Everywhere, and Indestructible
The final allegation was that DDT persisted virtually indefinitely, accumulating in the environment, which again traced back to Silent Spring and had been faithfully repeated ever since by the media. In response to one of these widely circulated claims, J. Gordon Edwards sent to dozens of radio and TV stations, and newspapers a list of over 150 scientific articles documenting the breakdown of DDT by living things. Not one of them ever made any reference to that material or modified the false impression that they had helped convey to the public.
One of the witnesses who testified at the hearings to the persistence of DDT claimed, under questioning, not to be aware of the work of his own research colleagues at Gulf Breeze, Florida, who had demonstrated in 1969 that 92 percent of all DDT, DDD, and DDE broke down in seawater within thirty-two days. 206
Dr. George Woodwell, who in 1967 had coauthored a paper with EDF founder Charles Wurster on DDT residues measured at a salt marsh on the shore of Long Island, admitted that the figure published had been 13 times too high because the spot they had selected for taking soil samples just happened to be at the place where the spray trucks cleaned out their tanks. When asked if he had ever published a retraction, Woodwell replied (Hearings, p. 7238) "I never felt that this was necessary," In fact, he had published work that showed the earlier results to have been grossly exaggerated, but EDF lawyers had advised him not to mention it. 207
Wurster himself did also testify, with regard to experiments he had performed in 1968 at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution into the effects of DDT on marine algae, which showed a marked reduction in photosynthetic activity—to three-quarters of normal and less. He had commented at the time that all animal life on Earth ultimately depends on this process, and speculated that changes in growth patterns at this level could have repercussions throughout the entire food chain. This caused tremendous agitation among environmental alarmists, resulting in wild media stories about an imminent disruption of the Earth's oxygen manufacturing ability that were repeated by the secretary general of the United Nations, U Thant.
Strangely, however, Wurster's group had never measured the amount of DDT actually taken into the organisms, but simply assumed it to be the case, that assumption carrying with it the further one that the observed reduction in photosynthesis was a result of biochemical action on the algal metabolism. But a simpler interpretation of the data suggests it to have been a purely physical effect caused by DDT particles adsorbing to the outside surfaces of the algae and cutting down the light supply. 208 This was reinforced by the work of others (e.g., Mendel et al., 1970), showing that the effect does not occur with filtered solutions of the compound, indicating that the DDT needs to be present in the form of large (hence filterable) flakes. Inhibition of algal growth, although also widely aired in the public forum, had been mentioned by Wurster only speculatively and was not confirmed experimentally. Despite all the furore, therefore, all these experiments really proved was that photosynthesis works better in clearer water.
The further two broad issues concerning the persistence of DDT were that it was ubiquitous, showing up everywhere from Asian jungles to the Antarctic, and that once taken up into the animal food chain its concentration was progressively magnified through successively higher trophic levels, such as algae—fish—predator fish—fish-eating bird—predator bird.
The examples cited to illustrate the first turned out invariably to be artifacts of the measuring techniques used, or results of misidentification. One of the principal instruments used in pesticide analysis, introduced in the early sixties, was the gas chromatograph, in which the sample being tested is vaporized into a stream of carrier gas that is passed through a column of porous material. The various constituents, having different molecular weights, separate out into distinct bands which can be identified by their emergence after a characteristic propagation time to be registered, usually as a "peak" of signal voltage, at a detector. (The process is analogous to the way in which water from a plumbing leak spreads out across a ceiling tile and dries to leave a ring pattern of successively colored haloes—hence the name.)
Although highly sensitive, it is a fact with this technique that totally different substances with similar mobilities can have similar "signatures," making skilled interpretation an imperative. The much-publicized finding of "DDT" in the Antarctic, for example, turned out to be due to contamination by molecules from the connecting tubing of the apparatus. Soil samples sealed in glass jars since 1911 gave results that were interpreted as five kinds of pesticides that didn't exist until thirty years later. A similar story applies to a gibbon from Burma, preserved since 1935. 209
The examples given to "prove" the hypothesis of magnification along the food chain were based on selected data. Figures were taken for DDT concentrations found in hawk brains, where they are highest, fish muscle, where it is lowest, and duck fat, which is intermediate. Comparison of figures for muscle tissue from crustaceans, fish, duck, hawk shows no magnification. 210
The Scientists' Findings and the Administrator's Ruling
The hearings went on for seven months, during which 125 witnesses were heard and 9,362 pages of testimony recorded. The EPA's hearing examiner, Judge Edmund Sweeney, was even-handed in his dealings, which seemed to infuriate environmentalists and drew criticism from the New York Times and Science, neither of which sent reporters to cover the proceedings. The scientific advisors had also followed the testimony and were unanimous in their eighty-page recommendation that the claims were unsubstantiated and there was no reason for DDT to be banned. Sweeney issued his conclusions on April 25, 1972. 211 They included the following:
• DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man. . .
• DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man. . . .
• The uses of DDT under the registrations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife. . . .
• The adverse effect on beneficial animals from the use of DDT under the registration involved here is not unreasonable on balance with its benefit. . . . There is a present need for the continued use of DDT for the essential uses defined in this case.
This was in line with the professional scientific and medical scientific pleas that had been made worldwide. During the EPA hearings the World Health Organization issued a statement that included:
Improvement in health occasioned by antimalarial campaigns has broken the vicious cycle of poverty and disease in many areas by preventing incapacity and death . . . . [N]o economic alternative to DDT is available and the . . . consequences of the withdrawal of DDT would be very grave. . . . [T]he safety record of DDT for man is truly remarkable.
Six weeks after Sweeney's findings, on June 2, 1972, the EPA Administrator, William Ruckleshaus, reversed the decision, rejected the scientific evidence, and ordered a ban on the sale and production of DDT. Ruckleshaus had not attended any of the sessions during the seven-month hearing and admitted that he had not read the transcript. The decision, he stated, was taken for political reasons. Environmentalist groups have campaigned vigorously ever since for a full ban on all use, by all nations.
Today, more than 2 billion people—40 percent of the world's population—live in malarious countries. Around 300 million are infected, and something like 100 million cases are estimated to occur each year along with millions of deaths, most of them children. Africa is one of the worst sufferers, with nearly 85 percent of the world's cases. More than 30 percent of childhood deaths there are caused by malaria.
Perhaps the most charitable interpretation of the 1972 decision would be that it was intended as a demonstration by a fledgling federal agency, in its first major test, that it was genuinely a disinterested arm of the national executive and not a lackey to financial or private corporate interests. One can only say here that if public perceptions are to take precedence over fact in the formulation of policy, it's a sad day for science. Critics have seen the
ruling as part of a deliberate policy of population control, in a period when global overpopulation has been widely promoted as one of the greatest problems that the world faces.
In the foregoing, I have leaned heavily on the book Ecological Sanity, by George Claus and Karen Bolander, which devotes almost six hundred pages to the subject of which I have managed to address only a few selected details briefly. The authors are meticulous in their treatment. They obviously read and studied the materials which in many cases expert witnesses who testified at the EPA hearing appeared not to have understood. In a number of instances they redid calculations and replotted graphs, showing data to indicate the reverse of what the authors of the papers maintained. In other words, as a source reference for anyone wanting seriously to grasp the issues at stake and how they were handled, I would recommend it as invaluable. It is, however, out of print. After reading a review, I managed to track a copy down in a used bookstore in New Jersey.
Silent Spring can be found in mass-market editions at any bookstore, and is reprinted regularly.
"Vitamin R": Radiation
Good for Your Health 212
It is very difficult, and perhaps entirely impossible, to combat the effects of brainwashing by argument.
— Paul Feyerabend
Radiation Phobia
It seems that the public is at last coming around to accepting that a nuclear power-generation plant cannot explode like a bomb. The majority that I talk to appear to concede, also, that the Chernobyl accident that occurred in the Soviet Union in 1986 was a result of practices and policy very different from the West's, and that there are other methods of bomb-making that are easier, quicker, cheaper, and safer than fooling around with used power-plant fuel. This leaves fear of radiation as probably the only effective weapon for carrying on the crusade against nuclear energy, as well as justifying what has become a lucrative and no-doubt for some, morally gratifying, cleanup industry. The key credo that keeps both sides of the act in business, re-aired periodically lest we forget, is that "no level of radiation is safe." In other words, any exposure to ionizing radiation, however small, is damaging to health. Yet despite the colossal cost to society in terms of a stalled energy policy, the waste of funds and effort on windmills and solar toys, and millions of tax dollars diverted into hauling away dirt and burying it in holes in the ground, the belief rests on a theoretical construct that has never been substantiated by evidence. In fact, what evidence there is tends to disprove it.
At levels encountered ordinarily—i.e., excluding bomb victims and patients subjected to massive medical doses, usually as a last resort in terminal situations—no measurable results of low-level radiation doses are actually observed at all. Low-level effects are inferred by taking a known high-level point where the effect is measurable, and assuming that it connects to the zero-point (zero dose, therefore zero effect) as a straight line. From this presumed relationship it is possible to read off as an act of faith the pro-rata effects that small doses ought to have, if one accepts the straight-line assumption. In the early days of radiation physics, when comparatively little was known, this was about as good a relationship as any to use when attempting to set safety standards for researchers and workers. By the same token, since little was known about the natural ability of biological systems to repair radiation damage, it was assumed that the effects would accrue cumulatively with dose—a bit like equating a shot of whiskey every night for a month with a full bottle straight down. If this overstated the risk, then so much the better, for in the absence of firm knowledge one would obviously prefer to err toward the safe side.
However, somewhere along the line what started out as a sensible precaution came to be perceived as reality. The invisible but assumed effects then took on substance with the introduction of the curious practice of extrapolating them across the whole of an exposed population to derive a total figure for persons X dose, from which effects were deduced statistically. This would be like saying that since a temperature of 1000oC is lethal, 1 degree kills 1/1000th of a person. Therefore raising the temperatures of classrooms in schools containing a million children by two degrees will kill two thousand children. Yet this is the kind of model that the figures the media are so fond of repeating are based on. Research that has been known to the health and radiation physics community for many years indicates, however, that it is wrong.
"The Dose Makes the Poison": Hormesis
Trying to emulate the labors of Hercules would cause most of us to drop dead from exhaustion. Nevertheless, jogging a few miles a week makes lots of people feel good and keeps them in shape. A dip in the boilers of an ocean liner would be decidedly damaging to one's health, but soaking in a hot tub is relaxing. Things that get lethal when taken to extremes are often beneficial in small quantities.
This has long been acknowledged for chemical and biological toxins. Trace amounts of germicides can increase fermentation of bacteria. Too-small doses of antibiotics will stimulate growth of dormant bacteria that they are supposed to kill. A moderate amount of stress keeps the immune system fit and in good tone, no less than muscles. The phenomenon is known as "hormesis," from the Greek hormo, meaning "to stimulate." For around two decades, evidence has been mounting that hormesis holds true also for ionizing radiation. Not that sunbathing during a nuclear strike is good for you; but low levels aren't as bad as many would have us believe.
In the early eighties, Professor T. D. Luckey, a biochemist at the University of Missouri, published a study 213 of over twelve hundred experiments dating back to the turn of the century on the effects of low-level radiation on biota ranging from viruses, bacteria, and fungi through various plants and animals up to vertebrates. He found that, by all the criteria that biologists use to judge the well-being of living things, modest increases above the natural radiation background make life better: living things grow bigger and faster; they live longer; they get sick less often and recover sooner; they produce more offspring, more of which survive.
And the same appears to be true also of humans. The state that the EPA found as having the highest average level of radon in the home, Iowa, also has below-average cancer incidence. 214 The mountain states, with double the radiation background of the U.S. as a whole (cosmic rays are stronger at higher altitudes, and the rocks in those states have a high radioactive content), show a cancer rate way below Iowa's. The negative correlation—more radiation, less cancer—holds for the U.S. in general and extends worldwide. 215 The waters of such European spas as Lourdes, Bath, and Bad Gastein, known for their beneficial health effects since Roman times, are all found to have high radioactivity levels. British data on over ten thousand U.K. Atomic Energy Authority workers show cancer mortality to be 22 percent below the national average, while for Canada the figure is 33 percent. 216 Imagine the hysteria we'd be seeing if those numbers were the other way around.
This kind of relationship is represented not by a straight line, but by a J-shaped curve sloping upward to the right. Dose increases to the right; the damage that results is measured vertically. The leftmost tip of the J represents the point of no dose/no effect. ("No dose" means nothing above background. There's some natural background everywhere. You can't get away from it.) At first the curve goes down, meaning that the "damage" is negative, which is what we've been saying. It reaches an optimum at the bottom, and then turns upward—we're still better off than with no dose at all, but the beneficial effect is lessening. The beneficial effect disappears where the curve crosses its starting level again (the "zero-equivalent point), and beyond that we experience progressively greater discomfort, distress, and, eventually, death.
This has all been known for a long time, of course, to the authorities that set limits and standards. The sorry state of today's institutionalized science was brought home at a conference I attended some time ago now, in San Diego. Several of the speakers had been involved in the procedures that are followed for setting standards and guides for low-level ionizing radiation. The conventional model,
upon which international limits and regulations are based, remains the Linear, Non-Threshold (LNT) version. Yet all the accumulated evidence contradicts it. According to the speakers, the reality of hormesis is absolutely conclusive. Were it to be acknowledged as real, just about all of the EPA hysteria about cleanups could be forgotten, the scare-statistics being touted about Chernobyl would go away, and most of the worries concerning the nuclear industry would be seen as baseless. However, such an interpretation is not, at the present time, politically permissible. Hence, quite knowingly, the committees involved ignored all the discoveries of molecular biology over the past twenty-five years, and threw out the 80 percent of their own data that didn't fit the desired conclusions in order to preserve the official fiction.
So what optimum radiation dose should our local health-food store recommend to keep us in the better-off area below the x-axis? Work reported from Japan 217 puts it roughly at two-thousandths of a "rem," or two "millirems," per day. That's about a tenth of a dental X ray, or one coast-to-coast jet flight, or a year's worth of standing beside a nuclear plant. For comparison, the "zero equivalent point" (ZEP) crossover where the net effect becomes harmful is at around two rems per day; fifty (note, we're talking rems now, not millirems) causes chronic radiation sickness, and a hundred is lethal.
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