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

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

If you search for the article on Google, Google has a partner arrangement with NYT that circumvents the registration.

Or you can just click here (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/magazine/11DDT.html?ex=1082260800&en=0080f21512ee3ca6&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE) :)

[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.

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

I dont know what to comment on this...(I dont know enough about DDT). I have heard something about DDT mutating local insects and small things to be resistant to other things...I dont know,Im quite clueless. I want to know more about the harmfull effects of DDT before we try and reap the helpfull ones.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Quick, name five industrial pesticides in use today and their teratogenic and mutagenic capabilities. Now, of them, how many are older and better studied than DDT?

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

hey hey woah...I never sujjested anything else..I just said I wish I knew more about what EXACTLY DDT did.thats all.

[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.

this might be continued

[merwy.livejournal.com]

Ought to stick to my proper homework. But even if I must admit my theoretical base is not extensive, my enviromental chemistry course has only lasted for about 4 months so far, I can't really not comment on this. I know you believe in liking humans better than plants. So do I. But the humans do not in the long term survive without the plants. I believe there must always be a careful weighting of harmful and positive effects of chemical compounds, it is simply not true to say that DDT has no harmful effects.
In britain, there was according to a study (by someone named Ratcliffe in 1993) a drop of about 50% in the peregrine population in 1961 compared to that in 1930. This followed the introduction in about 1940 of DDT and in 1955 of cyclodienes. After restriction were imposed on those two substances, the population has risen above the 1930 levels. The decrease was caused by DDT disturbing the incorporation of calcium into eggshells, making them too thin to hatch. That spells dangerous to me. Yes, I am a tree-hugger, and yes, I'd rather see peregrines die than children - but sufficient concentrations of DDT might also kill the children. The lethal oral dose (LOD-50 - the dose at which 50% of test animals die) of DDT is 110 mg per kg body weight. Obviously, direct tests have not been carried out on humans, but it is assumed that LOD-50 values are roughly equal for different species. 110 mg is not such a lot.
AS for alternatives, I believe a substance called methoxychlor "has the same insecticidal properties (as DDT)" but is much more easily degraded in nature and hence not as dangerous. These last facts are from Colin Baird : Environmental Chemistry, 2nd edition pages about 300.
I am not saying there are no reasons for or situations in which to use DDT, but there IS serious cause for concern and restrictions.

[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]

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*

[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.