The Lives We Can Still Save

You've seen the horrific images of walls of water rushing up beaches, sweeping away everything – and everyone – in its path. You've seen the dead piled up like cordwood, wounded survivors, and persons collapsing upon hearing their entire family has vanished. Alas, you may not have seen the worst.

Dr. David Nabarro, head of crisis operations for the U.N. World Health Organization, warned that disease could take more lives than the waves. "The initial terror associated with the tsunamis and the earthquake itself may be dwarfed by the longer term suffering of the affected communities,'' he said.

The main enemy is pestilence that can come from many different sources and cause a bewildering number of deadly diseases. Many are contracted from contaminated water that, according to Gerald Martone of the International Rescue Committee, can carry more than 50 diseases.

Apparently, the first couple of paragraphs of Funemto's piece fail to ignite any interest among the FReepers who've only browsed the article as posted. Perhaps it's the mention of the UN and World Health Organization.

I'd rather both those entities cease to exist, too, but there's more to the article, so here's what I believe to be the most significant paragraphs, speaking to the action that, if taken immediately, could save hundreds of thousands of lives:

Malaria and dengue fever, both carried by mosquitoes, are already endemic in many of the affected areas and disease levels could dramatically increase as they breed in the countless pools of stagnant water left behind by the waves. Mosquitoes that carry malaria come out at night, those that carry dengue by day. They thus kill around the clock.
Draining the pools would be terribly laborious, especially since mosquitoes can breed in nothing more than a footprint. The best answer would be spraying with DDT. Unfortunately, environmentalists have demonized DDT based essentially on unfounded accusations in a 1962 book, Silent Spring.
Yet notes Paul Driessen, author of Eco-Imperialism and senior policy advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality, "DDT is not only probably the most effective mosquito killer on earth, it's also been tested for literally decades and has never been shown to harm people." It's questionable whether it even has any impact on the environment. There are other insecticides available, Driessen observes, but "they don't have the repellency of DDT and a single DDT spraying lasts six months."
He says DDT should be sprayed on water pools, tents, and on people themselves – as indeed was once common in Sri Lanka and throughout most of the world. "We need to ignore the environmentalists and concentrate on immediate health dangers," he says. Incidentally, by and large environmental groups also oppose water chlorination.
Typhus, spread by fleas and lice, could also become epidemic and DDT has an excellent track record in preventing it since it was first dusted on Italian war refugees in 1943.

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