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Epley: Politically correct genocide

Paul Epley

Professor Wen Kilama of the African Malaria Vaccine Testing Network in Tanzania sums it up: “Malaria is equivalent to crashing seven jumbo jets filled with children every day!” According to the World Health Organization, in the year 2000, more than 300,000,000 people were infected with malaria. Nearly 2,000,000 – 90 percent being children younger than age 5 or pregnant women – died from the disease. To put this in perspective, it has been determined that nearly 3,000 people died Sept. 11 while two children per minute, or 3,000 per day, every day, are dying from malaria. Since there were less than 1,000 cases of malaria and fewer than 10 deaths in the U.S. last year, you might be tempted to put your humanitarian feelings aside and dismiss the whole thing as someone else’s problem. Before you do, read on.

The vast majority of malaria cases occur in Africa, India, Mexico and Brazil. Latin America also is experiencing a public health disaster with more than 250,000 cases of dengue fever, a disease once thought to be eradicated. Even more alarming, “dengue hemorrhagic fever,” a more aggressive strain where its victims hemorrhage to death, is rapidly spreading. Only a few years ago, the good old U.S. of A. was introduced to St. Louis encephalitis and West Nile Virus.

Mosquito-borne illness is one serious problem.



What does all of this have to do with political correctness and genocide? Prior to 1972, the mosquito and its associated diseases were all but eradicated. In 1972, there were seven months of hearings on Dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) before Administrative Law Judge Edmund Sweeney, who concluded, “DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man. … The use of DDT under regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife.” Similarly in 1970, the National Academy of Sciences, in their book “Life Sciences,” stated that, “In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria.”

Despite the evidence, Rachael Carson’s book, “Silent Spring,” declared that DDT softened eggshells trashed the balance of nature and polluted the food chain. In a bow to political correctness, William Ruckelshaus, a lifelong member of the Environmental Defense Fund and Director of the EPA, and who did not attend any of the hearings or even read the transcript, overturned the law judge and banned DDT.



Carson’s claims were debunked by science, but our activist press has kept these studies – like those debunking man’s role in global warming – buried.

You may recall the rallying cry of the Eco-movement centered about Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” comparing mankind to a horde of locusts that was to soon overpopulate the planet and denude it of all vegetation. To these activists, this preservation of human life by DDT was intolerable, despite the fact that 30 years of use had shown DDT to be safe for humans and animals, inexpensive and effective to control the spread of insect-borne diseases. The eco-nazis set out to have DDT banned in the name of saving the environment. They saw the vast human casualties as acceptable.

Also, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) held a conference titled “Eco-Imperialsim: The Global Green Movement’s War on the Developing World’s Poor” in New York in 2002. CORE supports the use of DDT and describes how the traditional environmental movements are “preventing needy nations from using the very technologies that developed countries employed to become rich, comfortable and free of disease … and perpetuate poverty and misery in developing countries through eco-centric policies.”

The point here is that policies, even those seeming well-intentioned, have effects, often severe, that are far beyond the immediate.

To quote Robert Louis Stevenson, “Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.”


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