consider the case of dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, on which the Bush administration is marginally better than the European Union.

DDT, to give that chemical its more familiar name, works miracles against diseases that are spread by insects. During the Second World War, vast quantities of the stuff were dusted over troops and concentration-camp survivors to kill the body lice that spread typhus. Later, DDT was used widely in Latin America to beat back dengue and yellow fever. But the chemical's noblest calling is to combat malarial mosquitoes..........

The European Union is apparently proposing to require Uganda to mount an expensive program to monitor food for DDT residue, if it plans to export into Europe, because Uganda is planning to do household spraying with DDT against mosquitos. This ignores the fact that there is little danger of DDT from the interior walls of Ugandan houses contaminating food harvested for export.

"Why does Europe impede Uganda's fight against malaria? The standard answer starts with "Silent Spring," the book that helped launch the environmental movement in the 1960s and that painted a scary picture of DDT's potential impact on the food chain. But this is only half right. The book's overblown claims led to the banning of DDT in the United States in 1972 and its disappearance from aid-funded programs thereafter. But "Silent Spring" was really about the dangers of large-scale agricultural use of DDT, not the limited spraying of houses. Today mainstream environmental groups concede that in the context of malarial countries, the certain health benefits of anti-malarial spraying may outweigh the speculative environmental risks.

"So the sin of the environmental movement -- at least of its more responsible exponents -- is not that it's flat wrong on this issue. Instead, it is more subtle. Environmentalists think it's their responsibility to campaign against the damage done by toxic substances, but not to campaign against the damage done by the over-regulation of substances that actually aren't very toxic. Of course, the environmentalists' credibility in calling for necessary regulation would be enhanced if they were willing to denounce unnecessary regulation. But you don't hear them yelling about the European Union's absurd position on Uganda.

"The result is that there's no counterweight to consumers' food-safety paranoia, and politicians refuse to countenance DDT spraying "just to be on the safe side." This cowardice is no different from the Bush administration's indifference to scientific sense on climate change, though you won't catch the environmentalists saying that. And the consequences are rather more immediate. Think what being on the "safe side" means to malaria's victims."