Sunday, June 25, 2023

The Usual DDT Lies From Pravda

 The good news?  A couple of baby bald eagles have successfully 'fledged' (flown) in Milwaukee County for the first time in 100+ years.

The bad news?  Little Local Pravda printed its anti-science, anti-DDT propaganda.  As you might expect, they printed it without evidence.

Pravda's anti-science propaganda:

 ...The population of the species was considered endangered just 50 years ago. Eagle numbers dropped to fewer than 1,000 in the United States and about 100 in Wisconsin because of unregulated hunting, poisoning and then, in the post World War II era, the use of DDT and other chemicals.

DDT caused eagles and many other birds to lay thin-shelled eggs that broke before the chick hatched. With very low recruitment rates, eagle numbers plummeted....

Here's the reality:

The alleged thinning of eggshells by DDT in the diet was
effective propaganda; however,
actual feeding experiments
proved that there was very little, if any, correlation between DDT
levels and shell thickness.
Thin shells may result when birds are
exposed to fear, restraint, mercury, lead, parathion, or other agents,
or when deprived of adequate calcium, phosphorus, Vitamin D,
light, calories, or water. While quail fed a diet containing 2
percent calcium produced thick shells, a calcium content of only 1
percent resulted in shells 9 percent thinner than normal. In the
presence of lead, shells were 14 percent thinner, and with mercury,
8 percent thinner.
Bitman and coworkers demonstrated eggshell thinning with
DDT by reducing calcium levels to 0.56 percent from the normal
2.5 percent. After this work was exposed as anti-DDT
propaganda, Bitman continued his work for another year. Instead of
the calcium-deficient diets, however, he fed the quail 2.7 percent
calcium in their food. The shells they produced were not thinned at
all by the DDT. Unfortunately, the editor of refused to
publish the results of that later research.
Editor Philip Abelson had
already told Dr. Thomas Jukes of the University of California in
Berkeley that would never publish anything that was not
antagonistic toward DDT (T. Jukes, personal communication).
Bitman therefore had to publish the results of his legitimate feeding
experiments in an obscure specialty journal, and many readers of
continued to believe that DDT could cause birds to lay thin-
shelled eggs

There remains some discussion about what MAY be a difference between the eggs of raptors v. other birds such as quail--but when DDT (and its component DDE) disappeared, that discussion terminated.

Speaking of "termination," that's also what happened to the lives of millions of people worldwide who died of malaria because DDT was no longer available to kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes.  But, in the famous quote of an Enviro-Wack to a Senate hearing, "They're only little brown people."

The abortion culture is not restricted to killing babies, friends.

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