Active versus Passive Moral Culpability.

[elfs]

Malaria is a disease Westerners no longer have to think about. Independent malariologists believe it kills two million people a year, mainly children under 5 and 90 percent of them in Africa.

Yet DDT, the very insecticide that eradicated malaria in developed nations, has been essentially deactivated as a malaria-control tool today. DDT is most likely not harmful to people or the environment. Certainly, the possible harm from DDT is vastly outweighed by its ability to save children's lives. "I cannot envision the possibility of rolling back malaria without the power of DDT," said Renato Gusm-o, who headed antimalaria programs at the Pan American Health Organization, or P.A.H.O., the branch of W.H.O. that covers the Americas. "In tropical Africa, if you don't use DDT, forget it."

"Why it can't be dealt with rationally, as you'd deal with any other insecticide, I don't know," said Janet Hemingway, director of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. "People get upset about DDT and merrily go and recommend an insecticide that is much more toxic."

Washington is the major donor to W.H.O. and Roll Back Malaria, and most of the rest of the financing for those groups comes from Europe, where DDT is also banned. There is no law that says if America cannot use DDT then neither can Mozambique, but that's how it works. The ban in America and other wealthy countries has, first of all, turned poor nations' agricultural sectors against DDT for economic reasons. A shipment of Zimbabwean tobacco, for example, was blocked from entering the United States market because it contained traces of DDT, turning Zimbabwe's powerful tobacco farmers into an effective anti-DDT lobby. From a health point of view, of course, American outrage would have been more appropriate if traces of tobacco had been found in their DDT than the other way around.

Read the whole thing: What the World Needs Now Is DDT (New York Times; registration required).

Comments

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

Wow. What a poorly written article.

Hint to the author--"but what about the children?" isn't a substitute for comprehensive hard scientific data, nor does it excuse poor logic skills.

Not to mention the fact that I strongly disagree with the concept that the US doesn't have the right to attach conditions to how grants of US money is spent.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

While "what about the children?" is the worst editorial come-on in recorded history, I don't see what was wrong with the article. The EPA's own judge of record during the 1972 hearings that led to the banning of DDT said, "DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man...DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man...The use of DDT under the regulations involved here does not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife."

I don't beleive the author argued that the US doesn't have the right to attach conditions; just that in this case the attached conditions are irrational and cause the deaths of thousands annually.

You and I benefit from DDT's existence; to decide that, now that we've gotten what we want out of it, we should restrict those benefits to others is hardly moral or wise.

Al Gore wrote in the 40th anniversary edition of Silent Spring that thanks to that book, "Countless human lives will be saved." Sadly, the opposite is true: Countless human lives have been lost to the propoganda and junk science that was Rachel Carson's life work.

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

What's missing in that long-winded rant (7 pages, wow!) is *any* mention of what DDT actually is and the real reason it's been banned by every progressive nation (see my explanation below, hopefully that'll make it more clear). The closest it comes is to mention the multinational treaty to ban "persistent organic pollutants" (italics my own, this author is of course not going to stress the actual "whys" of the ban), the so-called "dirty dozen" (DDT is one of the three that wasn't banned outright, but is discouraged and restricted to indoor use only, as she noted).

Then there's the AIDS tangent she rants on for many paragraphs, which has no relevance to the actual issue of DDT and its outdoor usage in Africa.

Al Gore is one of those psuedo-environmentalists who makes my skin crawl. He is an utter moron, his stupidity (and that of others like him) is almost as dangerous to the environment as the polluters who just don't care about anything but making a quick buck and are willing to wreak devastation in order to do it. He spreads this ignorant tripe of his on things like DDT and "global warming", filled with grossly inaccurate statements that betray his utter ignorance of any of the scientific research involved, which industrial-conservative loons of course easily debunk, and then NOBODY believes the scientists. As soon as the public sees through the hyperbole and hysteria that these enviro-loons spread, they invariably seem to react by deciding there IS NO PROBLEM and that scientists have deceived them. *sigh*