DDT
tlambert | November 16, 2005This editorial from Africa Fighting Malaria contains the usual misleading statements about what happened in South Africa and the usual false claim about the EU threatening to ban imports from Uganda. But it adds this attack on Bayer:
The obstacles to good malaria control unfortunately do not end there. Big business also plays a distasteful role in this saga. Recently, the Financial Times reported that Gerhard Hesse, business manager for vector control of Bayer Crop Sciences and a board member of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, wrote an e-mail to various health academics claiming: "We…
tlambert | November 15, 2005Kent R. Hill, assistant administrator, Bureau of Global Health, USAID, corrects yet another ignorant claim that USAID won't fund DDT spraying:
Paul Driessen's opinion article titled "USAID Could Stop This Epidemic" (Nov. 2) misrepresents the U.S. Agency for International Development's support for indoor residual spraying to control malaria, as well as the United States government's position on the use of DDT internationally. USAID strongly supports spraying as a preventative measure for malaria and will support the use of DDT when it is scientifically sound and warranted.
In the past, USAID…
tlambert | October 26, 2005Correspondence on the paper "Agricultural production and malaria resurgence in Central America and India"
Nature Vol 294 26 November 1981 pages 302,388
Malaria debated
SIR --- I have read the paper by Chapin and Wasserstrom (Nature 17
September, p.181) with interest. I am disappointed with the
presentation and discussion of the important subject of malaria
resurgence and its relationship to agricultural production.
The authors give a garbled account of the very concept of malaria
eradication and especially of the causes of the relative failure of
this great endeavour. They imply, that the…
tlambert | October 26, 2005There were some letters written to Nature by malariologists disputing Chapin and Wasserstrom's paper that argued that agricultural use of DDT was the major factor in the resurgence of malaria in India and Central America. Before I write about the dispute I should stress what they all agreed on:
It is generally agreed among malariologists that agricultural
insecticides have made a contribution to selection for insecticide
resistance in mosquitoes and that such resistance has made a
contribution to the resurgence of malaria in Central America and South
Asia.
Furthermore none of the…
tlambert | October 22, 2005Michael Fumento has
responded
to my post way back in January demolishing his foolish proposal that after
the tsunami:
DDT should be sprayed on water pools, tents, and on people themselves---as indeed was once common in Sri Lanka and throughout most of the world.
Unfortunately, mosquitoes in Sri Lanka are resistant to DDT, so DDT spraying would be a waste of time and money.
Fumento insists that DDT spraying would be effective despite resistance because
Resistance doesn't mean "immunity." Often it simply means using more insecticide in the spray than you would otherwise.
And then when you do…
tlambert | October 21, 2005John Bruton, the EU ambassador to the US responds to Mallaby's clueless DDT boosting piece.
In his Oct. 10 op-ed column, "Look Who's Ignoring Science Now," Sebastian Mallaby suggested that European regulations are to blame for the misery in Uganda and other malaria-stricken nations. The facts testify otherwise.
The European Union has no objection to the safe spraying of houses with DDT for malaria control, but it does have concerns about illegal agricultural uses. The E.U., like the United States and 149 other countries that signed the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants in…
tlambert | October 21, 2005Extracts from "Should DDT continue to be recommended for malaria
vector control?" by C. F. Curtis published in Medical and Veterinary Entomology (1994) 8, 107--112
The banning of DDT in developed countries
In the early 1970s the use of DDT was banned in the U.S.A. and some
European countries except for certain emergency pest control
situations. The ban was based on the toxicity of DDT to fish, its
persistence in the environment and evidence that it could be passed up
food chains. Very high doses of DDT applied against the beetle
vectors of Dutch elm disease led to concentration of residues…
tlambert | October 14, 2005Andrew Kenny in The Spectator
writes
Judged on sheer evil, the worst crime in history was brown, the Nazi
genocide, although the reds slaughtered more people. The death toll
(difficult to measure) is roughly, Hitler's holocaust 6 million,
Stalin's famine and terror 8 million, and Mao's famine 30 million. But
the greens have topped them all. In a single crime they have killed
about 50 million people. In purely numerical terms, it was the worst
crime of the 20th century. It took place in the USA in 1972. It was
the banning of DDT. ...
In 1971 DDT was poised to rid the world of malaria. In 1972…
tlambert | October 14, 2005Extracts from "Agricultural production and malaria resurgence in Central America and India" by Georganne Chapin and Robert Wasserstrom published in
Nature Vol 293 17 September 1981 pages 181--185
Among the inhabitants of Asia, Latin America and tropical Africa
malaria, remains a major cause for alarm. Yet only a few years ago,
health officials in a dozen developing countries (capitalizing on the
discoveries of British parasitologist Ronald Ross half a century
earlier) pointed triumphantly at their efforts to eradicate entirely
this mosquito-borne scourge[1-5]. Following World Health…
tlambert | October 10, 2005Sebastian Mallaby's article in the Washington Post has all the hallmarks of the clueless DDT-boosting article.
The only expert mentioned is not a malariologist but comes from some right-wing think tank. In this case it's Roger Bate.
Nowhere is mentioned the main reason why anti-malaria programs have shifted away from DDT---the widespread development of resistance to DDT by mosquitoes.
Other insecticides and drugs against malaria are ignored. South Africa did reintroduce DDT for spraying traditional houses, but they also used deltamethrin on western-style houses and switched to a more…
tlambert | September 29, 2005Senator Inhofe comes in for some well-deserved mocking for inviting novelist Michael Crichton to testify on global warming science. RealClimate has a detailed dissection of Crichton's testimony.
I watched the proceedings and learned that as well as believing that global warming is a big hoax, Inhofe believes that the 1972 US ban on DDT has caused millions to die from malaria. He had Donald Roberts up to testify about it and Roberts presented the usual misleading arguments about this non-existent ban.
Testimony like that of Roberts is pernicious. Malaria really is a solvable problem, but…
tlambert | September 28, 2005I've written several posts debunking the myth that using DDT is banned, pointing out that is used in places like South Africa. Now Professor Bunyip has finally discovered this fact and slams Tim Blair for spreading the myth:
This item from the BBC will have Tim Blair beside himself -- a contortion worth seeing, given that he has long since assumed the initial improbable position of being well up himself.
South Africa had stopped using DDT in 1996. Until then the total number of malaria cases was below 10,000 and there were seldom more than 30 deaths per year. But in 2000, [South Africa] saw…
tlambert | September 13, 2005The tsunami and Katrina both left behind pools of stagnant water in which things have swarmed and multiplied and emerged to infect humanity. I'm referring, of cause, to clueless articles extolling the virtues of DDT.
The latest is by Henry Miller in the National Review Online.
The six-year old U.S. outbreak of West Nile virus is a significant threat to public health and shows no signs of abating. ... As of September 6, Louisiana ranked fourth in the nation in human West Nile virus infections; but with most of New Orleans still under water and a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes, there…
tlambert | August 10, 2005Tina Rosenberg's article, What the World Needs Now Is
DDT,
published in the New York Times last year contains many factual
errors about DDT. The errors combine to present a false picture of a world where DDT is a magic bullet that could end malaria if only dogmatic environmentalists would allow it. After seven weeks one (and only one) correction was made to her article:
An article on April 11 about DDT and its effectiveness in controlling
malaria in developing countries misstated the position of an
international health organization on it. The Global Fund to Fight
AIDS, Tuberculosis and…
tlambert | July 28, 2005In response to my post showing that
DDT is not banned,
David Adesnik suggests that there is a de facto ban on DDT
There are two ways that this de facto ban is supposed to work: first, by aid agencies refusing to fund DDT use, and second by the EU banning imports from DDT-using countries.
However, the agencies do fund DDT use and the stories claiming that they don't have had to be corrected.
A correction of the story Adesnik cites was published on May 23 2004 in the New York Times:
An article on April 11 about DDT and its effectiveness in controlling malaria in developing countries misstated…
tlambert | July 16, 2005Brian Schmidt tries to track down a source for the quote "People Are Pollution" that John Ray claims was the slogan of Zero Population Growth. Ray was unable to give a source for his quote, which would seem to be bogus. Schmidt concludes:
I don't think Ray is intentionally dishonest (unlike Benny Peiser) but I suspect the quality of his work on this slogan, given how often he repeats it, indicates how much one should trust anything from him that does not come with independent documentation.
A while ago I exchanged several emails with Ray trying to get him to correct his false claim that:…
tlambert | June 26, 2005Last week, in response to more repetition of the false claim that
environmentalists had killed many millions of people with a ban of DDT.
John Quiggin set out the facts of the matter:
DDT has never been banned in antimalarial use. The main reason for
declining use of DDT as an antimalarial has been the development of
resistance. Antimalarial uses have received specific exemptions from
proposals to phase out DDT, until alternatives are developed. Bans on
the use of DDT as an agricultural insecticide, promoted by Rachel
Carson and others, have helped to slow the development of resistance,
and…
tlambert | June 23, 2005The World Bank is the largest funder of Eritrea's anti-malaria program.
The Eritrea Daily
reports on
the good results:
But today Eritrea, one of the poorest countries in the world, stands out as a success story in controlling malaria.
The statistics are compelling. The number of people dying from malaria has dropped by between 55 to 65 percent since 1999. Mortality of children under five years of age dropped by 53 percent, while there was a 64 percent drop in the death rate for older children and adults.
"In 1991, our death toll among pregnant women from malaria was very high" Eritrea's…
tlambert | June 19, 2005John Quiggin catches Miranda Devine spreading the DDT Hoax in the Sun Herald. If DDT is banned, how come this company will sell you some? They say:
In the past several years, we supplied DDT 75% WDP to Madagascar, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, South Africa, Namibia, Solomon Island, Papua New Guinea, Algeria, Thailand, Myanmar for Malaria Control project, and won a good reputation from WHO and relevant countries' government.
I was particularly impressed by this argument from Devine:
Advertisements of the time, which today seem preposterous, extolled it as a benefactor of all humanity, with…
tlambert | June 15, 2005Tim Blair's ability to detect fake
quotes
mysteriously deserts him when the fake quote supports his
anti-environmentalist agenda. After quoting the usual falsehoods
about how the ban on DDT killed 50 million. (It was only the
agricultural use that was banned, and far from costing lives, this
saved lives since it slows the evolution of resistance.) He has this:
The likely reason was spelled out with chilling clarity by Charles
Wurster of the Environmental Defence Fund in the USA in 1971 when it
was pointed out to him that DDT saved the lives of poor people in poor
countries. He said: 'So…