Mass Murder and Good Intentions

On April 25, 2007, we will once again celebrate Africa Malaria Day. Since Africa Malaria Day 2006, more than 400 million Africans – men, women, and children – will have been stricken with the disease. Of those, roughly one million have died.     

It is a terrible disease. The early symptoms include fever, chills, and vomiting, followed by diarrhea, delirium, and unconsciousness. Of those who don’t succumb during weeks of incapacitating illness, many suffer permanent brain damage.

Malaria has been with us for many years. The first mention of it dates back to Chinese medical writings in 2700 B.C. It arrived in India around 1,000 B.C.; is thought to have reached the shores of the Mediterranean sometime after 500 B.C.; and it arrived in northern Europe between 1000 and 1500 C.E. 

The disease was carried to the Americas, probably by African slaves brought by the Spanish colonizers of Central America. It first spread throughout the Caribbean and parts of Central and South America, and beginning in the mid-18th century it spread across the North American continent.

Finally, in 1939, during the early stages of World War II, Swiss chemist Paul Müller of Geigy Pharmaceuticals developed a pesticide called Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane (DDT), a substance that has been highly effective in controlling insect-borne diseases such as malaria, typhus, and yellow fever.

Not only was DDT a major boon to the life expectancy of people throughout the world, it could be purchased for just pennies a pound. In India alone, the number of cases of malaria, annually, was reduced from 75 million to less than 5 million in just ten years. 

However, in 1962, American biologist Rachel Carson published her book Silent Spring, alleging that DDT caused cancer in humans and that it was harmful to the reproductive process in birds by thinning their egg shells. The radical environmental movement was born, and in late 1971 the Environmental Protection Agency initiated a series of hearings on the potential dangers of DDT. 

After seven months of exhaustive hearings, the EPA Administrative Law Judge, Edmund Sweeney, ruled that, “DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man.…The uses of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife.…The evidence in this proceeding supports the conclusion that there is a present need for the essential uses of DDT.”

Nevertheless, in spite of all of the scientific testimony to the contrary, pressure by radical environmentalists caused EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus, a wealthy member of the Environmental Defense Fund, to reverse Judge Sweeney’s ruling, declaring that DDT was a “potential human carcinogen” and banning its use for virtually all applications. 

Ruckelshaus had not attended the hearings and had not even read the final report. DDT was banned for agricultural use in the USA, and subsequently throughout the world. 

The result? If we were to compile a list of history’s greatest mass murderers, who would we put on our list? Attila the Hun? Ghengis Khan? Josef Stalin? Adolph Hitler? But who is the greatest mass murderer of all time? In the thirty-five years since the banning of DDT, more than 13 billion cases of malaria have been reported, most of them in Third World countries. Of these, more than 87.8 million have died, 90% of them pregnant women and children under age 5.   

Clearly, the top candidate for the title of the greatest mass murderer of all time would be Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, aided and abetted by a host of co-conspirators in the radical environmental movement who carry on her fight against the use of DDT. Ms. Carson was obviously well-intentioned, as are all liberals. Unfortunately, they are rarely willing to live with the unintended consequences of their actions. 

But DDT is now making a comeback in sub-Saharan Africa, in spite of European Union threats of agricultural export sanctions against Uganda, Kenya, and other countries that use DDT to control mosquito-borne diseases. According to Roy Innis, Chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), within two years after starting DDT programs, South Africa, Mozambique, Zambia, Madagascar, and Swaziland slashed their malaria rates by 75%, or more. 

If the Bush Administration would exercise some leadership with the EU, and if radical environmentalists would decide to place more value on human life than on the thickness of the egg shells of the Brown Hooded Kingfisher, the Saddlebilled Stork, and other birds, Africa Malaria Day 2007 could have some real meaning. To allow all of those lives to be lost in the name of “environmental protection” and “animal rights,” using Al Gore-style junk science as a basis, is not just inhumane, it is genocide on a grand scale.