AP Still Peddling DDT Myths

Here's a great article from JunkScience writer Steven Milloy about the long discredited myths about DDT.

Bald Eagle-DDT Myth Still Flying High

One of the most notorious DDT “factoids” is that it thinned bird egg shells. But a 1970 study published in Pesticides Monitoring Journal reported that DDT residues in bird egg shells were not correlated with thinning. Numerous other feeding studies on caged birds indicate that DDT isn’t associated with egg shell thinning.

In the few studies claiming to implicate DDT as the cause of thinning, the birds were fed diets that were either low in calcium, included other known egg shell-thinning substances, or that contained levels of DDT far in excess of levels that would be found in the environment – and even then, the massive doses produced much less thinning than what had been found in egg shells in the wild.

So why was it banned in 1972?

Why was banning DDT so important to environmentalists? Charles Wurster, a senior scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund – the activist group that led the charge against DDT – told the Seattle Times (Oct. 5, 1969) that, “If the environmentalists win on DDT, they will achieve a level of authority they have never had before. In a sense, much more is at stake than DDT.” Banning DDT wasn’t about birds. It was about power. The sooner the record on DDT is set straight, the sooner the environmentalists’ ill-gotten “authority” will be seen for what it is.