Malaria sickens an estimated 500 million people every year. It kills up to 2 million annually, half of them children, most of the rest pregnant women. Malaria sends more African children to graves than any other disease—three times as many as HIV/AIDS, according to UNICEF. Worldwide, children die from malaria at the rate of two per minute, or 3,000 per day. That’s the equivalent of 80 fully loaded school buses plunging over a cliff every day of the year.
In sub-Saharan Africa alone, this mosquito-borne executioner infects over 400 million people year after year. It leaves tens of thousands with permanent brain damage, makes tens of millions so sick with fevers and convulsions that they can’t work or attend school for weeks on end. Tens of millions more are forced to leave work, school and fields to care for sick loved ones. Malaria costs the region $12 billion a year in lost economic production.
The United States and Europe eliminated this horrible disease by using DDT and other pesticides, along with window screens, aerial spraying of mosquitoes, drugs and other measures.
But when it comes to preventing malaria in poor developing countries, Western government agencies and green activists apply vastly different standards of ethics, science and public health. Committed to environmentalism, they deliberately withhold the same insecticides that helped make America, Canada and Europe malaria-free.
While millions die, the U. S. Agency for International Development (USAID), European Union (EU), World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), UNICEF—plus dozens of environmental groups like Greenpeace, Beyond Pesticides, the World Wildlife Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council and the perversely named Physicians for Social Responsibility—do everything in their power to perpetuate these lethal policies. They coerce nations to eliminate pesticides, especially DDT, from disease control programs, and to rely on anti-malaria programs that are Politically Correct, but proven failures.
All the while, this “Killer Elite” exaggerates the risks of man-made chemicals and the benefits of “natural” alternatives. Their environmentalist ideology has trumped science, medicine, ethics and painful experience, allowing the deadly resurgence of a readily preventable disease.
Fatal Funding
In many cases, government agencies such as the USAID, and international donors like the World Bank’s Global Environment Facility (GEF), tell impoverished countries that grants are conditioned on their not using DDT or other pesticides, and that funding will be withdrawn if they do. Over the years, they have replaced healthcare professionals who support pesticide use with environmental activists and NGOs that emphasize “holistic” alternatives.
These powerful entities write the rules, control the purse strings and host numerous international conferences like the World Health Assembly, which pass anti-pesticide resolutions and dictate the scope of policy discussions. Roll Back Malaria—a consortium of aid agencies, international institutions and environmentalist groups funded by the World Health Organization (WHO)—has issued a 40-page action plan to reduce countries' reliance on DDT. Its goal is eventually to eliminate DDT use for public-health purposes. But The Lancet, the esteemed British medical journal, concluded that Roll Back Malaria (RBM) was a failure. Anticipating RBM’s “Africa Malaria Day” on April 25, 2005, the journal found that the group’s program was so ineffective that malaria rates had increased after five years of effort.
U. S. and international grantmakers bankroll dozens of activist groups that share an anti-pesticide ideology and promote myths about the dangers of DDT. For example, the GEF contributes to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Greenpeace, the two most prominent opponents of DDT use. The European Union, which bans the marketing of any product containing DDT, provides major grants to environmental activist non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that pressure poor countries to abandon DDT use.
Other support comes from leftist foundations, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Ted Turner’s foundation. The Heinz family philanthropies have actively supported anti-pesticide group efforts to ban “DDT and other harmful pesticides.” Teresa Heinz Kerry, who leads these foundations, worries that country club women will get a “devastating triple whammy” from “the chemical soup” they encounter daily from birth control pills, makeup, sun block and golf courses that are “perfectly manicured, thanks to estrogenic pesticides.” Her concern about the malaria epidemic in her native Africa is muted.
Some U. S. government agencies deny an anti-DDT bias. For example, USAID says that DDT will “be considered” for malaria control programs—but only if a full environmental impact assessment demonstrates that DDT “is the only effective alternative” and “could be used safely” under strict WHO protocols. But in fact for many years USAID has not spent “one dime for any actual effort, either pesticides, bed nets or drugs,” says University of Ottawa infectious disease expert Dr. Amir Attaran. Dr. Roger Bate of the group Africa Fighting Malaria notes that USAID spends some 85 percent of its annual $80 million malaria budget on consultants who hold meetings, write educational materials, exhort people to use bed nets and assert “progress” in the war on malaria. The agency hopes to provide 40 million pediatric doses of remedial drugs annually by 2006. But it will be many years before there are nearly enough doses for 500 million malaria patients annually. Anti-malaria vaccines are likewise at least a decade away—after which it will take years to immunize the two billion people at risk of getting the disease.
How many more millions will die in the meantime?
The Miracle Chemical
Before the 1930s, insect-borne diseases were responsible for taking millions of lives each year. In 1935, India alone endured an estimated 100 million cases of malaria and up to a million deaths. In World War I, typhus epidemics killed at least three million Russians and untold millions more across Europe.
But in the late 1930s, Paul Hermann Müller discovered that tiny amounts of the chemical that came to be known as DDT killed just about every insect he used it on. Even when some mosquitoes eventually developed resistance to it, DDT still acted as an effective repellent, driving them from homes.
The U.S. military began using DDT in 1942 to fight widespread malaria and typhus epidemics. They sprayed soldiers, dusted beaches, deloused concentration-camp survivors with DDT, without apparent ill effects. These measures saved millions of troops and camp survivors. As A.G. Smith of the British medical journal Lancet put it: "If the huge amounts of DDT used are taken into account, the safety record for human beings is extremely good."
After the war, the United States launched a global malaria eradication project. “From colonial times until the 1940s, malaria was the American disease,” says Dr. Robert Desowitz, professor of tropical medicine at the University of North Carolina. Up to seven million Americans were stricken every year until the mid-1920s; 3,900 died in 1936. By the 1960s, however, the disease had been almost eliminated, not just from America, but also southern Europe, the Caribbean and much of eastern and southern Asia. In India alone malaria's horrific annual toll in lives plunged from a million deaths per year to fewer than 50,000 total cases of infection in 1961.
For his discovery, Müller received the 1948 Nobel Prize in medicine. "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT," the National Academy of Sciences later reported. "In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria."
But that changed in 1962, with publication of Rachel Carson's anti-pesticide classic, Silent Spring—the book that launched the modern environmental movement. The fledgling Environmental Defense Fund, joined by the Sierra Club, initiated lawsuits against DDT use and pressured the Environmental Protection Agency to hold hearings. Though the presiding administrative judge concluded that DDT was not a hazard to man, EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus—himself an Environmental Defense Fund member—banned it in 1972.
The U. S. ban became the spearhead of a worldwide assault on DDT. Under pressure by green groups, other wealthy countries joined the ban and began to restrict funding for DDT projects. That campaign continues to this day—and its consequences are untold death and misery, especially in the Third World. Since the EPA ban in 1972, over 50 million people have died from this once nearly vanquished disease.
Mosquitoes Spared, People Sacrificed
The carnage caused by the environmentalists’ anti-DDT policies is not a matter of conjecture. The consequences of DDT use—and non-use—are well documented.
South Africa slashed its malaria rates by 80 percent in just 18 months by spraying the walls and eaves of traditional mud and thatch huts twice a year with small amounts of DDT. Ecuador cut its malaria incidence by 60 percent by using DDT; Madagascar by 90 percent after just two spraying cycles with DDT.
In stark contrast, Bolivia’s infection rate increased 80 percent since 1993, when it bowed to international pressure and banned the pesticide’s use in favor of bed nets and other alternatives, notes Dr. Silvia Pasquier of Bolivia’s St. Thomas Aquinas College. Zanzibar, Sri Lanka and other countries have had similar experiences.
The resurgence of malaria should come as no surprise.
A few years ago, several organizations provided loans to Eritrea, where malaria is responsible for 50 percent of all deaths. But the UNICEF money could be spent only on insecticide-treated bed nets, while USAID funds went for “environmental assessments.” Meanwhile, as the carnage continued, the World Bank required Eritrea to develop a program and schedule to replace DDT house spraying with “chemicals or techniques that are safer for the environment and human health.”
The impoverished African nation of Ethiopia grieves over nearly 150,000 malaria deaths a year, including 95,000 children. Yet Canada gave Ethiopia $1.5 million (U. S.) toward a “national implementation plan” to comply with the international Stockholm Convention to eliminate “persistent organic pollutants,” including DDT. In effect, then, this effort to eliminate DDT pays Ethiopia about $10 for each dead Ethiopian.
In February 2005, an EU bureaucrat warned Uganda that the country’s export of fish, flowers and cereals to Europe could be disrupted if it used DDT to reduce a malaria epidemic that kills up to 100,000 Ugandans every year. Even barely detectable traces of DDT on these products could trigger an import ban. The threat puts Ugandan lives a distant second behind the ideological preoccupations of disease-free European environmentalists.
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. Yet a recent WHO-UNICEF report claims “progress” in the battle against malaria. Even worse, until 2004, the two agencies were still prescribing and providing drugs that they had known for years were no longer effective.
But Is There A Danger?
Anti-insecticide ideologues maintain that DDT constitutes an intolerable risk to human health and the environment. DDT poisons food chains, harms fish, thins bird eggshells, might cause cancer or reduced male hormones in animals and is “related” to premature births and slow reflexes in babies, their reports claim.
Wildlife and people are “contaminated” by a “cocktail of highly toxic chemicals,” including DDT, say World Wildlife Fund press releases.
“Measurable quantities” of DDT and its break-down product DDE “are present” in human fatty tissue, blood and breast milk, argue Greenpeace activists. “Researchers think DDE could be inhibiting lactation because of its estrogen-like effects and may therefore be contributing to lactation failure throughout the world,” says a 2001 Greenpeace International report. [Emphasis added.]
Studies “suggest that DDE and possibly other organochlorines can weaken the immune systems of children, increasing their risk of developing asthma and certain infections,” Physicians for Social Responsibility argues. [Emphasis added.] PSR urges “holistic” alternatives to DDT, as part of a chemicals-free “integrated malaria control program.”
Mosquitoes in some areas have become resistant to DDT, reducing its effectiveness as an insect killer, says Environmental Defense. “Chronic low dose DDT exposure is associated with premature birth and low birth-weight in babies who were exposed before birth, and with decreased duration of milk supply in nursing mothers,” it asserts. [Emphasis added.]
“The main factor that needs to be addressed is poverty. The mosquito is only secondary,” insists Dr. Romeo Quijano, director of the Philippines Pesticide Action Network. “People liberate themselves from poverty, and reduction of mortality due to malaria ensues.”
But what is the truth?
· Millions, perhaps billions have been exposed to DDT—millions of World War II allied troops and Holocaust survivors, hundreds of thousands of insecticide sprayers and tens of millions of Americans and Europeans. But no replicable, peer-reviewed scientific study has ever found significant harm to a single human being. In fact, no study has ever found harm to humans, wildlife or the environment from spraying DDT inside houses for malaria control.
· Even when mosquitoes acquire resistance to the chemical, it still acts as an irritant that repels them from homes before they can bite.
· DDT is far less expensive and effective than many alternatives, making it more affordable for the poor in developing countries.
· Malaria is less the result of poverty than its cause, especially in Africa. Its economic impacts are devastating in the Third World. Controlling malaria is critical to these nations’ rise from poverty.
The WHO, USAID and NGOs also judge DDT and other pesticides as failures because they don’t work everywhere and don’t achieve 100 percent malaria eradication. And to be sure, DDT is no “magic bullet.” Neither are other pesticides or more Politically Correct strategies. The war against malaria must be fought against many mosquito species and constantly mutating parasites, in different terrains and cultures, under many housing and climate conditions.
But the battle requires every weapon at our disposal. Disease control specialists—not ideologues—should determine when, where, why and how to use DDT or other strategies. They need the freedom to do so.
Certainly, chemicals must be used carefully and may have side effects. But risks must be balanced against clear benefits. For insecticides, the benefit is in millions of lives saved.
Unfortunately, in the practice of ideological medicine, such facts seem to merit little attention—even from those charged with safeguarding the health and well-being of the world’s most vulnerable people.
There is some evidence that mounting bad publicity over this environmentalist-inspired carnage is causing some of them to get defensive, even backpedal. For example, a recent World Bank loan provides money for DDT spraying in Eritrea, offering hope that its anti-DDT policies may finally be softening. Earlier this year, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a harsh column chiding environmentalists on their DDT opposition. But when he contacted Greenpeace and WWF spokesmen for statements, they tried to sound more conciliatory: “If alternatives to DDT aren’t working, you’ve got to use it. If there’s nothing else and it’s going to save lives, we’re all for it.”
However, inflammatory anti-DDT polemics still dominate their websites, and neither the activist groups nor “healthcare” agencies have actually recognized, much less promoted, the use of DDT and other insecticides in the battle against parasitic diseases. Nor have they acknowledged the two most fundamental issues in the malaria debate:
1. Wealthy, malaria-free countries are dictating the malaria control policies of poor, malaria endemic countries, and forcing them to stop using pesticides.
2. Anti-pesticide NGOs and government agencies are systematically violating the human rights of the poorest, most powerless, most disease-ridden people on the planet by denying them access to proven protective chemicals.
A disturbing undercurrent meanders through some anti-pesticide rhetoric, suggesting that at least a few environmentalists are ambivalent about the deaths their policies cause. Club of Rome director Alexander King wrote in The Discipline of Curiosity, “My chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it greatly added to the population problem.” Sierra Club director Michael McCloskey opined, “By using DDT, we reduce mortality rates in underdeveloped countries, without the consideration of how to support the increase in populations.” Some seemed less ambivalent. Asked whether banning DDT would result in more deaths from disease, former Environmental Defense Fund scientist Charles Wurster once said, “People are the cause of all the problems. We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any.”
It would be unfair to suggest that preventing access to insecticides, biotechnology and electricity, and letting Mother Nature run her course is all part of a deliberate attempt to reduce Third World “over-population.” However, at the very least, EU-WHO-USAID priorities, abetted by the fanaticism of prominent greens, have spawned policies whose effects are just as lethal as if they were calculated.
The victims of these policies insist on progress now—not ten, twenty or fifty years from now, when countless millions more have succumbed to the epidemic.
“I lost my son, two sisters and two nephews to malaria,” says Ugandan farmer and businesswoman Fiona Kobusingye, herself a repeated malaria survivor. “Don’t talk to me about birds, and don’t tell me a little DDT in our bodies is worse than the risk of dying or losing more babies to this disease. African mothers would be overjoyed if DDT in breast milk was our biggest worry.”
In impoverished, disease-ridden nations, an 80-90 percent reduction in malarial infection and death rates is clearly possible. They should not have to settle for less.
We certainly did not.
