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

[http://users.livejournal.com/dominic-m-/]

thats what DDT does..I ermember now...it infects the bugs-birds eat bugs-bird lays eggs-eggs are weakend because of DDT and die.

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

Beat me to it :) I was an environmental biologist, the ecosystem (and not human mutations) was the primary concern for using DDT, the primary problem attributed to it was the weak-shell defect, and it also hit the alligator population stunningly hard.

DDT is what is known as an environmental estrogen (EE), basically it's a compound that is an estrogen agonist-- basically a synthetic form of the estrogen hormone the way it interacts with animal tissues, but generally doesn't do the job correctly (at the very least, it's going to throw the hormonal balance off, at the worst the analogy would be the way carbon monoxide bonds to hemoglobin irreversibly in the place of oxygen, rendering it useless so you suffocate). Many household detergents are also EEs.

EEs have also devastated fish and amphibian populations in some industrial areas, not only causing weak, malformed eggs, but they can also have adverse effects on both genders of some animals. These animals are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine.

Now the problem with DDT specifically, which shows like Dateline (I just recently saw someone ranting about it on TV, I could swear it was John Stossel) don't bother to mention...it's a durable compound that hangs around as an EE contaminant long after the useful effects as an insecticide have ended. It has a half life of somewhere around 50 years (look it up, whoever is concerned, I'm too lazy) to be ingested by animals or carried around the globe by the prevailing winds.

If you sprayed it and the compound broke down a week or two later, then it would be a no-brainer to spray it all over Africa, and Colorado too as hard as West Nile Virus hit here. But we don't have a form of DDT that is so quickly biodegradable and the things that don't devastate the environment aren't terribly effective as insecticides. I hope people like Stossel are just ignorant. Still, it's inexcusable to only tell part of the story, even out of abject ignorance, to the effect that folks are misled. Not to come across as a hysterical ranting loon, because the situation isn't as grave of a danger, but this is akin to all that "the atom is our friend" crap, thinking it's okay to spread radioactive contamination around to make our lives more comfortable in the short term, and not being concerned about the long-term consequences.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

It is important to point out that, as The Interational Programme on Chemical Safety (http://www.inchem.org/documents/ehc/ehc/ehc83.htm#SectionNumber:6.2) points out, DDT is not being proposed as a crop pesticide, but as a household pesticide, used to control the introduction of mosquitos into the home.

Yes, the article claims that DDT should not be used when there are alternatives-- there isn't one that, on a cost-benefit ratio, is as effective. When scientists come up with one the DDT advocates will stop beating the drum.

Until then, the West is culpable in the continued spread of malaria.

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

Interior use is permitted, but even the stock footage Dateline used showed it being sprayed from trucks as a fogger and on the outside of huts as a mist. When you're dealing with the types of huts in most of those areas (mostly just bunches of twigs lashed together), it's about as impossible to contain the DDT inside the structure as it is to ladle water with a sieve. So it goes back into the environment, and causes problems. The only thing I agree 100% with out of the article is that as much effort should be thrown into finding a suitably effective, yet environmentally-friendly alternative to DDT as has been thrown into AIDS research.