More DDT hoax spreading

The latest folks to spread the DDT hoax are Kopel, Gallant and Eisen. They claim:

[Malaria] is a disaster manufactured by First World political correctness; DDT prohibition is scientifically indefensible, and is responsible for millions of deaths every year.

However, as explained in my posts on DDT, DDT is not banned from use against malaria, and while it is still helps against malaria in some places, it is not the panacea that Kopel et al make it out to be.

They also write

But rather than limiting DDT use, the United Nations is actively encouraging a worldwide ban on DDT.63

But reference 63 is to the Stockholm Convention on Persistant Organic Pollutants, which specifically exempts DDT use for vector control from the ban. Banning agricultural use of DDT greatly aids its use against malaria, since mosquitoes will be much less likely to develop resistance.

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Yes, very good points. I think Laurie Garrett has a nice several page piece on the history of this whole DDT thing in the malaria chapter of "The Coming Plague." Apparently, even Rachel Carson was not opposed to using DDT for public health purposes.

Good point, Tim. That does seem to be an important distinction that a lot of people who should know better are missing.

N.B.: That's Dr. Donald R. Roberts of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md.

Not the other Dr. Roberts who has also published in the Lancet.

In that paper, Roberts has

DDT house spraying was stopped in Sri Lanka in 1961, and this was followed by a major malaria epidemic.

He seems to have the year wrong (1964, not 1961) and fails to note that the

reason spraying was stopped was that malaria cases had dropped to near zero.

The resurgence of malaria was, indeed, a public health disaster. We need to learn from it, and keep it from happening again. Using a deliberate misconstruction of its causes as a rhetorical weapon against environmentalists is shameful, if you ask me.