On Balance: Facing a New Year

ON BALANCE: FACING A NEW YEAR

I will be a bit unique among editorialists and approach the new millennium with some observations about an old, somewhat stale topic rather than a new Y2000 discovery. I am prompted to swim against the tide because there is an unresolved problem facing our collective consciousness that I fear will haunt us until we re-examine and reverse our dispositions. I speak of the continuing fantasy - totally manufactured by a unique alliance of apprehension, misinformation and political deceit - that our land is awash with undisciplined, abusive use of pesticides which threaten our immediate health and doom our children to an abbreviated future.

Within the scientific world this belief is total absurdity; among politicians it is a theme that guarantees votes. The phenomenon is truly akin to the epidemic of ignorance that in the Middle Ages brought to Europe the Plague. An unbelievable one-third of the population was ravaged by diseased rats and fleas while the epidemic was blamed on all sorts of innocents who were in turn killed in a terrifying attempt to placate whatever supernatural cause was alleged to be devastating that corner of the world. In spite of our technological advances, we seem to be no more rational at heart today than our woefully less equipped ancestors.

For how many years now have we fallen prey to wild assertions, subsequently disproved, that chemicals such as Alar were threatening our progeny? The public still believes that after a three-month scientific trial DDT was adjudged to possess risks that did not warrant its use. On the contrary: it was determined that the chemical did possess positive values which, when balanced against the risks, factually demonstrated that it should remain in use. After the trial, which was an EPA public process, the EPA Administrator acted upon his legal right and overturned the “not-guilty” verdict, instead moving to cancel the chemical’s registration. Out of the United Nations came a complaint that this act was deleterious to public health for many Third World countries who depended on the pesticide.

But the point of this discussion is not to reconsider our value system in the United States. Instead it is to point out that this historical item of fact has been overlooked and buried in the American media and replaced with false assumptions. To compound these errors, the false information is continually used as bedrock precedent for subjecting newer agents to suspension.

This is more than a political issue or philosophical problem. Recently the New York Times announced that not only had a group of children contracted Malaria while camping on Long Island, but that an outbreak of mosquito-borne encephalitis had occurred in New York which has resulted at latest count in four deaths. The public outcry asking why preventive pesticide treatments had been abandoned for years was joined by an emergency area-wide treatment using Malathion insecticide dispersed by helicopters - a treatment which had to be expanded to include Central Park. It is interesting to note that years ago our local Bay Area media decried the use of this same agent during the Med Fly crisis, calling it “an invention of Nazi Germany during World War II.” That bit of emotional baggage certainly did not calm the anxiety of our citizens during a difficult time.

I suggest that the Millennium due-date is a good deadline for us to take stock in the foolishness of “junk science” and the political spin regarding pesticides. We deserve a better fate than a dose of misinformation which lays us vulnerable to public health tragedies. I note that Senator Feinstein is co-authoring a very excessive and scientifically preposterous set of restrictions that essentially leaves public schools very vulnerable to whatever emergencies vermin-borne diseases may present.

Under the fanfare that incorrectly implies that school children are endangered by pesticides used in school pest control programs, this excessively restrictive program creates a greater real danger than the sponsors’ advertised claims. Where it was put into place locally, in San Francisco, it almost immediately required the Health Department to seek emergency “behind-the-scenes” exemptions. Of course, the authors and the new environmental personnel created by the law have never acknowledged that the statute strictly enforced was a failure. But the memos and the incidents are history, and it is a sad result of the power of political persuasion that, in spite of the facts, the Senator’s staff now wishes to foist this counterproductive, failed program upon the whole nation.

I would hope that the New Age ushers in among other advancements a public attitude calling for an honest evaluation of the environmental hazards our modern technology creates and a truthful assessment not subverted or managed to win some ideological, economical, or political goal. On a personal level, it is our endeavor at Crane that our performance and this publication continue to manifest scientific honesty and self-discipline.

Harold S. Stein, Jr.

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