> 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.
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:
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/rehabilitatingcar... http://www.salon.com/2008/05/15/steve_milloy_and_rachel_cars...
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.