Bring Back DDT, and Science With It, Essay Example

This editorial discusses the 1972 ban on the use of DDT, a well known pesticide, because of its nefarious effect on the environment and human health. Polemic in nature, this article makes radical claims regarding DDT and how banning it underscores the ignorance and anti-science attitudes of Americans at large. The author goes to the extreme of comparing the ban on DDT with the Nazis genocide against the Jews, which resulted in the execution of top officials at Nuremburg. This ban was passed predicated on lies and a fabricated hysteria because of the absence of science in the public sphere. The author points to the deaths caused by the infectious disease known as malaria, which could be cured by DDT, especially in tropical countries. This article argues that the DDT ban, despite its potential to eradicate malaria as a mosquito borne disease, was passed as an institutional means to kill people by depriving Americans of a viable solution to a malaria epidemic. The central argument here is that DDT was banned as a form of population control due to the demographic explosion that took place in the aftermath of World War II. Moreover, the author argues that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a seminal work on the adverse environmental impact of DDT , was a fraudulent account that played on people’s emotions by disseminating fraudulent information. As such, the author argues that the United States must reverse its decision in banning DDT because it poses no threat to human health despite the fallacious information that has been disseminated for the past five decades. Fallacies permeate this editorial because it deplores the DDT ban in America, not in other countries, yet malaria is not a major public health issue in America but rather in tropical and industrializing countries. Vaccinations and medicines have developed enough to ensure that a malaria outbreak does not materialize. As such, the information disseminated in this article about DDT lacks currency and forms a disjointed and fallacious narrative about the benefits and drawbacks of DDT.

References

Hecht, M.M. (). Bring back DDT, and science with it. 21st Century Science & Technology Magazine. Retrieved July 20, 2015 from http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/summ02/DDT.html