Discover has a good article on Rachel Carson, DDT and malaria. Unlike many other recently published articles (e.g. the New York Times) it gets the science right:
But elsewhere, the picture is murkier. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 500 million cases of malaria occur each year, resulting in an estimated 1 million deaths. Most of these cases of illness and mortality occur in sub-Saharan Africa. But no one can say whether malaria rates have increased or declined in Africa as a whole in recent decades because of difficulties in collecting data, says Valentina Buj, public-health officer for the WHO's Global Malaria Programme in Geneva. Some countries do not track whether DDT has been used to combat malaria. "Given the wide variation in the transmission of the disease--endemic areas, areas of low endemicity, hyperendemic areas, and sometimes these strata all occurring in the same country--we prefer to look at each country separately without aggregates over the entire continent," Buj says.
The confusion is also reflected by the fact that in the past year officials at the WHO have issued contradictory directives on the use of DDT to fight malaria. On September 15, 2006, Arata Kochi, the head of the Global Malaria Programme, announced at a news conference in Washington, D.C., that DDT posed no health risk when sprayed in small quantities on the inside walls of houses, and he called for an expansion of its use to combat the mosquito-borne disease. Then on May 3, 2007, Maria Neira, director of the WHO's public-health and environment department, said at a Dakar, Senegal, meeting of the ratifiers of the Stockholm Convention--an international treaty that went into effect in 2004 that controls the use of persistent organic pollutants like DDT--that the WHO's goal was to reduce the use of DDT and eventually eliminate it.
Lost in all the hullabaloo is the fact that DDT has never been completely banned for use in public-health measures. The Stockholm Convention defines disease control as an "acceptable use" for DDT, and 13 countries in Africa and Asia have registered their intention to use it as such.
Hat tip: Ed Darrell
Wow! Talk about six degrees of separation. I used to date Valentina Buj when she lived in Canberra! Wow.
500 million cases of malaria occur each year?
So, in less than two years everybody in the entire African continent has contracted malaria? In 12-13 years the whole world has got the thing?
I must have missed something.