Avery, Dennis

By Dennis T. Avery, Center for Global Food Issues, Hudson Institute... 

In books written by both Dixie Lee Ray and Dennis Avery, a chilling example of the effect on human health of DDT s withdrawal is presented. In Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), there were 2.8 million cases of malaria prior to the advent of DDT and only 17 by 1963 when its use was widespread. Because of the rising anxiety in the United States about the theoretical possibility of DDT carcinogenesis, spraying was halted in the mid-sixties. In 1968, the number of malarial cases in Sri Lanka returned to 2.5 million. This is a tragedy that must not be repeated. Were any lives saved from DDT-induced cancer ... 

Dennis Avery estimates that less than 3% of all cancer deaths are caused by all the combined forms of environmental contamination and pollution. Both Avery and Bast and coauthors cite work by Dr. Robert Scheuplein of the FDA who specifically looked at the incidence of pesticide-induced cancer in relation to the total amount of cancer attributed to food. At the most, pesticides could account for 0.01% of food-related cancers, a topic we will address extensively in the next chapter. Many authors cite similar conclusions based on an often-quoted landmark epidemiological study on the causes of cancer, done by Doll and Peto in 1981 and published as the book The Carnes of Cancer. The authors studied cancer deaths in our country from the 1930s to the late 1970s, the precise period when the risk of pesticide-induced cancer would have been expected to peak as chemicals such as DDT were in heavy use during this period prior to the influence of Silent Spring. They concluded that 98-99% of can-... 

Dennis JH, Stenton SC, Beach JR, Avery AJ, Walters EH, Hendrick DJ. Jet and ultrasonic nebulizer output use of a new method to measure aerosol output directly. Thorax 1990 45 728-732. 

Quoted in Dennis Avery, The Fallacy of the Organic Utopia, in Julian Morris and Roger Bate, eds.. Fearing Food Risk, Health Environment (Boston Butterworth Heinemann 1999) p. 8. 

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