A Doctor and Documentarian Against the DDT Ban
By Dr. D. Rutledge Taylor
Besides being a film producer, I have a preventive medicine practice
in Los Angeles. As it happens, California was leading the nation in
West Nile virus cases in 2005, and I was being asked about it more
frequently by my patients. Meaning only to get up to speed on vector-
borne diseases, I found myself reading volume upon volume of studies
on malaria and vector-borne diseases. I was feeling like a budding
Albert Schweitzer M.D., wondering what I could do to actually make a
difference. Well, like Schweitzer, I could go abroad and work on one
patient at a time, but from what I was finding, this would hardly be
efficacious.
In February of 2005, I met with Dr. Art Robinson in San Francisco. He
had once worked for many years with Dr. Linus Pauling and currently
has his own laboratory where he conducts protein research among other
studies. We talked at length about malaria, DDT, and Third World
countries. I found him to be honest, forthright, and willing to pour
out what he knew. On my evening flight back to L.A., everything seemed
surreal. I knew somehow my life as I knew it had been discontinued.
I told my production partner, an environmentalist, about the
conversation and she had a lot of trouble with it. Yet, she was
hearing it from me and she also knew I had met with a very ethical and
prominent scientist. We agreed to research further. The more I read
about vector-borne diseases, the more convinced I was that prevention,
rather than treatment, was by far the superior approach. From what I
could find out in regard to malaria and other vector- (insect-) borne
diseases, treatment was the order of the day and had been for many
years. From what we could see, it was an abject failure. Our research
showed that the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Europe eradicated malaria
and many other insect-borne diseases from 1945-70 with the use of DDT.
Prevention was the main or first line of defense, followed by other
measures.
Something happened in America in the 60s, and it was not just Vietnam.
Rachel Carson wrote a "novel," not a scientific study subject to peer
review, but a novel, called Silent Spring. Fear spread across the face
of this land -- I could see this as I read articles, journals,
editorial comments, and ads in the New York Times suggesting mothers
were poisoning their nursing children with DDT-tainted breast milk.
DDT was allowed, a very slight amount, even in baby food.
Whipped into a frenzy by Rachel Carson's book, fearing cancer, people
were in effect fearing the unknown. After Earth Day in 1970, it was
clear to politicians that the public was demanding getting rid of the
most innocuous of chemicals -- DDT. It was legally banned in 1972 by
people who knew better at the time -- people who were "supposed to
know." People who said they were protecting us and wildlife. Were
they? Did they?

Traveling the World to Witness the Ban's Effects
In order to find the answers we put together a team and actually
traveled the world. Our travel time was a coincidental yet prophetic
forty days and forty nights. Why this ban on DDT? What have been the
gains for the U.S. citizenry for this ban? Why have no major news
media worth their salt plastered the resulting death rates all over
the media? We interviewed people in places ranging from the streets of
South Africa, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Panama to the U.S.
Senate committee hearings in Washington -- from doctors, clinics,
hospitals, NGOs, Environmental Defense Fund, fighters for malarial
relief to people on the streets of the U.S.
Insect-borne diseases are on the rise all over the world. Malaria
alone infects more than a half-billion, mostly women and children,
yearly with more and more deaths piled upon the deaths of the
preceding years. Something was terribly wrong. This ban was touted by
the Environmental Protection Agency and environmental groups
everywhere as a "success" story and still is to this very hour. But
they are going to have to come forward with more than words, more than
feel-good, look-good soundbites. The result of the DDT ban has been an
unspeakable death toll -- and a sad, deception-riddled tale.
It took us what has seemed like forever to wade through the junk
science held up to be valid, to get to the hard peer-reviewed data.
There have been literally thousands of studies of every possible
aspect of DDT. What peer-reviewed, replicated scientific data supports
the ban on DDT? None.
Instead we found that DDT, the most effective chemical for preventing
malaria and a veritable host of other diseases (West Nile virus, Lyme
disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Dengue fever, lice, yellow
fever, river blindness, elephantiasis, St. Louis encephalitis virus,
typhus, Chagas disease, bubonic plague, Japanese encephalitis, bed
bugs, and many others -- not to mention many bird and animal
diseases), had been made a chemical scapegoat, a glorified whipping
boy. DDT had to go down to satisfy politics, resulting in massive
deaths among mostly black, brown, and yellow human beings.
Guilt and a Creative Response
Now, the threatened faces are lighter, whiter. We admit that our
parents' generation made a grave mistake by banning DDT. They were
scared. What they did in ignorance, we must redress with knowledge. We
will stand by our parents by helping to make this right again. My
friend, a prominent psychologist, says, "the unconscious guilt our
parents carry in this regard can be terrible."
Unaware of the havoc and pain hasty actions would set in motion
worldwide, our parents are perhaps being mentally weighed down without
their even knowing it. The burden of partial awareness of all those
deaths is being borne by the American people, and the burden is
looming large. The carnage just goes on and on with no end in sight.
Even a malaria vaccine would leave mosquitoes and other insects free
to spread many cases of the disease -- and there would be an
astronomical loss of life while we "wait" for a vaccine. Billions do
not have time to wait. Their voices crying for help have been silenced
over the years, but they are now getting desperately louder, shriller.
I heard firsthand the sound of their silence and it was deafening.
What has been done with the stroke of a government pen can be undone.
How? By stirring up awareness so that more people will come to know
and experience the power of many voices speaking as one.
It is our hope that 3 Billion and Counting http://3billionandcounting.com/,
(the result of this research) a film I directed and produced due out
later this year, will be a catalyst in this awakening.  As a brief
glimpse of this powerful footage from the film reveals, (Africa
Slaughtered) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFBDTuv10H8   we are
dealing with the greatest human death toll in known history, far
greater than the Holocaust and all wars combined-  the greatest crime
against humanity that this world has ever known.
It is time that we wake up and do what is right for humanity.

Dr. D. Rutledge Taylor