When Politics Kills: Malaria and the DDT Story by Kendra Okonski and Roger Bate Reprinted from The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Environmental Policy Program
A recent New York Times article unveiled an interesting archaeological discovery: the earliest genetic evidence of malaria infection. According to the February 20 article by John Noble Wilford, "The new findings provided strong support for the hypothesis that a widespread outbreak of an especially lethal form of malaria in the fifth century AD probably contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire." It was not mentioned in the piece, but the first thing to come to mind for us was this: Had DDT come along just a few centuries sooner, the empire might have been spared.
Malaria continues to topple empires today, killing over one million people every year, mostly children and pregnant women. (As Dr. Wenceslaus Kilama, chairman of Malaria Foundation International, has said, the malaria epidemic "is like loading up seven Boeing 747 airliners each day, then deliberately crashing them into Mt. Kilimanjaro.") The number of deaths is increasing, especially in developing countries. Yet while these countries ought to have every method available to control this disease, political leaders and environmental groups recently came very close to banning an important weapon in the fight against malaria: DDT.
http://www.igreens.org.uk/malaria_and_ddt.htmWithout DDT, malaria bites back
by Roger Bate
Malaria is on the increase in all tropical regions of the planet - especially in Africa. In 2000, the disease killed more than one million people and made 300million seriously ill.
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/000000005591.htmThe Economic Costs of Malaria in South Africa
Malaria Control and the DDT Issue
Malaria is one of the world's most serious tropical diseases and imposes very significant economic costs on some of the poorest nations on earth. This study estimates the direct and indirect costs of malaria to South Africa and examines the issues surrounding the use of DDT as an anti-malaria insecticide.
Early records of malaria cases by Europeans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries show that malaria was a severe inhibitor of economic development and caused large economic costs. The current malarial areas in South Africa today are about one fifth of the size they were at the beginning of the 20th century. The historical success in controlling malaria is due in very large part to the use of DDT in malaria vector control.
In recent years, however, there has been a sharp rise in the number of malaria cases in South Africa, and indeed throughout Southern Africa. This rise is due to a number of factors, such as high rainfall in recent years, increased migration and a reduction in the use of DDT in vector control. The rise in malaria cases imposes heavy costs on the local and national economies. The economic cost (direct costs include the costs of care and control of malaria, and indirect costs include the losses in productivity and lost future earnings from death) of malaria in South Africa is conservatively estimated to be around R124 million (US$20 million) in 1997/98. Malaria in selected Southern African countries could cost as much as US$1,000 million, or 4% of GDP in 1998. In South Africa, malaria usually occurs in rural areas with agricultural and labour intensive industries. The incidence of malaria in these areas has severe economic impacts and as in the past, continues to hamper economic development
http://www.malaria.org/tren.html100 things you should know about DDT
Discovered by accident, DDT became one of the greatest public health tools of the 20th century.
Overuse harmed its efficacy -- and made it politically unpopular.
Müller won the Nobel Prize in 1948 for his work on DDT.
Rachel Carson sounded the initial alarm against DDT, but represented the science of DDT erroneously in her 1962 book Silent Spring. Carson wrote "Dr. DeWitt's now classic experiments [on quail and pheasants] have now established the fact that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction. Quail into whose diet DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched." DeWitt's 1956 article (in Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry) actually yielded a very different conclusion. Quail were fed 200 parts per million of DDT in all of their food throughout the breeding season. DeWitt reports that 80% of their eggs hatched, compared with the "control"" birds which hatched 83.9% of their eggs. Carson also omitted mention of DeWitt's report that "control" pheasants hatched only 57 percent of their eggs, while those that were fed high levels of DDT in all of their food for an entire year hatched more than 80% of their eggs.
Population control advocates blamed DDT for increasing third world population. In the 1960s, World Health Organization authorities believed there was
no alternative to the overpopulation problem but to assure than up to 40 percent of the children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the Agency for International Development stated,
"Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing." Eugenics read NAZI is sheeps clothing.
Science journals were biased against DDT. Philip Abelson, editor of Science informed Dr. Thomas Jukes that Science would never publish any article on DDT that was not antagonistic.
But as an assistant attorney general, William Ruckelshaus stated on August 31, 1970 in a U.S. Court of Appeals that "DDT has an amazing an exemplary record of safe use, does not cause a toxic response in man or other animals, and is not harmful. Carcinogenic claims regarding DDT are unproven speculation." But in a May 2, 1971 address to the Audubon Society, Ruckelshaus stated, "As a member of the Society, myself, I was highly suspicious of this compound, to put it mildly. But I was compelled by the facts to temper my emotions ... because the best scientific evidence available did not warrant such a precipitate action. However, we in the EPA have streamlined our administrative procedures so we can now suspend registration of DDT and the other persistent pesticides at any time during the period of review." Ruckelshaus later explained his ambivalence by stating that as assistant attorney general he was an advocate for the government, but as head of the EPA he was "a maker of policy."
http://www.junkscience.com/ddtfaq.htm
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