Psuedo-science can be fatal. It’s estimated that since the ban of the insecticide DDT, more than 50 million people have died of malaria. A young aspiring journalist from the Bulls Head section of Staten Island is one of the latest victims. Akilah Amapindi, 23, contracted the disease while working as a radio intern in southern Africa.

A few years ago, I learned that the boyfriend of a neighbor of mine had died of malaria while abroad. I am ashamed to admit that when I heard the sad news, my first instinct was to doubt the cause of death, subconsciously suspecting that drugs were the real culprit.

At the Martin Luther King Jr. dinner the Congress of Racial Equality held earlier this year, I heard CORE’s chairman, Roy Innis, speak of the senseless devastation wreaked on Africa due to the lack of modern technology in agriculture. CORE then held a conference at the United Nations to discuss the efficacy and realistic necessity of using DDT to control and minimize the damage done by malarial mosquitoes in developing countries.

The more one reads about the havoc wrought by agenda-driven environmentalists, the more one is astounded by how easily Americans can be frightened by speciously researched enviro-babble. Is global warming real? Sure. It’s been warming and cooling off for millions of years, and guess what? We humans have very little to do with it and it’s sheer arrogance to think that we can cure it.

In the 1960s, Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” generated worldwide interest in the environment and raised an alarm about the damage caused by chemical pesticides. Her book and the subsequent demonizing of the insecticide led to the 1972 ban on DDT in the United States. DDT was not banned internationally, but countries were warned that they would not get foreign aid if they used it. According to statistics from the United Nations, malaria before the ban had become a relatively minor disease, with about 50,000 deaths a year worldwide. A few years later, that figure had climbed into the millions.

DDT was not a carcinogen. It did not harm humans. Indeed, it could be ingested. It was one of the most effective killers of disease-bearing mosquitoes.

Dr. Paul Muller, its inventor, was honored with the Nobel Prize in 1948. When it was introduced in Sri Lanka, cases of malaria dropped from 3 million in 1946 to just 29 in 1964. Five years after the DDT ban, the death rate had climbed back to more than a half-million a year.

I was still a teenager when “Silent Spring” was published, and all I knew at the time was that it was about bugs, so my interest level was nonexistent. But Rachel Carson has been lauded over the years as the matriarch of today’s militant environment movement. What is interesting to note is that many legitimate scientists have always condemned her book as a tissue of cleverly told lies designed to exclude any argument that challenged Carson’s conclusions.

J. Gordon Edwards was a professor of entomology at San Jose State University who testified in defense of DDT at hearings before the ban. He wrote an editorial in 1992 for 21st Century Science and Technology Magazine that was called “The Lies of Rachel Carson.” In it he pinpointed all of Carson’s deliberate obfuscations and faulty research, from the very beginning of “Silent Spring” to its end.

For example, Carson quotes the famed Albert Schweitzer in the dedication of the book this way: “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the Earth.” But Schweitzer was speaking of nuclear warfare, not insecticides. In reality, he wrote in his autobiography, “How much labor and waste of time these wicked insects do cause us … but a ray of hope, in the use of DDT, is now held out to us.” Funny how Carson left that out.

Perhaps the best explanation for why junk scientists have so much success in promoting their hokum theories is that there are so many “intellectual morons” in the world of academia. An author, Daniel Flynn, in his latest nonfiction work, “Intellectual Morons – How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas,” coined that term.

The tragic death of a young woman in our city due to a disease that would have been eradicated had not hysterical, bone-headed lemmings fallen for flawed data should be our wake-up call. Before blindly accepting scientific hypotheses as fact, we should be cognizant of where that research is coming from and what group is financing it. Science and a personal political agenda are a very bad mix.