After the tsunami hit southern Asia late last year, experts warned the next threat would be disease. Today, the Associated Press has reported the experts were right. “The combination of the tsunami and the rains are creating the largest single set of [mosquito] breeding sites that Indonesia has ever seen in its history,” said Richard Allan, director of the Mentor Initiative, a group that specializes in fighting malaria. When told the World Health Organization warned that disease could kill more people than the deadly tidal waves, he replied, “If anything, I think they are being conservative. Three-quarters of those [total] deaths could be from malaria.” Already seven cases of malaria have been reported in the Aceh province of Indonesia – and malaria season is just beginning.
This catastrophe could be averted. WHO could dramatically limit the number of malaria and dengue fever infections with a simple, economical, and effective treatment: spray DDT. Yet the world’s Green lobby would rather protest the use of a safe chemical than prevent further destruction to this ravaged area.
Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) is safe and effective. Just nine years after its first use as a pesticide, DDT won inventor Dr. Paul Müller a Nobel Prize. Soon, entire nations had eradicated the plague of malaria. In 1970, the National Academy of Sciences declared, “In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths.”
However, Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring alleged this practice caused cancer and deteriorated human, animal, and plant life. After extensive hearings in 1972, Judge Edmund Sweeney ruled these arguments lacked merit. An EPA bureaucrat, who had not attended the meetings nor read any of their transcripts, then overruled him and banned DDT use in the U.S. by fiat. Environmentalists quickly attached strings to USAID grants that effectively forbade DDT spraying in the rest of the world – with deadly consequences.
Two-to-three million residents of the Third World now die needlessly from malaria every year. WHO reports 2,500 children under the age of five die of malaria every day. Indeed, Nicholas Kristof noted in the New York Times, “Mosquitoes kill 20 times more people each year than the tsunami did.” The disease afflicts nearly 10 percent of the world’s population, with 90 percent of its victims in sub-Saharan Africa.
The other region most seriously affected is the same area hit by last month’s tsunami. According to the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction at Columbia University:
Malaria is endemic in 101 countries and about 40% of the world’s population is at risk…In WHO's Southeast Asia region (which includes Sri Lanka), the caseload was 16 million, with 73,000 deaths.
Malaria consumes 60 percent of Sri Lanka’s public health budget. Sri Lanka had 115 deaths from malaria in 1998, with 211,000 infections, up from a paltry 17 cases in 1963.
In all, the 30 Years War against DDT has threshed a deadly harvest of 50-90 million lives.
Malaria is not the only killer stalking tsunami-stricken Asia. Dengue fever is also carried by mosquitoes. Though lesser known, Dengue fever also claims innocent lives unnecessarily. Worldwide, some 2.5 billion people are at risk; 50 million infections develop a year, with two-to-five percent proving fatal. This translates to 2.5 million deaths a year. Nonetheless, WHO admits, “Before 1970 only nine countries had experienced DHF epidemics, a number that had increased more than four-fold by 1995.” This pox, too, could be limited by thoughtful pest control measures.
The intervening 32 years since the EPA ban have disproved nearly all Carson’s allegations. Todd Seavey of the American Council on Health and Science provided the facts: “No DDT-related human fatalities or chronic illnesses have ever been recorded, even among the DDT-soaked workers in anti-malarial programs or among prisoners who were fed DDT as volunteer test subjects – let alone among the 600 million to 1 billion who lived in repeatedly-sprayed dwellings at the height of the substance's use.” (Nonetheless, Teresa Heinz Kerry has donated more than half-a-million dollars to immortalize Carson’s legacy.) Limited spraying is now endorsed by such anti-environmentalist reactionaries as the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, and Ralph Nader.
There is another compelling reason to allow DDT use in southern Asia: non-DDT treatments are critically low and remarkably ineffective. Days before the tsunami, Voice of America news reported, “The World Health Organization says a massive shortfall of a key malaria drug will last well into next year, leaving poor countries with about half of what they need to fight the disease.” Worse yet, area mosquitoes have built up a resistance to anti-malarial drugs, rendering them useless. The remaining options – experiment with new and unproven drugs, or sleep beneath mosquito nets – provide uncertain or temporary remedies at best, and both options are more costly than spraying DDT. Yet the environmentalists’ ban has proven effective. Today, only India and China still produce DDT.
This shortage, and the carnage it will bring in its wake, reflects the perverse intentions of its extremist supporters. Dr. Charles Wurster of the Environmental Defense Fund and the leading force behind the EPA ban, was reportedly asked whether this new policy would result in additional deaths. He replied, “Probably – 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.”
Another such supporter is Alexander King, founder of The Club of Rome, an anti-population group. King wrote in 1990: “My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.”
The tsunami reduced King’s “population problem” by more than 200,000 souls. Continuing the DDT ban will pay greater dividends yet.
