Macro of mosquito sucking blood close up on the human skin. Mosquito is carrier of Malaria Encephalitis Dengue and Zika virus

The unfolding story of birth defects from the zika virus has raised a host of fears, and skepticism. There is conflict over delays in funding government responses, and what those responses should look like. In this article, Vermont farmer and lawyer John Klar explores the implications of using chemicals to somehow eradicate the mosquitoes thought to carry the virus. 

by John Klar

With horrific images of infants permanently deformed by microcephaly from a mosquito-born virus, it is understandable that we should fear for the health of pregnant women. We are told this unfolding threat will spread through America: the Aedes aegypti species of mosquito which carries Zika includes even Vermont within its range, according to Centers For Disease Control (CDC) maps. It may take years to fashion a cure for the disease, so government has rushed to reassure us that spraying of insecticides to kill the mosquitoes will offer protection. But as often happens when government officials and chemical vendors conspire to help the public, this false hope presents new and certain dangers.

I do not question that the Latin American cases of microcephaly are being caused by a newly mutated mosquito-borne virus. Some groups have recently panicked the world by arguing that instead the microcephaly is being caused by larvicides engineered to destroy the genetic development of insects but which have found their way into drinking water. This does not appear to be the case – but it raises vitally important concerns for all of us.

There are powerful arguments against the use of insecticides or other chemicals to combat the threat of Zika virus in the United States:

  • Mosquitoes develop resistance to the poisons, making it harder to eradicate them at all in the future. Natural predators are often wiped out, so that when spraying stops the resurgence of the pests explodes. Such resurgence invites more spraying, with yet less effect.
  • This type of mosquito does not travel very far. Indiscriminate spraying of vast areas is useless; targeted spraying would need to focus on areas populated by humans, which means that humans will be exposed.
  • Glyphosate (Round-Up) is turning up in human breast milk and foods that are supposed to be organic – we risk exposing the unborn to more threats by loading up on unstudied chemicals than the threat posed by Zika. The mosquitoes are seasonal and regional: the chemicals never leave our ecosystem or our bodies.
  • We have a horrible track record, curing problems with chemicals. The only winner is Wall Street profits: our environment suffers every time. And threats of cancer (especially in children) grow.

We must reflect upon why we continue to seek magic scientific solutions to environmental threats, when those solutions are even greater environmental threats. The great thinker Wendell Berry calls this “techno-mysticism”: “faith” in science to “save us” from nature. But how do we continue to cling ignorantly to a faith which has been so thoroughly demonstrated to be false? We sprayed our troops with Agent Orange (manufactured by Monsanto and others, the chemical companies that now dominate our agriculture “industry”) and they and their children suffered for decades. We gave pregnant women thalidomide and told them it was safe.

And who are these “we” people? Are they the scientists and regulators who told us everything was OK, or are they us – because we keep trusting their arrogance, no matter how many times they are proved wrong? Similarly, why would we continue to trust the federal government, when it has so thoroughly and powerfully demonstrated that it is compromised by special (corporate) interests, that it has no sense of accountability, or even know how to balance a budget? Yet we do. We do.

We must get informed not just about Zika virus, but about what is insinuating itself into nearly every American woman’s breast milk. We know that DDT is bad. We decimated the ozone layer with fluorocarbons. Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) has shown up in dozens of wells in Vermont – like most pesticides, it has been linked to cancer and disruption of endocrine systems: at least we no longer employ it as a food additive in our Teflon frying pans.

In 1962, scientist and author Rachel Carson chronicled many of our nation’s failed experiments with the chemical panacea. Humanity’s love affair with chemical “solutions” arose after many new chemicals were created for warfare against fellow humans, in World War II. In the years following that human conflict we began to wage war against our own ecosystem, with aerial bombardment against Japanese beetles, budworm, fire ants, mosquitoes, gypsy moth caterpillars and other pests. In every case we failed in the long term to eradicate or even control these pests. In every case we killed fish, birds, livestock, and other creatures. In every case we exposed millions of humans to toxins, and many suffered illness. Each time, we allocated government funds to purchase and distribute toxins without investing much at all in determining (before or after) what the effects on other life would be. And in every case we exhibited a grand and incredible hubris.

When we sprayed for budworm, we killed whole populations of salmon. When we sprayed for Japanese beetles, the toxins were absorbed by earthworms, and eaten by robins and other songbirds, which then died horrible deaths by the thousands – which is where Rachel Carson drew her book’s title, “Silent Spring.” There are now about 80,000 manmade chemicals in use in our environment: less than 1% of them have been evaluated for human health effects. And we are dosing our children, and our children’s children, with them.

Our state and federal “authorities” console us with measurements that say “levels are OK.” But the levels are not OK. Of such “standards’ (which are often simply adjusted upwards when exceeded), Rachel Carson observed that they provide “… mere paper security and promote[] a completely unjustified impression that safe limits have been established and are being adhered to. …[M]any people contend, with highly persuasive reasons, that no poison is safe or desirable on food.… [A laboratory animal] …is very different from a human being whose exposures to pesticides are not only multiple but for the most part unknown, unmeasurable, and uncontrollable….This piling up of chemicals from many different sources creates a total exposure that cannot be measured. It is meaningless, therefore, to talk about the “safety” of any specific amount of residue.” (Silent Spring, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1962, 1994, pp. 181-182).

We kid ourselves if we believe that modern chemicals are harmless – that the scientists somehow learned from past errors and make “safe” chemicals today. They will not change if we do not demand change. They will still spend public money on toxic chemicals that poison our children (and human breast milk), for private corporate profits – profits that will never be used to test for harmful effects, remediate pollution, or cure, treat, or prevent cancer and other problems.

Yet here we are again – the World Health Organization advises that “Old-fashioned fogging using insecticides is also an important part of mosquito control.” And an “expert” on human infections and immunity recently offered this not-so-comforting solution: “”If you just spray an aerosol of insecticides up and down the streets, like we typically do in the U.S. or out of airplanes in some locations, those insecticides are not likely to penetrate into people’s houses where the mosquitoes are resting….The best kind is to go inside people’s houses and spray residual insecticides on the walls and their closets in dark places where mosquitoes like to rest, which is extremely labor intensive.”” (USA Today, “Controlling Zika Mosquitoes May Be ‘Lost Cause’,” Lisa Szabo, May 3, 2016).

Here in Vermont, the Vermont Agency of Agriculture Food and Markets oversees mosquito-spraying efforts (Vermont Statutes Annotated Title 6 Chapter 85). Our state offers grants for the purchase of larvicides and adulticides to use to “control” mosquito populations. It is quite evident that the mosquitoes refuse to be controlled: but our human bodies continue to absorb the chemicals we spray. Perhaps we should stop.