Please Pass The DDT
By Ryan Walsh (01/18/05)
Although it has almost been a month since the tsunami demolished large parts of Southeast Asia, the disaster still claims lives. The AP reports that while the threat of diseases such as dysentery and cholera has lessened, the threat of a deadly malaria epidemic has not. In fact, it has grown. If conditions were to permit such an epidemic, experts estimate that it could kill over 100,000.
A plague of this proportion, on the heels of one of the greatest natural disasters in history, would surely move the world to tears. Yet, among some, news of a malaria outbreak would only prompt anger—righteous anger toward the radical environmentalist movement on whose shoulders the guilt of such an epidemic would rest.
The reason I use the world “guilt” is because malaria is an easily preventable disease. Halting its spread, however, would require the environmentalist movement to renounce one of its favorite pet causes, codified in Rachel Carson’s classic 1962 treatise “Silent Spring.” Carson claimed, among other things, that the widespread use of pesticides, especially the extremely effective malaria-fighting DDT, resulted in higher cancer rates in human beings. Yet there is not one iota of scientific evidence to buttress this claim. In fact, the thrust of the research on this question runs to the contrary.
According to scientific testing by Dr. Philip Butler, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service's Sabine Island Research Laboratory, “92 percent of DDT and its metabolites” vanish from the environment after 38 days. Furthermore, as the former director of the World Health Organization (WHO) acknowledged decades ago, “DDT is so safe that no symptoms have been observed among the 130,000 spraymen or the 535 million inhabitants of sprayed houses [over the years in which DDT spraying was legal]. No toxicity was observed in the wildlife of the countries participating in the malaria campaign.”
In what appears to have been a last, desperate attempt to rid the world of Rachel Carson’s myth, one study commissioned in 1956 asked volunteers to eat DDT every day for two years. Amazingly, the volunteers reported no major physical maladies then or even later in life.
After the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned DDT in 1972, Judge Edmund Sweeney, who was in charge of an EPA advisory body on DDT, concluded that such a ban was unnecessary: “DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man...is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man...[the] use of DDT under the regulations involved here [does] not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife.”
So we’ve proven that DDT isn’t harmful, but what makes it so indispensable in combating malaria? Consider that before the DDT revolution of the 1950s, India experienced 800,000 deaths a year from malaria. In the later 60s, after India had relentlessly implemented the use of DDT, annual malaria cases were down to almost zero. According to the New York Times, “In Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, 2.8 million cases of malaria per year fell to 17.” The Times further notes that this dramatic downturn in malaria cases worldwide even lead the National Academy of Sciences to proclaim that “to only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT.”
But by the early 70s, Rachel Carson had captured the hearts of the WHO and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and almost instantly the chemical viewed by scientists as a sort of Holy Water in the fight against worldly plague became a cancer-causing, bird-killing, humanity-threatening scourge. Simply astonishing.
In the short time it took you to read this column, over 1,000 people contracted malaria and a dozen died.
I think it’s clear whose hands are bloody.
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