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A worldwide pandemic of staggering proportions is underway, killing many millions of people and sickening millions more. This pandemic is not the dreaded bird flu; it is not the frightful Ebola virus. The epidemic is malaria. According the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), "Each year 350-500 million cases of malaria occur worldwide, and over one million people die...." The disease is especially rampant in Africa, where it has exacted an appalling toll on children. According to correspondent Dr. Carolyn Demasi, reporting for the Australian news program Catalyst, “Every 30 seconds a child in Sub-Saharan Africa dies from Malaria.”
Malaria is a disease caused by the microscopic parasite Plasmodium falciparum, itself carried by the anopheles mosquito. Those bitten by the disease-carrying mosquitoes are at risk of infection. For those living side-by-side with the mosquito, particularly in Africa where the disease is most prevalent, there hasn’t been much help dealing with the threat. The most effective means of reducing or eliminating malarial infections has long been known to be the use of DDT, but since DDT was banned by the United States in 1972, it has been difficult, if not impossible, for developing nations in Africa to acquire and use this life-saving chemical. The tide, however, is turning, and renewed spraying of DDT promises to end the malaria nightmare.
Banning DDT
DDT, or Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, was first discovered in 1874 by German chemist Othmar Zeidler. It wasn’t until 1939 that a U.S. scientist, Dr. Paul Müller, independently discovered the compound’s efficacy in killing insects. Soon the chemical was employed in the fight against mosquitoes, bed bugs, and damaging agricultural pests. The campaign to rid the world of these pests worked. By 1951 malaria was eliminated as a disease in the United States. Looking back on the previous decades of DDT use, in 1970 a National Academy of Sciences report admitted: “To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT.... In a little more than two decades [after WW II], DDT has prevented 50 million deaths due to malaria that otherwise would have been inevitable.”
Despite DDT’s effectiveness in destroying mosquitoes and other disease-carrying insects, environmentalists made DDT a major target throughout the 1960s. Following publication of ecologist Rachel Carson’s now-discredited book Silent Spring, environmentalists went on the offensive. They achieved success in 1972 when William Ruckelshaus, the head of the newly formed EPA, banned DDT. The ban came despite the fact that seven months of hearings immediately prior had convinced EPA examiner Edmund Sweeney that there was no need for a ban.
The ban had predictable results. While the rate of malarial infection in the United States remained essentially zero, rates elsewhere shot back up. Following the EPA ban, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), under threat of a lawsuit from environmental organizations, began working to stop other nations from using DDT. Sri Lanka, for instance, experienced 2.8 million cases of malaria in 1948. More than 7,000 people died from the disease that year. By 1963 DDT use had all but eradicated the malaria scourge in Sri Lanka. That year fewer than 20 people contracted the disease and no one died. But after DDT use was discontinued, rates of malarial infection soared to nearly pre-DDT levels.
Malaria in Africa
The incredible number of deaths from malaria in Africa and elsewhere has prompted calls for the renewed use of DDT to fight the mosquitoes that carry the disease. Niger Innis is the national spokesperson for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). His organization has been working in Africa for decades and has more recently begun to focus on the malaria pandemic. “CORE has been involved in the issue of malaria for the last five years,” Innis said, and the group has made the issue one of its most pressing concerns.
Innis and other CORE staff have visited Africa to study the situation on the ground and have attended several international conferences in an attempt to publicize the plight of those affected by the disease. This work has made Niger Innis acutely aware of the dramatic impact malaria continues to have on Africa.
“The statistics are well known in terms of the hundreds of thousands of lives that are affected by malaria, the deaths that come from malaria, those that get sick from malaria,” Innis said. “But that’s only one factor. The other factor is the inability because of sickness, because of time lost due to being incapacitated, the fact that that has such a dire impact on the productivity, on the creative genius that may exist within [Africa], on the entrepreneurial spirit that may exist and, in general, on economic growth.”
Despite the dire impact of the disease, historically, it has not received nearly as much attention as some others. “Unfortunately, malaria is not as politically sexy, political correct a disease as something like AIDS, which has gotten worldwide attention and has galvanized worldwide support to come up with a cure and whose victims have become front and center in establishment media,” said Innis. “Malaria has not garnered an equal amount of attention and I would argue that malaria at best — and there isn’t a best situation here — but at best kills and devastates as many Africans as AIDS and perhaps even more so.”
Fortunately, the means of stopping malaria is readily available in the form of DDT. Innis notes that CORE supports the proper use of DDT, in contrast to those radical environmentalists who support a continued ban. And he points out that DDT is working where it is being employed, but that other nations still refuse to embrace it because of the controversy over its use.
“In South Africa they have been using DDT for a few years and, guess what, miracle,” Innis says. “The malaria rate in South Africa has indeed gone down dramatically. In Uganda they are in the embryonic stage of employing DDT. There’s a struggle right now that is occurring between the Ugandan government and the environmental ministry of the Ugandan government.” According to Innis, most Ugandan agencies, including the health ministry, favor the use of DDT to save lives, but the environmental minister is stonewalling. “The environmental minister, who spends a lot of time at the international gatherings and sharing coffee and cocktails with his European environmental counterparts, does not agree,” Innis laments. “Consequently he is fighting the use of DDT in his own country even though he knows it could save lives.”
Work Remains
The biggest obstacle to the widespread use of DDT to combat malaria in Africa and elsewhere has been reluctance by U.S. agencies, USAID in particular, to fund and encourage the use of DDT. Officially, USAID does not ban DDT, but while recognizing its effectiveness, suggests its use ought to be limited. “There are a few situations in which … DDT is generally found to be appropriate,” says the official USAID summary of malaria control programs. The agency, however, points to the UN’s Persistent Organic Pollutants treaty as regulating the use of the chemical. “The U.S. government is signatory to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (the POPS treaty), which specifically allows an exemption for countries to use DDT for public health use in vector control programs, as long as WHO guidelines are followed and until a safer and equally effective alternative is found.” Unfortunately, this creates an international bureaucratic bottleneck that must be negotiated before effective malarial control programs based on DDT can be funded by the United States. As a result, USAID typically funds half-measures such as insect nets and the like that are not as effective.
It should be stated that there is no constitutional authority for agencies of the U.S. government to fund malarial control programs of any kind abroad. In fact, by virtue of its efforts to encourage nations to use methods other than DDT to control malaria, the taxpayer-funded USAID has actually contributed to the malaria pandemic. Only when USAID and other international agencies stop encouraging nations to view DDT as a last-resort solution will malaria be conquered.
This article originally appeared in The New American magazine.
