Greens create tragedy of DDT

By Natalie and Gerald Sirkin
from http://eco.freedom.org/el/20010802/sirkin.shtml
8/13/01

The story of DDT and malaria is back in the news. Malaria had been endemic all over the world, as far north as the Russian Arctic Circle, up to the end of World War II when DDT came into widespread use and malaria was eliminated in America and Europe. In 1972, EPA banned DDT. Its use fell sharply and deaths from malaria skyrocketed.

Besides malaria, mosquitoes also cause encephalitis, sleeping sickness, typhus, elephantiasis, plague, dengue fever, and other diseases. But now DDT has been beaten, by World Wildlife Fund, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Greenpeace, National Audubon Society, Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club and the other green imperialists through their influence over governments.

In poor countries where DDT was extensively used, after World War II, it nearly eradicated malaria. In India 75 million people contracted malaria every year and 800,000 died in the 1940s. By 1961, DDT had brought the number of cases down to 50,000 a year.

In Sri Lanka (Ceylon), DDT spraying began in 1946. By 1956, malaria cases had fallen from 3,000,000 to 7,300; by 1964, to 29, and deaths were down to zero. Then came Rachel Carson. In her book, Silent Spring, she attacked DDT as "so potent that a minute quantity can bring about vast changes in the body." The evidence has never supported her. Several authorities have occasionally eaten some of it to demonstrate the falseness of her attack.

EPA Head William Ruckelshaus banned DDT in 1972, even though EPA Administrative Law Judge Edmund Sweeney had heard nine months of testimony from 150 expert scientists and had found that "DDT is not carcinogenic, mutagenic, or teratogenic hazard to man [and] does not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife." Ruckelshaus, an attorney, not a scientist, had not attended a day of the hearings and the previous year, had praised DDT. Seven years later he wrote that his "ban on DDT was a political decision rather than a scientific one."

Three decades later, there is still not a trace of evidence that DDT harms human health or that it decreased the numbers of bald eagles and other birds of prey as DDT opponents charge. Leading expert Professor J. Gordon Edwards, entomologist at San Jose State University, has documented errors in those allegations, from unwitting misclassification to purposely feeding birds diets without calcium, weakening shells of nesting eggs, and blaming the decreased number of birds on DDT.

Environmentalist scares like Silent Spring and the ban by the EPA, spread massive fear throughout the world. Many malaria-prone countries discontinued spraying. Sri Lanka, for example, discontinued in 1964, and within five years, had over half-a-million malaria cases.

Countries that were not frightened into stopping spraying with DDT, were pressured into it by threats from US Agency for International Development to withhold aid grants. Belize and Bolivia admitted USAID pressured them to stop. Mozambique, hard hit by malaria, was forced to stop spraying, by aid-donors Norway and Sweden.

In the 30 years since the U.S. ban, extensive scientific effort has still found no satisfactory substitute for DDT. A survey of the tragedy of DDT and malaria published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (www.fightingmalaria.org) appears in When Politics Kills: Malaria & The DDT Story, by Richard Tren and Robert Bate, directors of Africa Fighting Malaria, a South African humanitarian group.

DDT is much cheaper than other pesticides. The victims of the green imperialists are the poor countries, which can't afford the more costly and less effective alternatives to DDT. DDT is persistent, needing to be resprayed only infrequently. Its persistence, a major advantage, is a major complaint of the greens.

Mosquitoes' resistance to DDT turns out to be less of a problem than was expected. The expectation, that disease-bearing mosquitoes would become so resistant to DDT as to render it ineffective, has not materialized. DDT is a repellent. Spraying the interior walls of houses is enough to drive mosquitoes away despite any resistance they might have built up.

How stands the case?

We have in DDT a product that can eradicate malaria; save millions of lives, prevent recurring suffering and weakness, eliminate a significant cause of poverty; a product that does no harm to humans or the environment, is the only effective weapon against malaria. Yet wealthy environmental organizations and wealthy countries war against DDT.

A politically cautious President Bush on April 18, 2001, agreed to sign the treaty negotiated by the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) for a worldwide ban on DDT and 11 other chemical substances (including harmless PCBs and the contaminant dioxin). DDT temporarily differs in that it is not banned but severely restricted. It is likely to be banned in five to ten years, according to Tren and Bate.

One country that reluctantly signed the legally binding UNEP treaty is South Africa. It stopped spraying, but resumed in 1996. Hospitals previously crowded with malaria cases are now nearly empty.

But its neighbor, Mozambique, one of the poorest countries in the world, desperately needs grants. More people die of malaria in Mozambique than of AIDS. South Africa has been urging Mozambique to use DDT and stop the malarial mosquitoes that cross over into South Africa. Mozambique refuses, citing imaginary environmental damage from DDT-easier than admitting they are sacrificing lives for grants.

So it goes, in the world of green imperialists.