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by Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times, January 2005
If the U.S. wants to help people in tsunami-hit countries like Sri Lanka and Indonesia – not to mention other poor countries in Africa – there's one step that would cost us nothing and would save hundreds of thousands of lives.
It would be to allow DDT in malaria-ravaged countries.
I'm thrilled that we're pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the relief effort, but the tsunami was only a blip in third-world mortality. Mosquitoes kill 20 times more people each year than the tsunami did, and in the long war between humans and mosquitoes it looks as if mosquitoes are winning. One reason is that the U.S. and other rich countries are siding with the mosquitoes against the world's poor – by opposing the use of DDT.
"It's a colossal tragedy," says Donald Roberts, a professor of tropical public health at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. "And it's embroiled in environmental politics and incompetent bureaucracies."
In the 1950's, 60's and early 70's, DDT was used to reduce malaria around the world, even eliminating it in places like Taiwan. But then the growing recognition of the harm DDT can cause in the environment – threatening the extinction of the bald eagle, for example – led DDT to be banned in the West and stigmatized worldwide. Ever since, malaria has been on the rise.
The poor countries that were able to keep malaria in check tend to be the same few that continued to use DDT, like Ecuador. Similarly, in Mexico, malaria rose and fell with the use of DDT. South Africa brought back DDT in 2000, after a switch to other pesticides had led to a surge in malaria, and now the disease is under control again.
The evidence is overwhelming: DDT saves lives.
But most Western aid agencies will not pay for anti-malarial programs that use DDT, and that pretty much ensures that DDT won't be used. Instead, the U.N. and Western donors encourage use of insecticide-treated bed nets and medicine to cure malaria. Bed nets and medicines are critical tools in fighting malaria, but they're not enough. The existing anti-malaria strategy is an under-financed failure, with malaria probably killing 2 million or 3 million people each year.
DDT doesn't work everywhere. It wasn't nearly as effective in West African savannah as it was in southern Africa, and it's hard to apply in remote villages. And some countries, like Vietnam, have managed to curb malaria without DDT.
But overall, one of the best ways to protect people is to spray the inside of a hut, about once a year, with DDT. This uses tiny amounts of DDT – 450,000 people can be protected with the same amount that was applied in the 1960's to a single 1,000-acre American cotton farm.
Is it safe? DDT was sprayed in America in the 1950's as children played in the spray, and up to 80,000 tons a year were sprayed on American crops. There is some research suggesting that it could lead to premature births, but humans are far better off exposed to DDT than exposed to malaria.
I called the World Wildlife Fund, thinking I would get a fight. But Richard Liroff, its expert on toxins, said he could accept the use of DDT when necessary in anti-malaria programs.
"South Africa was right to use DDT," he said. "If the alternatives to DDT aren't working, as they weren't in South Africa, geez, you've got to use it. In South Africa it prevented tens of thousands of malaria cases and saved lots of lives."
At Greenpeace, Rick Hind noted reasons to be wary of DDT, but added: "If there's nothing else and it's going to save lives, we're all for it. Nobody's dogmatic about it."
So why do the U.N. and donor agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, generally avoid financing DDT programs? The main obstacle seems to be bureaucratic caution and inertia.
President Bush should cut through that and lead an effort to fight malaria using all necessary tools – including DDT.
One of my most exhilarating moments with my children came when we were backpacking
together and spotted a bald eagle. It was a tragedy that we nearly allowed DDT to wipe out such magnificent birds, and we should continue to ban DDT in the U.S. But it's also tragic that our squeamishness about DDT is killing more people in poor countries, year in and year out, than even a once-in-a-century tsunami.
Copyright 2005, The New York Times
http://nytimes.com/2005/01/08/opinion/8kristof.html
Editor’s note: This is a very important column, for several reasons. It comes from The New York Times and one of its most liberal columnists – hot on the heels of a brilliant article by NYT commentator Tina Rosenberg (“What the world needs now is DDT,” April 21, 2004) and a hard-hitting editorial by the paper’s own staff (December 22, 2003). His position has also been echoed by the Washington Times, Chicago Sun-Times and numerous other caring people, including Ralph Nader (!) and novelist and film producer Michael Crichton, who have put true environmental ethics, real social justice and people’s lives ahead of environmental purity.
It also reflects a possible sea change in attitudes by Greenpeace and WWF – or at least by a lone representative from each organization – following decades of strident opposition to DDT by these and other ideological environmental groups. That opposition resulted in the deaths of an estimated 50,000,000 people (mostly children and pregnant women) in developing countries since 1972, when then-EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus banned the pesticide – for “political reasons,” as he later admitted, and ignoring the strong recommendation of his own scientific advisory committee that DDT was safe and should not be banned.
Better late than never – but why did all these innocent people have to die?
Finally, it is important to stress the Kristof is clearly wrong about the environmental dangers of DDT. This pesticide did not cause bird eggshells to thin or eagles to die, as Gordon Edwards, Donald Waite and other scientists and ecologists have repeatedly pointed out. See www.eco-imperialism.com/content/article.php3?id=85
-- Paul Driessen, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power · Black Death
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