Losing Fight Against Malaria: Think DDT
Scientists are losing the war against malaria and are desperately seeking a new tactic. From the story:
Their desperate bid is genetic engineering. But that takes time with very uncertain results. But we do have something old we can--and should use starting today: DDT. It wiped out malaria in the USA and surely the human lives DDT could save are worth whatever perceived environmental harm spraying might cause.Faced with a losing battle against malaria, scientists are increasingly exploring new avenues that might have seemed far-fetched just a few years ago.
"We don't have things we can rely on," said Andrea Crisanti, the malaria expert in charge of genetically modifying mosquitoes at London's Imperial College. "It's time to try something else."
The problem today, however, is that many environmentalists don't put human flourishing first. Heck, as we have noted here, some want us to be eradicated instead of the mosquitoes.
Labels: Malaria. DDT.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 7:57 AM
12 Comments
12 Comments:
Amen. People are scary. They get something just blocked out in their minds and then can't rethink. Rachel Carsen should be burned in effigy. :-)
You know, this has bothered me for a long time. How could just an effective weapon against such a terrible disease as malaria just be unilaterally banned worldwide on the basis of one, not so well researched, book? Shouldn't the fact that so very many lives were at stake (and still are) have been cause for our society to pause and really, truly weight the cost-benefits of DDT? I'm too young to remember the debate, but what I've read seems to indicate there wasn't much of one for me to miss. I wonder if the timing of the ban with the huge over population scares around that time are merely coincidence or if a group of people decided that malaria would help reduce the population? Anyway, thanks for the post.
Jeremy: Thanks for your thoughts. The human race is becoming a herd. I don't think the people thought about the impact on people, only that the earth needed to be saved (to use modern parlance). BUT TODAY, there is no excuse since we know that much of the panic was overblown. MOREOVER, we know those kids and others are dying in Africa but the inanimate EARTH means more to the environmentalists than people. Flatly stated, they just don't give a rip.
Next to abortion, euthanasia and cloning, nothing infuriates me more than what the inhumane environmentalist types are willing to make Africans suffer for their ideology. I'd like to declare war on these do gooder ideologues who see Africa as their laboratory and Africans as their lab rats. What kind of inhumanity and unconcern for humanity do you have to have to watch millions suffer like this for your ideology-especially one as wrong as this nonsense about DDT and holding them hostage to combatting this evil and preventable disease with nets. With nets! God almighty! I can only conclude that the suffering of African children is acceptable collateral damage for their cause. Some of these people should be thrown in jail and put on trial for crimes against Africa and non-white humanity around the world. The third world cannot handle anymore of these people's inhumanity in the name of helping them. Ditto for the population controllers.
So much error, so little time!
1. Opposition to DDT use in Rachel-Carson-approved applications is not from environmentalists. It's from tobacco farmers and other agriculturists who claim that the EU will restrict imports of their products if DDT is used at all. EU issued a statement saying it's not true -- still, these conservative businessmen sue to stop the use of DDT in Uganda.
You're blaming the wrong group.
2. Malaria was effectively gone from the U.S., according to public health records, by 1939. DDT was not used as an insecticide until four years later. Historians and scientists say the chief thing that got malaria in the U.S. was rising incomes. Poor people, even, could afford housing with windows that could be screened, and they were. Medical care improved, too. Those two things are the keys to fighting malaria.
3. To apply DDT effectively, you need a functioning government to follow through with the program. Somalia? Congo? Uganda under Idi Amin? Heck, even Senegal and Kenya today? We can't poison Africa to democracy that works.
4. Malaria's resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s was due to the parasites themselves becoming resistant or immune to the pharmaceuticals that treat humans. DDT doesn't affect the parasites. It's useful to remember the eradication campaign of WHO in the 1950s and 1960s was based on the idea of suppressing mosquito populations long enough that the parasite would disappear. That was a race because, as WHO and all the scientists involved knew, resistance to DDT by the mosquitoes would frustrate the campaign, if it developed before the parasites could be wiped out. Ironically, it was the overuse of DDT for agricultural purposes that led to the speedy onset of mosquito immunity to DDT -- the same guys who sue to stop the use today. Go figure.
5. Rachel Carson was meticulous in her 53 pages of footnote references to solid science publications. She was absolutely correct. Nothing she said has ever been discovered significantly in error by any science study later.
6. The problem today is people who blame environmentalists and so fail to do what is necessary to fight malaria. The Bush administration has refused to spend money on bednets to protect children ("not costly enough; the people won't appreciate them enough if we give them away"), and still refuses to spend U.S. money for DDT for indoor spraying (why? Even the old Environmental Defense Fund, the original anti-DDT agency, is on record supporting the limited use of DDT in Indoor Residual Spraying). Blaming a dead, good scientist doesn't get the bednets distributed nor the DDT sprayed. Get with the program, will you?
7. Jeremy, there never has been a complete ban on DDT, and no one could do it unilaterally. The 1972 deregistration by EPA covered agricultural broadcast spraying. There was always provision for use to fight against malaria. DDT was manufactured in the U.S. for a decade longer, and sold overseas -- check the Superfund cleanup sites to see just how many DDT makers there were in the U.S.
Even the Persistant Organic Pesticides Treaty (POPs) has a special exemption for DDT to be used to fight malaria.
But,
8. DDT's use declined because the mosquitoes became resistant, and in some cases immune, to it. Spraying poisons that kill fish and beneficial insects, not to mention the birds that eat the malaria carriers, is stupid when it doesn't kill the mosquitoes. We should not insist that Africans be stupid just to assuage our anti-environmentalist day-dreams.
9. In recent applications under the aegis of the rabidly anti-malaria Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, free bednets reduced malaria by 50 to 75 percent in African nations. If saving children's lives is "acceptable collateral damage," Mr. Nelson, you're right. In the meantime, get the facts, and join the environmentalists in saving babies, will you?
The "Nothing But Nets" campaign will take your contributions.
You're welcome.
Ed. Thanks for your input.
I was alive and conscious in the days in which DDT was stopped being used. And that's not how I recall it. But I will let others deal with that who may have more precise knowledge.
No one is against nets. Go for nets. But I am willing to bet that those African and Asian mosquitoes are not DDT resistant since they haven't been subjected to spraying. And I also suspect that malaria here didn't just go away due to increased prosperity.
I am not saying we should spray here. But we should spray in Africa and Asia, do nets, indoor spraying, anything we can do without less important environmental constraints preventing us from saving lives.
Nice try Ed. So many errors, so little time. Where to start? How about claims that Malaria was controlled in the US by 1949, four years before DDT was used as an insecticide?
The CDC says that Malaria was effectively eradicated from the US in 1949, not 1939 and that DDT was the primary means of killing it. Text and link below. “Malaria has been endemic in the US until the late 1940's.” “The program consisted primarily of DDT application to the interior surfaces of rural homes or entire premises in counties where malaria was reported to have been prevalent in recent years.” “Control efforts conducted by the state and local health departments, supported by the federal government, resulted in the disease being eradicated by 1949."
There are plenty of resources on the internet to show that DDT is effective against malaria and that eliminating DDT brings Malaria back in force and that reintroduction of DDT is effective in reducing Malaria. And you can find that economic pressure from European nations repressing the use of DDT.
There is real collateral damage is the huge number of the other 25-50 percent (IF your numbers are correct, and that's a big IF) who could have been saved by spraying but could not be saved because of eco-nazi policies.
But what do we expect? Alexander King, founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome, wrote: "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." Those Malthusians seem to keep popping up every where evil abounds. O well. Jeremy’s instincts are pretty good.
From the CDC "Eradication of Malaria in the United States (1947-1951" http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/history/eradication_us.htm
“The National Malaria Eradication Program, a cooperative undertaking by State and local health agencies of 13 Southeastern States and the Communicable Disease Center of the U. S. Public Health Service, originally proposed by Dr. L. L. Williams, commenced operations on July 1, 1947. The program consisted primarily of DDT application to the interior surfaces of rural homes or entire premises in counties where malaria was reported to have been prevalent in recent years. By the end of 1949, over 4,650,000 house spray applications had been made. Total elimination of transmission was slowly achieved. By 1951, CDC gradually withdrew from active participation in the operational phases of the program and shifted to its interest to surveillance, and in 1952, CDC participation in operations ceased altogether.
“A major commitment was to the malaria control and assessment activities associated with the Tennessee Valley Authority. The advent of World War II necessitated the control of malaria in and around the many military bases located in malarious areas, primarily in Southeastern U. S. These efforts were so successful that at the end of the war and the founding of CDC, one of the initial tasks was to oversee the completion of the elimination of malaria as a major public health problem. In 1949, the country was declared free of malaria as a significant public health problem.
“The role of CDC became one of surveillance within the U. S. and of assistance in the world-wide efforts to eliminate or control malaria in the economically underdeveloped areas of the world.
“Malaria has been endemic in the US until the late 1940's. Most of the transmission occurred in the southeastern states. (From this derives the fact that CDC, originally derived from malaria control operations, is located in Atlanta, Georgia).
“Control efforts conducted by the state and local health departments, supported by the federal government, resulted in the disease being eradicated by 1949. Such measures included drainage, removal of mosquito breeding sites, and spraying (occasionally from aircrafts) of insecticides.” End of Document.
It's no doubt nets can be somewhat effective if properly used, but bugs don’t always bite at night when we are sleeping in our beds.
June 21, 2008
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Don: I am not surprised by your research. Thanks for taking the time.
Re the Malthusians: Secondhand Smokette and I were in Paris about ten years ago and struck up a conversation with another couple. The conversation somehow turned to AIDS and the German man celebrated all the people who would die in Africa from the disease. We were appalled, told him so, cut off the conversation and left the restaurant.
Just like gasoline at $4.50 a gallon being EXACTLY what the Neo-communists (Demos) want, using dDT would require them to admit they've been wrong and would expose them as they'd rather see we humans vanish than the mosquitos.
Tweet! Technical foul. Please no name calling here. No calling conservatives fascists or liberals commies--however true it might be in either case. : ) Thank you. Carry on.
Don, check your history again. Malaria wasn't completely wiped out by 1939 in the U.S., but close enough that we'd count it a total victory if we could achieve the same numbers in Uganda today. The key thing with getting the disease out of a country is to keep humans from getting the disease for six months to a year -- the parasite needs a human host to survive. Once that's done, the pool of parasites is gone, and the mosquitoes don't matter. In the U.S., we had the advantage of rising incomes, which made better houses, which could take screens. Plus, we got a public health care system that could deliver treatments to any human who had malaria.
You can't use DDT as a substitute for screens. DDT doesn't work to improve the health care system, nor to cure humans. And if you can't do those two things, malaria will beat you.
There's a very good history of the failed campaign to eradicate malaria with DDT, published in The New Yorker in 2001. It explains that Fred Soper, the guy in charge of the campaign, understood there was a narrow time window to do the trick with DDT. If the disease could not be eliminated entirely, it would come roaring back.
Politics, not environmentalism, prevented all but three African nations from even starting a campaign. We missed the window.
Now, anopheles mosquitoes have a mutation which allows them to digest DDT, almost as a nutrient. Since anopheles species are the ones that carry the deadliest form of malaria, that's a key problem
You can spray DDT, but it won't kill the mosquitoes. It will kill things that do kill mosquitoes, however -- and that will mean a spread of malaria.
Why not just admit it: Rachel Carson was right? Her proposal for a program of integrated pest management has proven workable every where it has been tried. In the past five years, IPM has reduced malaria by no less than 50% wherever it was tried, and by much higher percentages in some places.
Beating malaria is a tough task. DDT can't do the job alone, and it has severe drawbacks. Calumny against "environmentalists" does no good -- it's businessmen who sue to stop DDT spraying in Africa today.
Why not just get behind the programs that the malaria-fighting professionals say work?
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