Double Standards On Disease Control, Part 2
By Paul Driessen (05/20/05)
Anti-pesticide policies violate human rights and condemn millions to needless death.
Contrary to USAID assurances, mosquito net programs have not proven nearly as effective in controlling malaria as spraying houses with DDT, Desowitz and Professor Donald Roberts of the US Uniformed Health Services University point out. South Africa slashed its malaria rates by 80% in just 18 months by spraying the walls and eaves of traditional mud and thatch huts twice a year with small amounts of DDT – and then by 93% within three years, by augmenting this with new artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) drugs. No bed net program comes close.
Ecuador has cut its malaria rates by 60% by using DDT – while Bolivia, which bowed to international pressure and banned the pesticide’s use, has seen malaria increase by 80% since 1993, notes Dr. Silvia Pasquier of Bolivia’s St. Thomas Aquinas College.
USAID is now helping farmers increase the production of artemisia plants, with the goal of producing 20 million to 40 million pediatric doses of ACT by 2006. This is a welcome development. But it’s not enough.
500 million people get malaria every year, and an 80-93% reduction in disease and death rates is clearly possible. Why should these impoverished countries have to settle for less – and accept far more needless deaths every year – when we certainly would not?
Moreover, says University of Ottawa infectious disease expert Dr. Amir Attaran, for many years now USAID has not spent “one dime for any actual effort, either pesticides, bed nets or drugs.” Incredibly, it spends some 85% of its annual US$80 million malaria budget on mostly US-based consultants, notes an exhaustive analysis by Africa Fighting Malaria’s Dr. Roger Bate. Their meetings, educational materials, exhortations to use bed nets and assertions of “progress” in the war on malaria have done little to promote actual improvements.
A recent WHO-UNICEF report echoes this illusory progress. In reality, according to Attaran, Bate and others, since the “Roll Back Malaria” campaign was launched in 1998, global malaria disease and death rates have actually increased by nearly 10 percent. One shudders to think what lack of progress would look like.
For its part, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is spending millions annually to find a vaccine against malaria – while refusing to discuss supporting the use of pesticides. Experts like Professor Roberts doubt that a practical vaccine will be developed for a decade or more, because the malaria parasite mutates constantly. But even assuming the research is ultimately successful, as we all hope it is – and the world’s 2 billion people who are most at risk of getting the disease are eventually immunized – the more fundamental question is: How many uncounted millions will die unnecessarily in the meantime?
Rijken, radical environmentalists and many aid agencies detest pesticides – especially DDT, the cheapest, most effective and longest-lasting one currently available. They argue that DDT can remain in soil for years, harms birds and fish, might cause stomach cancer in crocodiles, contaminates food chains, has been detected on produce and in breast milk, and can cause premature births and slow reflexes in babies. They continue to trumpet these claims, even though no scientific study has ever found harm to humans, wildlife or the environment from spraying DDT on houses for malaria control.
Of course, all chemicals have side effects, and risks must be balanced against clear benefits. One important class of chemicals causes anemia and fatigue, increased risk of infection, nausea, diarrhea, hair loss, and even fetal defects and fertility problems. But we use them anyway – and any chemo-phobic activist who tried to get these powerful chemicals banned would be tarred and feathered by the cancer patients whose survival depends on them. As to DDT’s effects on babies, dead babies have no reflexes.
“For Rijcken and the European Union to equate Africa’s human and economic devastation with ‘detectable’ levels of DDT in soils, birds or mother’s breast milk is absurd,” says Boynes. “For them to suggest that an impoverished country like Uganda should monitor and test all its produce, in case some might have minuscule traces of DDT – to assuage Europeans’ fears of chemicals – is incomprehensible.”
If the United States had malaria rates equivalent to Africa’s, every year 100 million Americans would be infected, our hospitals would be overwhelmed, and at least 250,000 people would die – half of them children. We would demand immediate action, with every pesticide known to man, and would not tolerate anyone telling us to rely on bed nets or wait patiently for a vaccine.
If Washington, New York, Brussels and Geneva had one-tenth of Uganda’s malaria problem, even WHO and USAID bureaucrats – even Greenpeace zealots – would demand DDT, right NOW!
For people battling flies, mosquitoes and killer diseases in developing countries, the situation is no longer tolerable. “We Africans worry about losing more of our babies – the future of our nations – to malaria,” says Liberian Syrulwa Somah, professor of environmental and occupational safety and health at North Carolina A&T State University. “We are sick and tired of seeing our children die daily from a disease that is readily preventable.”
An estimated 800,000 Rwandans died during the 1994 genocide. Imagine this slaughter increased by 20 to 120% and repeated over and over for years. That’s the death toll from malaria.
“We think you’re dirt,” said “Hotel Rwanda’s” Col. Oliver (Nick Nolte), as the United Nations cut its poorly equipped security force from 2,500 to 270 and prohibited its peacekeepers from using their weapons. “You’re dung,” Oliver said flatly. “You’re not even a nigger. You’re African.”
Today, other international bureaucrats prohibit malaria workers from using pesticides. And the unnecessary, unfathomable, unconscionable death toll continues to mount.
It’s time to see this for what it actually is – a human rights atrocity of vast proportions. Only World War II killed more people than malaria has since 1972, when EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus ignored the findings of his own scientific panel, banned DDT in the United States and started all of this.
It’s time to say, Enough!
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