Steve Milloy

Way back in the early days of my blogging career, I remember coming across a "challenge" by a man named Jock Doubleday. I didn't know it at the time, but Doubleday had achieved some notoriety before his "vaccine challenge" as the director or Natural Woman, Natural Man, Inc. and the author of such amazing works as The Burning Time (Stories of the Modern-day Persecution of Midwives) and Lolita Shrugged (THE MYTH OF AGE-SPECIFIC MATURITY). His "challenge" was in the same vein as his previous work, only more so and full-on antivaccine. The reason I'm bringing up Doubleday again after all these…

Brian Dunning's Skeptoid does an excellent job of debunking pseudoscience, so his podcast on DDT is profoundly disappointing. Dunning claims that DDT use did not have a large impact on bird populations, that elitist environmental groups were killing brown children by blocking DDT use and that DDT is effective even if mosquitoes are resistant. None of these claims are true, as I will detail in this post. But first, why did a sensible fellow like Dunning get it all so badly wrong? Well, his primary source for information about DDT was Steve Milloy's junkscience.com. One commenter…