Dutch minister calls on UK to join safe abortion fund after Trump ban

The Dutch government has voiced hope that the UK will join 20 countries to set up a safe abortion fund to fill the gap left by Donald Trump’s “global gag rule”.

Lilianne Ploumen, the Dutch international development minister, is leading an international campaign to raise $ 600m (£480m) to compensate for the Trump administration’s ban on funding for NGOs that provide abortion or information on the procedure to women in developing countries.

Belgium, Denmark and Norway have joined the Netherlands in pledging $ 10m each, while at least 15 other countries are preparing to join the scheme, including Canada, Cape Verde, Estonia, Finland and Luxembourg.

The British government has yet to declare whether it will sign up to the initiative, prompting concerns from British Labour MPs that Trump’s ban could undermine the Department for International Development’s work in promoting the health and education of poor women around the world.

Ploumen said she had contacted the international development secretary, Priti Patel, and her DfID predecessor, Justine Greening, who serves as minister for women and equalities.

The British government and the Netherlands were working closely on international family planning topics, Ploumen said, voicing hope that the UK would join the latest initiative. “It is up to them to voice their support. They are a strong partner in all of this so I do hope they will be able to join.”

“The UK has been a great champion of international cooperation and not only when there were Labour leaders in charge,” she said, praising David Cameron and Theresa May.

The Dutch government wants donors to step in to support family planning programmes.

Campaigners fear the ban will choke off funding for maternal health services and work to combat Aids, malaria and the Zika virus.

Already, 3m unsafe abortions for 15- to 19-year-old girls are carried out each year, the World Health Organisation estimates, leading to lasting health problems and, in some cases, the mother’s death.

The Dutch minister voiced optimism that a coalition of international donors – governments, foundations, companies and individuals – could raise the money, despite tepid responses to international fundraising drives for humanitarian emergencies in Syria and Yemen.

The $ 600m goal was a “very ambitious target” that “signalled the US has been a great partner in the last years”. But she acknowledged that countries were struggling to “make ends meet and it is really unfortunate that the US has now given us another challenge”.

The Dutch government has also approached US foundations. A few individuals have handed over money in envelopes to the Dutch embassies in Washington and London, prompting the creation of the fundraising page at SheDecides.com

NGOs have praised the Dutch government and other countries, but fear the plan may not go far enough..

We are counting on the UK government to continue supporting the family planning cause

Irene Donadio, IPPF

“We are witnessing a new version of the global gag rule,” said Irene Donadio, an expert at the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). “It has been enormously expanded and that will affect expenditure on all global health programmes. We know that at a minimum it could be $ 600m a year, but it could be much more.

“We admire and support those governments who want to stand up for women and their dignity, but we are not sure this will fill the gap or how quickly it will fill the gap.”

The IPPF had “always admired the UK’s commitment to family planning”, but “could not help noticing that the UK has not been very vocal [on the global gag],” Donadio added. “We are counting on the UK government to continue supporting the family planning cause.”

A DfID spokeswoman did not address a question about whether the UK would contribute to the international fund, saying: “The UK is a global leader on family planning, sexual and reproductive health and rights. We are continuing to work closely with partners, including governments and civil society, to deliver this, and are stepping up our leadership even further by hosting a major international summit this summer to secure commitments that increase access to family planning services for women and girls in the world’s poorest and most fragile countries.”

Aid experts have voiced concern that Brexit will damage Britain’s international development role, by eroding budgets and prompting an isolationist turn.

But Ploumen voiced optimism that the UK would not shrink from its promises. “Listening to your prime minister, she has voiced the importance of Britain in the world on several occasions, and international solidarity is part and parcel, I would assume, of that relationship with the rest of the world.

“If you are a trading nation, if you are an open economy like the UK and the Netherlands, there is a deep interest in a stable world.”

Dutch minister calls on UK to join safe abortion fund after Trump ban

Tories join NHS chiefs in call for increased social care funding

Philip Hammond is being urged by senior Tories to give the crumbling care system a double boost in his autumn statement, amid growing alarm that social care and the NHS will be unable to cope with demand this winter.

The chancellor is under intense pressure from health secretary Jeremy Hunt, local council leaders and NHS bosses to find some extra money to prop up the social care system in England. Well-placed sources say that, although Hammond has ruled out any unexpected increase in the NHS budget, he is examining a plan to plough between £700m and £1.5bn extra into social care services from April to help reduce numbers of older people being admitted to hospital. He is also looking into letting councils raise the amount they can add to council tax bills to fund social care through a precept introduced in April; it is currently capped at 2%. The autumn statement, on 23 November, may see the cash-strapped NHS get access to fresh capital funding to build new hospitals and health centres. to help deliver its promised revolution in how patients are cared for.

The Care Quality Commission warned last month that social care is “approaching a tipping point” and that greater numbers of frail elderly people will suffer falls or illness and add to the strain on hospitals and GPs unless urgent action is taken. Hunt and NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens have been lobbying the Treasury to bring forward to 2017-18 some or all of the £1.5bn it intends to put into the Better Care Fund, a scheme to bolster social care. Ministers have pledged to put £105m into the fund next year, and increase that to £825m in 2018-19 and to £1.5bn in 2019-20.

NHS organisations, the Local Government Association (LGA) and the Association of Directors of Adult Social Care have been making the same case. Sajid Javid’s Department for Communities and Local Government is understood to also be supporting it behind the scenes.

James Davies, a GP as well as a Tory MP and member of the health select committee, said growing numbers of Conservatives wanted Hammond to prioritise social care. The LGA said years of cuts to town-hall budgets have left the sector in crisis, with fewer people getting help with basics such as washing and eating at a time when need is rising. Also, care homes are closing, partly because councils cannot afford high enough fees to allow operators – whose costs have risen because of the national living wage – to make a profit.

“It is my view that, if further funding can be located, it should go into social care, with the expectation that this will indirectly relieve some of the difficulties being encountered by the NHS. I believe many of my colleagues are reaching the same conclusion,” Davies told the Observer. “The current pressures on social care are such that the prompt, safe discharge of patients from our hospitals is increasingly dysfunctional. So-called exit block is now a major challenge needing urgent attention. There is also evidence that hospital admissions could be reduced in number if community social care provision were to be increased in its extent.”

Such coordinated lobbying on behalf of social care by both the NHS and local government bodies is unprecedented. Health service bosses, ahead of a Whitehall spending decision, agree that social care should be the priority for extra resources. They are telling the Treasury that this would bring the double benefit of also reducing demand on the NHS. New figures last week showed “bed blocking” – patients being unable to go home because of inadequate social care provision – at a new record high.

Stephen Dalton, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said: “The critical and negative tipping point for the health and care system has been triggered by cuts to social care. It’s imperative the chancellor takes the opportunity, in the autumn statement, to prioritise investment in social care before the winter.”

Chris Ham, chief executive of the King’s Fund, agreed: “Six consecutive years of funding cuts have left thousands of older people, their families and carers without the support they need, and are exacerbating pressures on the NHS. With council services facing a funding gap of £1.9bn next year, social care must be a priority for the autumn statement. This is a key test of the prime minister’s promise of a more equal country that works for everyone. There is no more burning injustice today than older and disabled people being denied the care they need to live with independence and dignity.”

Tories join NHS chiefs in call for increased social care funding

Leading ocean advocacy groups join forces to tackle microfiber pollution

Two leading clean ocean advocacy groups have joined forces to stop tiny synthetic clothing fibers from polluting the world’s waterways and poisoning the food chain.

Plastic Soup Foundation (PSF), a Dutch nonprofit, and New York-based Parley for the Oceans announced Tuesday a partnership to tackle the issue of microfiber pollution and to create a global alliance of companies, governments, NGOs and scientists. Microfibers – tiny, often synthetic threads shed from laundry, industrial clothing manufacturing and fishing nets – have been found in alarming numbers in recent studies of microplastic pollution.

“Microfibers pose a massive and complex threat,” said Cyrill Gutsch, founder of Parley for the Oceans, in a statement. “It’s all about funding, supporting and boosting new technologies… [and] the best way to achieve this is together.”

The partnership comes after PSF launched its Ocean Clean Wash campaign earlier this year to educate washing machine manufacturers, fashion brands, environmental organizations and the public about the problem. PSF says already 100 nonprofits and other organizations have signed on to support the campaign, including Greenpeace UK and Austria, Plastic Pollution Coalition and Fauna & Flora International.

A June study found that synthetic fleece jackets release, on average, 1.7 grams of microfibers each wash. These small fibers aren’t easily filtered out at local wastewater treatment plants. The study, funded by outdoor clothing company Patagonia, found that up to 40% of these small fibers land up in oceans, rivers and lakes, threatening wildlife and ultimately our food chain.

Synthetic fibers such as acrylic, polyester and nylon pose the most danger because they don’t disintegrate and disappear over time. Instead, they break down into smaller, increasingly toxic pieces, allowing them to be consumed by fish and other animals. These tiny fibers have the potential to build up and lead to a potentially poisonous accumulation of chemicals in larger species. A study from the University of Exeter found that crabs contaminated with microfibers ate less food and that the polypropylene plastic broke into smaller pieces when ingested, leading to a greater spread in the body – and consequently a greater threat to human health.

Clothing companies have been slow to lend their support to the issue, although that’s starting to change. Patagonia says it continues to fund research and provide grants to explore ways to reduce the release of microfibers into waterways. Dutch clothing brand G-Star Raw announced earlier this year it was supporting PSF to raise awareness among fashion and textile companies about the damage their clothing can pose to the environment and to public health. According to PSF, nearly 40 fashion brands have agreed to collaborate as part of the partnership with Parley. The brands involved will be announced during a Call to Action event early next year.

PSF and Parley will work with other organizations to launch a competition next year to encourage scientists, inventors and clothing makers to come up with ways to stop the release of microfibers in the wash. The winners will be announced in 2018, and will receive a cash prize to implement their ideas.

According to PSF and Parley, possible solutions to the issue include a mechanical filter in washing machines to catch tiny fibers, synthetic yarns and fabrics that don’t release fibers in the wash and environmentally safe coatings that prevent microfibers from releasing when rinsed.

Leading ocean advocacy groups join forces to tackle microfiber pollution

Uk authors join fight to overhaul children"s mental health services

‘As writers for young children, our work involves inspiring our readers and encouraging them to recognize the potency of imagination.’ Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

Some of Britain’s major children’s authors are calling for a radical redesign of the youngster protection and little one psychological health systems, warning that the recent system is failing the country’s most vulnerable and neglected kids.

A group of writers, like Philip Pullman, Francesca Simon, Lauren Little one and Patrick Ness, have signed a letter, backing a campaign spearheaded by the London-based children’s charity, Little ones Company, for wholesale reorganisation of children’s psychological overall health and social companies.

“We locate it unacceptable that Ofsted has declared that one in 7 councils in England fail vulnerable kids with ‘unacceptably poor’ specifications, within a framework described as ‘manifestly and palpably weak’,” the letter states.

“As writers for children, our task includes inspiring our readers and encouraging them to understand the potency of imagination and believed, in the hope that when they expand up they can use them to aid increase the true globe. As tax payers and adults committed to the welfare of youngsters, we are saddened by the lack of political imagination which has led to millions of young children in this country who are abused, neglected and/or suffering from psychological overall health issues becoming denied proper care.”

Their uncommon intervention comes as Little ones Company founder, Camila Batmanghelidjh launches an independent taskforce, to style a totally new way of delivering youngster safety and little one wellbeing providers. The former director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, will chair the entire body, and will be joined by the children’s commissioner, Maggie Atkinson, and chief executive of Lambeth council, Derrick Anderson.

Batmanghelidjh explained she was motivated by a sense of aggravation created in excess of thirty many years doing work with neglected and abused kids, and seeing little improvement in the state support accessible for them. “Fundamentally, factors have not improved. Even governments that intend to support vulnerable youngsters get hijacked by other agendas when they come to power. Vulnerable young children get relegated to the bottom of the political pile, and no one particular is holding the government accountable on their behalf,” she stated.

Senior social operate specialists and little one mental well being employees had told her repeatedly that they felt they have been unable to give the youngsters they worked with the help they needed due to the fact of funding constraints. Her need to restructure the recent method “must not be witnessed as an attack on social employees”, she explained, but was aimed at reforming the system that frequently manufactured it hard for pros to get kids assistance.

She proposes making a “division for loved ones resilience” that would carry with each other child mental health teams with social services, youth justice and unique needs services. “Who says that we need to preserve social companies and child mental overall health separate. Is that a good idea? Who says that psychiatrists should stay in clinics, and we must assume that they will have a parent that will take them to the appointment? Is that a excellent construct for a little one whose unique difficulty is a lack of dedication and care?” she explained.

Neighborhood authorities are currently often reluctant to capture the actual degree of need amid young children and youthful individuals in their locality, she mentioned, since they lack the capacity to meet that want, and in identifying it they would be legally obliged to handle it. The taskforce would try to pin down exact numbers of children who require assistance.

A report published by the Centre for Social Justice (the proper-leaning consider tank founded by secretary of state for operate and pensions, Iain Duncan Smith), Adequate is Ample final month explained several kid protection and mental wellness solutions were in crisis, and warned that the level at which several vulnerable children experienced for assist was set also substantial.

But Alan Wood, president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Companies (the specialist entire body for senior managers in youngsters solutions) mentioned he did not see the need to have for a radical restructuring of the present program.

“It is really straightforward to extrapolate from a modest proof base, failures in the technique. Day-in, day-out 1000′s of committed workers are doing work successfully with hundreds of 1000′s of the most troubled and troubling youngsters, and that ought to not be overlooked. The issues dealing with children’s social care are more acute than ever just before, particularly in a climate of diminishing sources and escalating demand,” he explained.

Last yr, in excess of half a million young children in England had been referred to children’s social care with nearly 53,000 children turning out to be topic of a youngster protection strategy and in excess of 375,000 kids designated as young children in need. “We need to have to increase the technique the place it is failing but we will not believe the program is failing as a entire,” he stated.

Uk authors join fight to overhaul children"s mental health services

Major doctors join with cancer sufferers to back Lord Saatchi"s Health care Innovation Bill

Leading professionals who have signed the letter like David Walker, Professor of Paediatric Oncology at Nottingham University, and Riccardo Audisio, President of the Association for Cancer Surgical procedure.

Many cancer individuals signed the letter, along with Charlie Chan, a consultant basic surgeon and Michael Ellis, Conservative MP for Northampton North.

In the letter – published today to coincide with the 2nd reading of the Bill in the Residence of Lords – the group explained the Bill “legally protects medical doctors who try out out progressive new strategies or drugs on individuals when all else has failed.

“This Bill will protect the patient and nurture the innovator. It will inspire protected medical advancement, even though at the same time deterring the maverick, thereby recalibrating the culture of defensive medicine.

“Finally, it will operate with proof-based mostly medicine and give new information that will inspire and help new investigation.”

The Bill was designed to give the hope to the dying but has considering that been amended so that untried medication can be offered to individuals who may possibly benefit.

Oxford University has also agreed to set up and run a database containing anonymised data about those who agree to the treatment options.

Stephen Kennedy, a professor of reproductive medicine at Oxford University, told The Telegraph the database will be “publicly accessible to patients and healthcare experts alike”.

Individuals would be ready to go onto the internet site, discover an modern treatment that had been examined on other individuals and then ask for it to be tested on them.

Prof Kennedy stated: “There would be a facility inside of the database to allow men and women to search on the basis of circumstances and treatments.” Patients’ details on the internet site “would be completely anonymous,” he additional.

The new law has been criticised by patients’ groups and attorneys. The Patients’ Association stated it was concerned that medicines which have only been experimented with on a few hundred people could put patients at risk.

It was also anxious about the issue of patients giving informed consent – specially if really sick individuals are desperate for any opportunity of hope.

Katherine Murphy, the association’s chief executive, mentioned it was achievable “some gung-ho doctors will want to use dying sufferers as guinea pigs”.

She stated: “The Bill is a enormous threat to patient security. It is aimed at solving a difficulty that doesn’t exist. We applaud and inspire health care innovation, but giving untested drugs to critically sick men and women is not the way forward.”

Jonathan Wheeler, vice-president of the Association of Individual Injury Attorneys, added: “This Bill enables a doctor to ‘play God’ with no consequences”

He explained the Bill “would only demand doctors to ‘consult’ colleagues about an revolutionary remedy. There is no obligation to gain the consent of those colleagues just before going ahead”.

Major doctors join with cancer sufferers to back Lord Saatchi"s Health care Innovation Bill

US Congress members join campaign calling for end to FGM

More than 50 members of Congress have joined a campaign calling on the White Residence to carry out a research into the risks of female genital mutilation for American girls and introduce emergency hotlines and airport checks to avert them becoming taken out of the nation for the practice to be carried out abroad.

In a signal the expanding political momentum in Washington behind a Guardian-backed campaign, American FGM survivor and campaigner leader Jaha Dukureh also met this week with officials at the departments of justice and education to discuss their response to a petition with more than 202,000 signatures demanding a extensive US action program.

Senior Democrats think President Obama, who signed a law banning travel for the purposes of carrying out FGM in 2013, is sympathetic to calls for further US action on the issue but fear a wider lack of information of the hazards to American girls and women is holding back a much more co-ordinated official response.

“It’s so essential for the Obama administration to join us and to break the silence so we can educate folks all around the nation,” said Texan congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee, one particular of 58 signatories to the White Property letter, in the course of a briefing in Capitol Hill this week.

“We hear from women usually who were born right here in the US and have been by means of FGM. These younger females are your average American youngsters: some of them you know, some of them are residing in your neighbourhood.”

New York congressman Joe Crowley, who aided launch the FGM campaign and petition at the US headquarters of the Guardian final month, mentioned raising awareness was especially essential at the begin of the so-known as “cutting season” when girls from immigrant families are returned to nations in Africa throughout the summer season holiday.

“It is crucial that as we enter these summertime months and we know families will be taking their kids overseas to reconnect them with their homelands, that they recognize that it is against the law to transport their youngster overseas for the purposes of getting FGM,” mentioned Crowley.

“We want to alert educators and counsellors on how to look for women at chance,” he extra, calling for a “national hotline so people who know girls at threat can get in touch with in and found out how they can strategy this sensitive situation.”

The last complete research in 1997 estimated 70,000 women and youthful women living in America were at risk of getting subjected to the practice, but campaigners argue much more up-to-date study is required into the scale of the difficulty in light of new census data on immigrant communities.

“People usually assume that FGM is an African issue, not an American difficulty,” mentioned Dukureh, who is also becoming supported by the campaign group, Equality Now and whose petition is hosted on the campaign platform, Adjust.org.“There are a lot of women during the nation – in Altanta, in Minnesota, in New York – that have been via FGM and we do not have a single government programme in area for survivors, or to avert it taking place.”

She also joined representatives Crowley and Jackson-Lee in urging the US to lead and support fund a co-ordinated worldwide response.

“We have to begin from house,” explained Dukureh. “We have to do something in our own nation before we can inform other nations what to do. Politicians need to comprehend that this is an American dilemma as well.”

Jackson-Lee stated worldwide figures suggested 30 million ladies and women stay at chance about the planet of what the United Nations defines as the “partial or complete elimination of the female genitalia for non-health-related factors.”

“We are an enormously diverse nation and we welcome the diversity of traditions, but we do not welcome oppression or the denial of human rights,” she said.

“Too a lot of American women encounter the oppression of FGM … just believe of a youthful woman going via this, unknowingly or without her permission to, in essence, alter her existence permanently. It is said that FGM is to preserve the virginity of the women and to maintain them pure till marriage but it is genuinely taking their spirit away.”

US Congress members join campaign calling for end to FGM

Who"s Who Of Health Care Join Forces For Wise Engineering

In the new app-driven overall health economy, ease of use of IT for providers and individuals is a must. Equally crucial is a sound technical strategy and organization program for application creators looking for achievement, sustainability, and a huge market for their innovations. Underneath the leadership of Boston Children’s Hospital’s Drs. Kenneth Mandl, Isaac Kohane, Joshua Mandel and an advisory committee that consists of former U.S. Chief Engineering Officer Aneesh Chopra, Harvard Company College professor and notable author Clayton Christensen, and Eli Lilly’s director of Clinical Open Innovation Thomas Krohn,  to boost entry to and high quality of care. Wise apps are agnostic to the underlying electronic health record (EHR) or other IT platform. Like iPhone or Android apps, Sensible apps are substitutable and can be readily additional or deleted from EHRs.

Swapping Technological innovation In True Time

The Intelligent team has focused on enabling the home of substitutability in health IT through an application programming interface (API). This basically allows innovators and developers who compose an app to run it anyplace, and lets end users of health IT customize their systems with these substitutable apps.

He makes an analogy to the unique iPhones that utilized cellular towers to triangulate a user’s GPS, but shifted with the present day satellite GPS. When they did so, iPhone apps kept on functioning. The app developers did not require to know how the underlying technique measured geo-coordinates. Similarly, Intelligent apps don’t want to know which electronic wellness record or pharmacy info method is in use at any offered hospital. Instead, Smart app developers, like those developers for iPhone apps, simply use the unique library to make upgrades and adjust out necessary components.

Sensible Overview Video

This is exactly what developers like Justin Cranford in Raleigh, North Carolina say are excellent for performance. “In the iPhone, the library is written by Apple, and that inner code changes, but the commands I get in touch with to build apps just pull these modifications in without having me ever knowing. Believe about how Tinder pulls in Facebook photographs and triangulates your spot by means of the phone.” Or, as Ken Mandl quipped, “I don’t envision that each time the creators of Angry Birds wished to include a bird they had to fly to Cupertino for a meeting with the Apple technical crew.”

This approach, recognized as abstraction, enables technologies to be swapped out and improved inside the walls of hospitals, clinics and other care facilities. A all-natural extension of which may possibly be the ability to share these substitutions and updates with individuals, enabling them access not only to their information, but local community and population trends inside the hospital and out – which is most important to advisors like Thomas Krohn from Eli Lilly. In accordance to him, “I’m at the table since the pace of transformation is too slow.  This is the real chance,” he believes, “to enable innovation at the stage of care.”

Clayton Christensen adds, “Modularized hardware and software are what make this distinctive. That component will establish the winners and losers.” When comparing it to his writing in The Innovator’s Prescription, he contends, 

Overall health Reformations Make Smart Attainable

In addition to the innovative tips and established versions that Wise is created on, important alterations to the well being system and technology in the United States have created advances such as this possible. 3 distinct incidences have had a notably large effect on Sensible.

First, the opening of overall health information has allowed payers, suppliers and patients entry to new information. In accordance to Aneesh Chopra, Though the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has not opened all of their data to the public, giving away payment information has opened numerous new doors for utilizing payment information to much better inform everybody in the well being ecosystem.

Second, the digitization of well being care has permitted for patient data to not only be collected, but to be utilised. By releasing patient data, our former CTO Mr. Chopra, who has a background in wellness, technological innovation and policy believes that a patient revolution is on the horizon. He contends that the greatest way to empower individuals is to give them their own data to consider past the four walls of the hospital or institution, and that means they can also use Sensible in true time.

Third, payment reform in America is shifting us from a charge-for-service to an outcomes and worth-based mostly overall health program. Despite the fact that there are considerable flaws to the method, the psychological shift for providers implies that patient-centered care, outcomes and general “value” will have new significance. .

Intelligent Advisors And Partners

The advisors that have come together to make Sensible a reality actually are a who’s who of the health business. In addition to the former White Property CTO, universities and professors of note and the greatest provider well being programs, there has also been buy in from important technology firms, pharma, traders and consultants.

The record of advisors involves, but is not limited to:

-       The Advisory Board Firm

Who"s Who Of Health Care Join Forces For Wise Engineering

Celebrating Earth Day: Science And Engineering Should Join The Get together

A number of years ago seventh graders at a tony personal college near San Francisco have been given an uncommon Earth Day assignment: Make a record of environmental tasks that could be achieved with Bill Gates’ fortune.  This strategy to environmental awareness fits in nicely with the Obama-Pelosi-Reid worldview that the correct to personal house is subsidiary to undertakings that others think are worthwhile – the redistributive theory of society.  And how intriguing that the resources produced “available” for the students’ considered-experiment were not, say, the aggregate net worth of the members of Congress but the wealth of 1 of the nation’s most productive, modern entrepreneurs.

One more Earth Day assignment for individuals very same students was to read Rachel Carson’s best-selling 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” an emotionally charged but deeply flawed excoriation of the widespread spraying of chemical pesticides for the management of insects.  As described by Roger Meiners and Andy Morriss in their scholarly nevertheless eminently readable 2012 analysis, “Silent Spring at 50: Reflections on an Environmental Traditional,” Carson exploited her reputation as a properly-identified nature writer to advocate and legitimatize “positions linked to a darker tradition in American environmental thinking: neo-Malthusian population management and anti-technologies efforts.”

Carson’s proselytizing and advocacy led to the virtual banning of DDT and to restrictions on other chemical pesticides in spite of the fact that “Silent Spring” was replete with gross misrepresentations and scholarship so atrocious that if Carson were an academic, she would be guilty of egregious academic misconduct.  Carson’s observations about DDT have been meticulously rebutted level by point by Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, Professor of Entomology at San Jose State University, a prolonged-time member of the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, and a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences.  In his stunning 1992 essay, “The Lies of Rachel Carson,” Edwards demolished her arguments and assertions and named consideration to vital omissions, faulty assumptions, and outright fabrications.

Consider this quote from Edwards: “This implication that DDT is horribly deadly is fully false.  Human volunteers have ingested as a lot as 35 milligrams of it a day for nearly two many years and suffered no adverse results.  Hundreds of thousands of men and women have lived with DDT intimately throughout the mosquito spray programs and nobody even received sick as a consequence.  The Nationwide Academy of Sciences concluded in 1965 that ‘in a little far more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million [human] deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable.’ The Planet Well being Organization stated that DDT had ‘killed far more insects and saved much more men and women than any other substance.’”

Meiners and Morriss conclude properly that the influence of “Silent Spring” on present day environmentalism “encourages some of the most destructive strains inside environmentalism: alarmism, technophobia, failure to contemplate the expenses and advantages of options, and the discounting of human effectively-becoming all around the world.”  Sounds like a description of the mindset of the U.S. Environmental Safety Agency.

The 1st Earth Day celebration was conceived by then-U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson and held in 1970 as a “symbol of environmental duty and stewardship.”  In the spirit of the time, it was a touchy-feely, consciousness-raising, New Age experience, and most routines have been organized at the grass roots degree.  In current many years, Earth Day has offered an possibility for environmental Cassandras to prophesy apocalypse, dish anti-technology filth and proselytize.  Passion and zeal routinely trump science, and provability will take a back seat to plausibility.

One particular of the U.K.’s wonderful thinkers, Dick Taverne, aka Lord Taverne of Pimlico, discusses numerous of the shortcomings of New Age philosophy in his excellent book, “The March of Unreason.”  Taverne deplores the “new type of fundamentalism” that has infiltrated several environmentalist campaigns — an undiscriminating Back-To-Nature motion that views science and technology as the enemy and as a manifestation of an exploitative, rapacious and reductionist perspective towards nature.  It is no coincidence, he believes, that eco-fundamentalists are strongly represented in anti-globalization and anti-capitalism demonstrations around the world.

In this, Taverne echoes the late physician and novelist Michael Crichton, who argued in his considerably-acclaimed novel “State of Fear” that eco-fundamentalists have reinterpreted traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths and produced a religion of environmentalism, a religion with its own Eden and paradise the place mankind lived in a state of grace and unity with nature until finally mankind’s fall — which came not from eating an apple, but after consuming from the forbidden tree of knowledge (that is, science).  This religion also has a judgment day to come for us all in this polluted planet — all of us, that is, except for true environmentalists, who will be saved by attaining sustainability.  One particular of Crichton’s characters argues that given that the end of the Cold War, environmental alarmism in Western nations has filled the void left by the disappearance of the terror of communism and nuclear holocaust, and that social management is now maintained by hugely exaggerated fears about pollution, worldwide warming, chemical compounds, genetic engineering and the like.  With the military-industrial complicated no longer the main driver of society, the politico-legal-media complex has replaced it.

This politico-legal-media complex peddles dread in the guise of advertising safety.  French author and philosopher Pascal Bruckner captured its tone nicely: “You’ll get what you’ve got coming!  That is the death want that our misanthropes handle to us.  These are not wonderful souls who alert us to troubles but tiny minds who wish us suffering if we have the presumption to refuse to pay attention to them.  Catastrophe is not their fear but their joy.”

The small-minded misanthropes have appreciated some dubious “successes.”  They have effectively banished agricultural biotechnology from Europe, have the chemical sector on the run and the pharmaceutical market in their crosshairs.

Lord Taverne believes these are ominous trends that are contrary to the rules of the Enlightenment, returning us to an era in which inherited dogma and superstition took precedence over experimental data.  Not only do the practices of eco-fundamentalism retard technologies and the availability of items which, employed responsibly, could significantly boost and lengthen many lives and shield the environment, but they strangle scientific creativity and technological innovation.

By limiting citizens’ and businesses’ capacity to engage in voluntary transactions, irrational practices born of eco-fundamentalism undermine the overall health of civilized society and of democracy.  Defend science and cause, argues Taverne, and you defend democracy itself.  Nicely said, Milord, and Happy Earth Day to you.

Henry Miller, a doctor and molecular biologist, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. 

Celebrating Earth Day: Science And Engineering Should Join The Get together