It's Time to Spray DDT

NY Times ^ | January 8, 2005 | NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

[neverdem]

OP-ED COLUMNIST

If the U.S. wants to help people in tsunami-hit countries like Sri Lanka and Indonesia - not to mention other poor countries in Africa - there's one step that would cost us nothing and would save hundreds of thousands of lives.

It would be to allow DDT in malaria-ravaged countries.

I'm thrilled that we're pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the relief effort, but the tsunami was only a blip in third-world mortality. Mosquitoes kill 20 times more people each year than the tsunami did, and in the long war between humans and mosquitoes it looks as if mosquitoes are winning.

One reason is that the U.S. and other rich countries are siding with the mosquitoes against the world's poor - by opposing the use of DDT.

"It's a colossal tragedy," says Donald Roberts, a professor of tropical public health at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. "And it's embroiled in environmental politics and incompetent bureaucracies."

In the 1950's, 60's and early 70's, DDT was used to reduce malaria around the world, even eliminating it in places like Taiwan. But then the growing recognition of the harm DDT can cause in the environment - threatening the extinction of the bald eagle, for example - led DDT to be banned in the West and stigmatized worldwide. Ever since, malaria has been on the rise.

The poor countries that were able to keep malaria in check tend to be the same few that continued to use DDT, like Ecuador. Similarly, in Mexico, malaria rose and fell with the use of DDT. South Africa brought back DDT in 2000, after a switch to other pesticides had led to a surge in malaria, and now the disease is under control again. The evidence is overwhelming: DDT saves lives.

But most Western aid agencies will not pay for anti-malarial programs that use DDT, and that pretty much ensures that DDT won't be used. Instead, the U.N. and Western donors encourage use of insecticide-treated bed nets and medicine to cure malaria.

Bed nets and medicines are critical tools in fighting malaria, but they're not enough. The existing anti-malaria strategy is an underfinanced failure, with malaria probably killing 2 million or 3 million people each year.

DDT doesn't work everywhere. It wasn't nearly as effective in West African savannah as it was in southern Africa, and it's hard to apply in remote villages. And some countries, like Vietnam, have managed to curb malaria without DDT.

But overall, one of the best ways to protect people is to spray the inside of a hut, about once a year, with DDT. This uses tiny amounts of DDT - 450,000 people can be protected with the same amount that was applied in the 1960's to a single 1,000-acre American cotton farm.

Is it safe? DDT was sprayed in America in the 1950's as children played in the spray, and up to 80,000 tons a year were sprayed on American crops. There is some research suggesting that it could lead to premature births, but humans are far better off exposed to DDT than exposed to malaria.

I called the World Wildlife Fund, thinking I would get a fight. But Richard Liroff, its expert on toxins, said he could accept the use of DDT when necessary in anti-malaria programs.

"South Africa was right to use DDT," he said. "If the alternatives to DDT aren't working, as they weren't in South Africa, geez, you've got to use it. In South Africa it prevented tens of thousands of malaria cases and saved lots of lives."

At Greenpeace, Rick Hind noted reasons to be wary of DDT, but added: "If there's nothing else and it's going to save lives, we're all for it. Nobody's dogmatic about it."

So why do the U.N. and donor agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, generally avoid financing DDT programs? The main obstacle seems to be bureaucratic caution and inertia. President Bush should cut through that and lead an effort to fight malaria using all necessary tools - including DDT.

One of my most exhilarating moments with my children came when we were backpacking together and spotted a bald eagle. It was a tragedy that we nearly allowed DDT to wipe out such magnificent birds, and we should continue to ban DDT in the U.S.

But it's also tragic that our squeamishness about DDT is killing more people in poor countries, year in and year out, than even a once-in-a-century tsunami.

[Issaquahking]

To Americans, DDT is simply a killer. Ask Americans over 40 to name the most dangerous chemical they know, and chances are that they will say DDT..

Nice job by the envirowhacks of dumbing down the entire American education system.

Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane was banned in the United States in 1972. The chemical was once sprayed in huge quantities over cities and fields of cotton and other crops. Its persistence in the ecosystem, where it builds up to kill birds and fish, has become a symbol of the dangers of playing God with nature, an icon of human arrogance.

This, could be the very essence of Rush Limbaugh's "Symbolism without substance" definition in the lexicon of describing liberalism!.

Science and research take time, and continuous repetitive results. People on average, refuse to accept this in the generation of me-ism, and want instantaneous results...and they better be good; so they refuse to allow for time to generate a real picture of continuous research. It's a move on, ain't got time for solid science results, liberal thing..

Countries throughout the world have signed a treaty promising to phase out its use.

No one concerned about the environmental damage of DDT set out to kill African children. But various factors, chiefly the persistence of DDT's toxic image in the West and the disproportionate weight that American decisions carry worldwide, have conspired to make it essentially unavailable to most malarial nations. With the exception of South Africa and a few others, African countries depend heavily on donors to pay for malaria control. But at the moment, there is only one country in the world getting donor money to finance the use of DDT: Eritrea, which gets money for its program from the World Bank with the understanding that it will look for alternatives. Major donors, including the United States Agency for International Development, or Usaid, have not financed any use of DDT, and global health institutions like W.H.O. and its malaria program, Roll Back Malaria, actively discourage countries from using it..

Finally they (liberals) think they have it - CONTROL to the inth degree through big government. It's a formula for disaster (wrapping one's self around socialism/communism) instead of moving towards free market principles/capitalism, where real good comes from.

[sergeantdave]

DDT is safe for the environment. Here you go -

---

A pandemic is slaughtering millions, mostly children and pregnant women - one child every 15 seconds; 3 million people annually; and over 100 million people since 1972 - but there are no protesters clogging the streets or media stories about this tragedy. These deaths can be laid at the doorstep of author Rachel Carson.

Her 1962 bestselling book Silent Spring detailed the alleged “dangers” of the pesticide DDT, which had practically eliminated malaria.

Within ten years, the environmentalist movement had convinced the powers that be to outlaw DDT. Denied the use of this cheap, safe and effective pesticide, millions of people - mostly poor Africans - have died due to the environmentalist dogma propounded by Carson’s book.

Her coterie of admirers at the U.N. and environmental groups such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund and the Environmental Defense Fund have managed to bring malaria and typhus back to sub-Saharan Africa with a vengeance.

“Carson and those who joined her in the crusade against DDT have contributed to millions of preventable deaths. Used responsibly, DDT can be quite safe for man and the environment,” said former Surgeon General and retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Dr. Harold M. Koenig.

“DDT is the best insecticide we have today for controlling malaria,” said malaria expert Dr. Donald Roberts of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. “DDT is long-acting, the alternatives are not. DDT is cheap, the alternatives are not. End of story.”

DDT is also not hazardous to humans or the environment - despite all the propaganda to the contrary. According to tests conducted by Dr. Philip Butler, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Sabine Island Research Laboratory, “92 percent of DDT and its metabolites disappear” from the environment after 38 days. (See Environmental Protection Agency’s DDT hearings transcript, page 3,726.) Plus, humans have nothing to worry about with small exposures to DDT.

Rachel Carson and the worldwide environmentalist movement are responsible for perpetuating an ecological genocide that has claimed the lives of millions of young, poor, striving African men, women and children, killed by preventable diseases. - Lisa Makson, FrontPageMagazine.com

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And here's a "concerned" eco-fascist commenting on DDT -


“[Any known alternative to DDT] only kills farm workers, and most of them are Mexicans and Negroes. So what? People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them and this is as good a way as any.” - Dr. Charles Wurster, chairman of the Environmental Defense Fund’s Scientific Advisory Council and a key promoter of the DDT ban

[Sthitch]

I believe that someone else posted some of the information from JunkScience.com, already so I will not do that. There are many things that will cause an egg shell to thin, and DDT is not one of them. The one study that concluded that it did was flawed. The flaw was that the feed contained a known, and proved egg thinner as well as DDT. All other studies had and have refuted this link, but as you know just one contrary study is enough to convince liberals and environmentalist that we should ban something.

[wildbill]

I felt the earth move when I read this from Kristof of the NYT. When I satisfied myself it wasn't an earthquake, I was amazed at the change in position of some of the environuts.

Perhaps the charges that they prefer human deaths to mosquito control are hitting home.

[logician2u]

Do you think Kristof, the newshound that he is, might have happened across Michael Fumento's piece on the same subject from a week earlier?

Whatever motivated him, it's good to see that at least one "establishment" media type knows the facts about DDT.

[neverdem]

If you haven't, read the magazine article posted in comment# 6 on this thread. It's long, but informative. Comments# 42 and the link in 45 are also worth reading. Michael Fumento is well respected. Happy New Year!

[dervish]

Today's environmentalists suffer from the disease of the left, extremism. This is a simple cost benefit analysis even if one believes that DDT is harmful, not a given especially in the new lower but effective doses.

From the Wall Street Journal editorial:

Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas noted the hypocrisy of this position at a subcommittee hearing in October. AID "refuses to support and endorse the use of insecticides," said the Senator, "even when used in small amounts -- much smaller than the mass, airborne spraying that the U.S. implemented to eliminate its own malaria problem decades ago."

DDT works cheap

[Finalapproach29er]

Thanks very much. Looks like a sound solution.

[Stellar Dendrite]

It's amazing and scary about how many things the press lies about.....I guess it's all about the junk science.