by Robert Lederman - August 4, 2000
It is not too hard to figure out why most
New Yorkers are still uninformed and confused about West Nile
Virus. Despite the extent of spraying increasing every day, the
level of coverage is decreasing every day.
The quality of information within that
coverage has likewise decreased each day. During the first week or
two of this year's West Nile "panic" there were serious
questions asked-although never really answered-on television,
radio and in newspapers about the need for spraying, the toxicity
of the chemicals used and the potential health effects of
exposure.
As of this writing the daily coverage,
sandwiched between the latest perp walk, sports feature and
burning building story, can be summarized thus: "Today much
of Manhattan, the Bronx and QueenQueens will be sprayed with the
pesticide Anvil. No infected humans or mosquitoes have been found
although authorities report that they now have 32 dead birds. If
you have questions call the City's hotline or visit their
website". The "hotline" connects you to a teenage
operator in Pennsylvania who, depending on which one you get, will
say, "Anvil who?".
The NYC media has now had almost an
entire year to independently research this story yet they have
done virtually nothing beyond regurgitating the Mayor's daily
press releases. While initial reporting on the No-Spray lawsuit
was fairly extensive, the media uniformly gave the impression that
only a handful of hysterical environmental activists,
hypocondriacs and pet-lovers question the City's spray policy.
Where for example are media references to
the fact that the Journal of the American Mosquito Control
Association published scientific studies which show that repeated
indiscriminate spraying of pesticides-as is being done in NYC-
results in a long-term increase in the number of mosquitoes (the
new generation of which are immune to the spray) and a 15 fold or
1500 percent increase in the rate of mosquitoes infected with
encephalitis viruses? The article, which was written by a NY State
Department of Health official, also states that it seems likely
that ONLY mosquitoes exposed to pesticides are vulnerable to the
viral infections.
See: http://www.chem-tox.com/brevard/index.htm
SOURCE: Journal of the Am Mosquito Control Assoc,
Dec;13(4):315-25,
1997 Howard JJ, Oliver
New York State Department of Health
SUNY-College ESF
Syracuse 13210, USA.
When mindlessly quoting the Mayor and Dr.
Cohen's disinformation about Anvil being, "safe, natural and
non-toxic" where are the references to the fact that the
National Institute of Health and the National Academy of Sciences
consider chronic low-level exposure to organophosphate and
pyrethyroid neurotoxicants like Anvil, Scourge and Malathion to be
the most likely cause of the nation's genuine epidemic of learning
disabilities, childhood cancer and asthma or that Frederica Perera,
of Columbia University's Joseph L. Mailman School of Public
Health, reported that air-sampling "backpacks" worn by
72 pregnant women in New York City picked up high concentrations
of three neurotoxic pesticides that could cause disorders in their
fetuses?
See: Cover Story, Kids At Risk 6/19/2000
US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/000619/poison.htm
Also see: http://www.nih.gov/
Environmental Health Perspectives Volume 107, Supplement 3, June
1999 Pesticides and Inner-City Children: Exposures, Risks, and
Prevention, which found that in NY State the highest use of
organophosphate and pyrethyroid pesticides was not in agricultural
areas upstate but in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
When you repeatedly refer to the, "mysterious
WNV never seen before in North America", how is it
that you fail to mention 50 years of West Nile research and
experimentation in NYC area hospitals, universities and
bio-warfare labs, including Rockefeller University,
Sloan-Kettering and Plum Island? Is the source of all these WNV-infected
birds such a mystery to you when all of these institutions
deliberately infect birds and mosquitoes with WNV and experiment
on them as reported in past articles in the NY Times, Newsday, ABC
News etc?
Are these sources, hysterical,
irresponsible environmental activists as well? How about the NYC
Department of Health website or the Center for Disease Control (CDC)
website? A little searching in these most mainstream of mainstream
sources will uncover the facts that of the four New Yorkers who
allegedly died of West Nile Virus last year three were taking
immunosurpressant medications and a third was HIV-positive. The
CDC determined that NYC encephalitis infections in humans had
peaked and were decreasing more than a month BEFORE the spraying
began. [See: New York City Department of Health, West Nile Virus:
A Briefing, City Health Information Vol. 19, No. 1 (May 2000) http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/doh/html/chi/chi.html
and
United States Centers for Disease Control, Update: West Nile Virus
Encephalitis New York, 1999, fig. 1, October 22, 1999, http://www.cdc.gov/epo/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4841a3.htm
"The dates of onset of illness for laboratory-positive cases
of WNV infection suggest that the outbreak peaked in late August.
There have been no recognized cases of WNV infection with an onset
date after September 22. "
Are these inconvenient facts that might
cause anyone who read them to question the Mayor's spray policy if
not his sanity? How is it that there was a virtual media blackout
on the 8/2/2000 AP story that Oravax, a company working closely
with the Mayor's "experts" since the first day of the
1999 outbreak just announced getting an NIH grant to create a West
Nile Virus vaccine? Could it be that in their own press release
the company alluded to the fact-as I've been writing on a daily
basis since last Fall-that they actually had been working on this
vaccine for years before the NYC outbreak and that it was invented
and patented in 1996 by the U.S. Army Bio-warfare lab at Ft.
Dietrick MD? Was yet another, "cops arrest grisly murder
suspect" feature more important to the public on the day they
were about to be massively sprayed with poison gas?
Why are the Mayor and Dr. Cohen never
asked during their daily press conferences why the City has
obtained none of the required permits, violates virtually every
warning on the manufacturers label, ignores AG Spitzer telling
them it is illegal to call ANY pesticide safe, illegally sprays
adjacent to and over water, is using untrained and unprotected
spray applicators solicited by an ad in the NY Post and is
spraying in humid, damp and rainy weather despite Clarke chemical
itself stating that such spraying is completely useless for
controlling mosquitoes?
If the media can dig up who Giuliani is
sleeping with, who his father robbed in 1933, who is illegally
getting welfare contracts from him and who secretly had an honest
building inspector fired for fining a Giuliani contributor-can it
really be that hard to go to a government website and download
some actual facts on pesticides, mosquitoes and West Nile Virus?
Why do you keep describing a virus that the City's own website
calls very mild as, "The Deadly West Nile
Virus!!!!"? Aspirin kills thousands of times more
people each year. Do you preface Bayer ads with a disclaimer that
aspirin kills? The CDC itself estimated that in a full-blown WNV
epidemic 10-12 people might be expected to die. Bending over to
pick up the Sunday Times probably kills more people per year.
How is it that the great investigative
paper, the Village Voice, has not done a single article on
the spraying this year and barely covered it last year? While
police brutality is a very real threat to minorities, is being
sprayed with poison gas that causes breast cancer, birth defects
and infertility not a threat to minorities? How come independent
papers like the NY Press and NY Observer have not published
a single item on the spraying when even David Letterman's Late
Night monologue covers it?
How is it that not one paper commented on
the significance of the fact that at his press conference on
8/2/2000 the Mayor stated that the Bronx would be sprayed but not
Yankee Stadium because it might, "distract the players",
or that when most of Manhattan was sprayed last week Rockefeller
Center was omitted because some tourists were on line to get
tickets to an NBC NSync concert? If the spray is so safe, why not
spray during a Yankee game or in Central Park during a
Philharmonic concert? More inconvenient facts? Will the Mayor's
press aide, Sunny Mindel, bar you from the Blue Room if you ask
that question?
I hope you do not think I'm blaming the
City's hard-working reporters for what gets into the paper. I'm
sure that a love of investigative journalism is exactly what got
most of you into the business.
Unfortunately, the publishers and media
owners have been instructed not to go too far in covering this
issue.
Their marching orders-keep feeding the
panic and prepare people for the vaccine-no more no less. Keep
depicting it as a deadly virus even though it is one of the
mildest viruses there is which only people and animals exposed to
pesticides or other immune suppressants can actually get infected
by.
I can just hear them in the Mayor's
strategy meeting...is it time to discover a human victim yet or do
we go with a few more days of dead birds? We only have another 50
of those virus-injected birds in the freezer-let us know if we
need to infect some more.
Of course, there are individual reporters
who have asked these questions, some even getting them into their
columns and news stories. The problem is, it's hard to write a
story when the only response from the administration is, "no
comment" or an attempt to get you fired for asking the
question.
I'll leave you with this final thought.
You caught the Mayor lying about his family, crime statistics,
welfare, speeding, running for the Senate, illegal contracts, City
Hall access and virtually every single issue he has ever spoken
on. Some of those issues were not all that crucial to our daily
lives. Don't you think it's time to express a bit of skepticism
about this life and death issue?
Important Note:
Mr. Lederman has explained that his articles posted here are not
to be taken as official statements by the No-Spray Coalition of
which he is a member or of the "No-Spray" lawsuit in
which he is a plaintiff.
