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

[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.