Archbishop Desmond Tutu joins call for DDT to combat malaria
------------------------------------------------------------
Please find below the text of a declaration by Kill Malarial
Mosquitoes Now!
(KMMN) a broad coalition of public health experts and opinion
leaders calling for USAID to spend 66% of its malaria control
budget on DDT. Please ask your organization to sign the declara-
tion. Nobel Laureate Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu is now one
of hundreds of signatories. Malaria continues to kill over a
million people each year, mostly African children. Zambia's use
of DDT reduced malaria by 75 percent in two years. South Africa
slashed malaria rates by 96 percent in just three years, using a
combination of DDT and drugs. The chemical has not been linked
to a single case of human cancer in five decades of use.
Africa desperately needs DDT to compliment existing strategies
of bednets and ACT drugs. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and
Malaria is funding DDT in Zambia and Mozambique. Other countries
will use DDT if USAID would buy it for them. Please sign the
declaration by emailing me at mailto:pcoticelli@gmail.com and
circulate it to the highest authority of your respective organi-
zations and others. A PDF version of the declaration can be
found at http://www.fightingmalaria.org/, click on Kill Malarial
Mosquitoes Now!
Sincerely,
Philip Coticelli
Africa Fighting Malaria
mailto:pcoticelli@fightingmalaria.org
http://www.fightingmalaria.org/
--
Kill Malarial Mosquitoes NOW!
A Declaration of the Informed and Concerned
We, the undersigned, are justifiably concerned, anguished and
outraged that:
Over 500 million human beings suffer from malaria in Africa
and around the world annually. This is more people than live in
the United States, Canada and Mexico combined.
Well over a million of these people mostly children and
pregnant women are killed by malaria each and every year.
Malaria wreaks an enormous economic toll, incapacitating oth-
erwise productive people, leaving thousands with brain damage,
and keeping millions at home to care for the sick, instead of
producing goods and services to lift Africa and other regions
out of unacceptable, abject poverty.
The United States, Europe and other advanced economies have
failed to use every available means to stop the devastation that
malarial mosquitoes inflict upon the world's poorest citizens.
They are the same methods we used to eradicate malaria in our
countries. Yet, we have mindlessly withheld them from other peo-
ple for over 30 years to tragic, almost genocidal effect.
Almost none of the $200 million that US taxpayers contribute
to world malaria control each year is actually spent to kill or
repel the deadly mosquitoes that inject parasites into the
bloodstreams of their victims. These shortsighted policies fail
to recognize that spraying small amounts of DDT on the interior
walls of homes can effectively kill or repel malarial mosquitoes
giving longlasting protection to the families within.
Amazingly, some in government even oppose using malaria con-
trol monies to kill the parasite that malarial mosquitoes trans-
mit from person to person! These individuals would block or
limit funding for the purchase of medicines such as artemisinin-
based combination therapies (ACTs), which cure malaria and in-
hibit its spread wherever they are used.
DDT as yet plays no part in the program announced by President
Bush in July 2005, to spend an additional $1.2 billion on ma-
laria control over the next five years. Without DDT and ACTs,
this spending will be needlessly wasted, along with millions of
additional lives. We understand the facts about DDT and its his-
toric opponents, as summarized in the Background and References,
below. We now seek humane, heroic action by US leaders to alter
the ugly course of human history with regard to malaria. Our ob-
jective: To end malaria's worldwide reign of terror
We want to slash disease and death tolls in Africa and world-
wide, by changing the way the US government funds malaria con-
trol. We want cost-effective measures that actually kill and re-
pel malarial mosquitoes, eliminate parasites, cure malaria pa-
tients and save lives.
We therefore ask Congress and the President to:
Ensure that at least 2/3 (two-thirds) of annual Congressional
appropriations for malaria control are earmarked for insecti-
cidal and medicinal commodities with up to half of such monies
targeted to the treatment and cure of infected patients.
Specifically direct such funds to the actual purchase and de-
ployment of: (1) DDT, or any other proven, more cost-effective
insecticide/repellant, for Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) in any
given malarial locality; and (2) of ACTs, or other equally ef-
fective and durable drugs, for treatment of malaria patients and
reduction in transmission rates.
Require that this 2/3 formula be mirrored in the annual ma-
laria control spending by any agency receiving US malaria con-
trol monies such as US Agency for International Development,
World Health Organization, World Bank, UNICEF and Global Fund to
Fight AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis.
Direct that this 2/3 proportion will be subject to reduction
ONLY if replaced by corresponding expenditures for any malaria
control measure (such as larvaciding) that has been proven
equally or more cost-effective in reducing malaria morbidity and
mortality rates in specific localities as certified, in ad-
vance of such expenditure and replacement, by the directors of
the US Centers for Disease Control, Uniformed Services Univer-
sity of the Health Sciences or similar independent agency, based
on controlled epidemiological studies in the field.
In full accord with the UN Stockholm Convention on Persistent
Organic Pollutants, this objective contemplates DDT use only for
indoor residual spraying (which results in zero-to-negligible
external environmental residue) and not for aerial or any
other form of outdoor application.1 It does not contemplate the
use of insecticides, including insecticide-treated mosquito
nets, not shown to be more cost-effective than indoor residual
spraying with DDT for all members of affected populations. In
the absence of empirical evidence to the contrary, we the under-
signed regard as inadequate and therefore morally unacceptable
any policy that permits any sum in excess of one-third of US
antimalaria funding to be expended on contractors, "technical
assistance," conferences, "capacity building, overhead, bed nets
or similar measures, rather than the proven insecticidal and
medical interventions described above. Bureaucrats, contractors,
academics, insecticide companies, anti-pesticide activists and
other selfinterested parties have frequently protested that DDT
for indoor residual spraying is no panacea and falsely claimed
that alternative methods work equally well in controlling ma-
laria. However, the fact is, nothing in the history of man has
proven more effective than the combination of insecticides such
as DDT and effective medicines like ACTs for saving human lives
from the scourge of malaria. DDT enabled the United States,
Europe and most advanced economies to eradicate malaria. It must
now be permitted and encouraged to start saving lives in Africa,
Asia, Latin America and other parts of the world where malarial
mosquitoes continue to kill thousands of innocent children and
parents every day.
Because:
Allocation decisions on US appropriations for malaria control
must be made by Congress and the White House within weeks;
The US foreign aid and multilateral aid bureaucracies have
proven themselves incompetent and unwilling over many years to
make effective commodity purchases and allocation decisions;
Most of the world, including the World Health Organization,
has endorsed DDT for indoor residual spraying through the UN
Stockholm Convention; and
Americans and most of the world embrace life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness as fundamental Human Rights and yet the
effect of current malaria policies is to deny those Human Rights
to billions of the world's poorest people; Now, therefore, we
the undersigned Coalition of the Informed and Concerned hold
that the burden of scientific and moral proof rests with any who
would argue that more than one-third of US and world malaria
control spending should support measures other than DDT for in-
door residual spraying and ACTs (or any other proven, more cost-
effective interventions) for combating this horrific disease. If
and when the opponents of DDT and ACTs can show and obtain cer-
tification as provided above that something else works better to
save human lives from malaria, we the undersigned will readily
even eagerly accede to something less than this two-thirds
formula. Until then, however, we will fight furiously for every
human life now hanging in the balance, as a function of current,
myopic, errant and unconscionable US malaria control policies.
We urge all people of conscience, moral conviction and human de-
cency to join us in ending malaria's reign of terror in Africa
and the developing world. We hereby implore Congress and the
President to stop the misguided malaria spending, stop the talk-
ing, and finally take real action to:
Kill Malarial Mosquitoes NOW!
Signatories:
Desmond M Tutu Archbishop Emeritus, Nobel Peace Laureate, South
Africa
Andrew Spielman, PhD Professor of Tropical Public Health, Har-
vard School of Public Health
Admiral Harold M. Koenig, MD Former Surgeon General of the US
Navy (retired), Maryland
Patrick Moore, PhD Co-founder of Greenpeace....
[List of signatories continues...]
--
Background:
The truth about DDT and opposition to it
The wide-ranging attacks on and near-banning of DDT is arguably
history's most devastating embrace of junk science. DDT is one
of the single most effective tools for fighting malaria, a dis-
ease that kills over 1 million people annually. Most of these
deaths are among children and pregnant women, and those lucky
enough to survive malaria are often left brain-damaged and fac-
ing a blighted future.2
About 2.2 billion people live in malarial regions, and over half
a billion people suffer acutely from the potentially fatal dis-
ease every year. Over 70 percent of them live in Africa.3 Ma-
laria is not just an unnecessary human tragedy; it is also an
economic disaster. The disease imposes a huge economic toll on
malarial countries discouraging foreign investors, incapaci-
tating otherwise productive people, keeping millions at home to
care for the sick, instead of producing goods and services, and
exacting enormous healthcare costs that reduce budgets needed
for other health, social and environmental programs.4
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that malaria may
exact an economic cost of more than $12 billion per year.5 On a
cost-benefit basis, malaria control ranks among the top priori-
ties for measures to improve the world, according to the Copen-
hagen Consensus 2004, a panel of world-leading economists spon-
sored by The Economist. 6 Malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes,
which carry deadly or debilitating protozoa from infected to
non-infected people. Killing or repelling malarial mosquitoes
has the bonus effect of halting other mosquito-borne diseases
such as yellow fever and dengue fever. Shortly after the Second
World War, DDT was used to eradicate or dramatically reduce ma-
laria in the U.S., Europe, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Sri Lanka,
India, and many southern African countries. In 1971, WHO said
DDT is the "major single factor that made the concept of time-
limited eradication possible." It recommended continuing insec-
ticide availability, "particularly DDT." Why? Because sprayed
once or at most twice a year on mud and thatch huts and cinder-
block homes common in Africa and other poor countries, DDT keeps
most mosquitoes from entering, irritates those that do so they
rarely bite, and kills most that land on the walls. DDT both re-
pels AND kills mosquitoes. Even mosquitoes resistant to DDT's
insect-killer properties are repelled from homes and buildings
whose walls have been sprayed with the insecticide, thereby pro-
tecting all the people therein. No other pesticide at any
price is as effective, long-lasting, cost-effective and safe
as DDT for killing and repelling malarial mosquitoes. In fact,
DDT keeps up to 90 percent of mosquitoes from even entering a
home. However, to kill (but generally not repel) DDT-resistant
mosquitoes, alternative pesticides like synthetic pyrethroids
and carbamates can also be effective.
No anti-malaria vaccine exists today, and there is little pros-
pect of an effective vaccine being commercially available in the
next ten years. Until that day, as history has shown, the best
way to reduce or eliminate the incidence of malaria is to pre-
vent the disease in the first place, by controlling the Anophe-
les mosquitoes that carry it. The historical strategy is able to
be combined with new and extremely effective artemisinin-
combination therapy (ACT) medicines, which both cure malaria in
afflicted patients, and which interrupt the chain of malaria
parasite transmission from an ill person, to the mosquito, and
to the next uninfected victim. DDT targets the mosquito, and
ACTs 15 target the malaria parasite. Used together, they are
stunningly effective, as recent studies from Southern Africa es-
pecially show.
Many malarial countries have woefully inadequate healthcare and
transportation systems. As a result, many of those in need of
treatment go without, and many die. If proper malaria controls
were in place, fewer people would be infected, and those that
are infected would have a better chance to receive effective
drugs and treatment.
The US government promotes the use of anti-malarial drugs and
insecticide-treated bed nets. These have a place in malaria con-
trol. But they cannot and should not replace other interven-
tions, such as indoor spraying with insecticides, which dramati-
cally reduce malaria cases and deaths. In fact, indoor residual
spraying with DDT reduced malaria cases and deaths by nearly 75
percent in Zambia over a two-year period and by over 80 per-
cent in South Africa in just one year.7 Having reduced malaria
rates so dramatically, South Africa was then able to provide ACT
medicines to a much smaller number of people who still became
critically ill. In just three years, it slashed malaria rates by
an astounding 96 percent.8 Other countries successfully followed
South Africa's lead, and others also want to. It is therefore
critical that the USAID, World Health Organization (WHO), UNI-
CEF, Roll Back Malaria and other agencies help ensure that ma-
laria endemic countries have ready access to DDT. Indeed, ac-
cording to its own website, "the WHO recommends indoor residual
spraying of DDT for vector control."9 These agencies must ensure
that countries can reduce their malaria levels far enough that
all who nevertheless get the disease can be treated with ACTs
(or other equally effective) therapies that will continue to be
in extremely short supply for the foreseeable future.
Insecticide-treated nets certainly help to a limited degree.
However, they often get torn. They only protect one person at a
time. People often don't use them, because the insecticide irri-
tates their skin or they forget... kick them off when it gets
too unbearably hot under the net to sleep... don't have enough
for every family member... have no way to hang them up prop-
erly... or are still doing homework or housework when mosquitoes
arrive. Sleeping under a bed net is nearly impossible during
torrid African nights, says Omololu Falobi, a journalist in Ni-
geria. Use the net anyway, and you get heat rashes all over your
face and body. Most villages have no electricity to power fans
or air conditioners, and many of the same environmentalists who
oppose pesticides also oppose electricity generation on any
scale that would power these cooling systems. Even in cities
like Lagos, power outages are frequent, rendering fans and AC
useless. "Even if you have a generator, says Falobi, you don't
want to put it on throughout the night, for fear of carbon mon-
oxide poisoning."
Medicines that actually cure malaria (Artemisinin-based) are in
critically short supply. Although some USAID bureaucrats also
oppose devoting agency funds to ACT medicines, official agency
statements raise its expectation that there will be 55 million
pediatric treatments by 2006. But those treatments must treat
500 million critically ill malaria patients worldwide. That
means 445 million will not even have a chance to get treated.
Indeed, even under the most optimistic scenarios, there will be
sufficient supplies of ACT drugs to treat fewer than 1 in 4 pa-
tients for at least the next several years.
DDT is absolutely critical to preventing malaria in the first
place; treatment alone will never work. Expanding the production
of Artemisia is also critical, however, and USAID, pharmaceuti-
cal companies and others are working hard to do so. More re-
sources must be devoted to these efforts, too.16 In highly en-
demic areas, people can get 1,000 infectious mosquito bites in a
single year! Even with a 90% reduction in mosquitoes in the home
(via DDT indoor spraying) or outside (through the use of other
insecticides), they could still get 100 infectious bites per
person per year. It is certain that some people will get malaria
even with regular, effective spraying programs. That was and is
the experience in South Africa and other countries, and those
patients must have access to the very best medicine treatments
in our repertoire. Because they massively or completely elimi-
nate malaria parasites (gametocytes) from the victim's blood,
ACTs have another equally vital benefit. They significantly re-
duce the probability that a malaria-infected person can pass the
infection to a mosquito, and in turn to the next person who gets
bitten. Indeed, the gametocidal effect of artemisinins may be
comparable in magnitude to entomological (insecticidal) effects
of DDT. Some research has found that one ACT drug (Coartem)
slashed the proportion of patients carrying transmissible para-
sites to around 1/25 of what it had been when using older ma-
laria medicines, such as SP or chloroquine, which are no longer
clinically appropriate. In fact, these obsolete medicines may
fail in 50 to 80 percent of the cases. Recognition of these
facts is the principal reason that South Africa was able to go
from an 80 percent reduction in malaria disease and death rates,
using DDT alone to a 96 percent reduction over 3 years, using
DDT in combination with Coartem. Drugs designed to prevent
(through prophylaxis) the onset of malaria (Chloroquine, Ma-
larone, Doxycycline and others) are likewise inadequate for 2.2
billion people at risk from malaria. In any event, people living
in malarial areas cannot take malaria prophylaxis over an ex-
tended period of time, because of the expense and the side-
effects they will suffer. Only by slashing the number of people
getting malaria, can malaria-wracked countries get the best
drugs to those who still get sick. To do that, they need insec-
ticides, especially DDT. DDT and other insecticides helped
eradicate malaria in the United States and Europe, saving count-
less lives.
Today, insecticides are still our first line of defense against
West Nile virus and other diseases. It is callous and hypocriti-
cal for the United States to tell African and other malarial en-
demic nations that they cannot spray insecticides, when we use
aerial and ground spraying every day. Moreover, we spray insec-
ticides directly into the environment, whereas spraying for ma-
laria control only sprays insecticides inside houses. The USAID
once funded very effective indoor residual spraying programs
around the world. It can and must revive America's and the
world's once-proud anti-malaria programs. Used by trained spe-
cialists in indoor residual spraying programs, almost no DDT
gets into the environment. It's safe for humans, too. In its
latest review of DDT, the National Institute of Environmental
Health Sciences admits it cannot prove that DDT harms human
health. Indeed, about the worst thing opponents can say is that
"measurable quantities" of DDT are "present" in human fatty tis-
sue and mother's breast milk, and "could" inhibit lactation or
cause low birth weight babies. But these alleged problems are
all but irrelevant compared to the risk of losing hundreds of
thousands of children to malaria, year after year.
To a large extent, Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring
launched the modern environmental movement and inspired the US
EPA's 1972 domestic ban of DDT. That US ban has since then ex-
panded into a de facto global ban on its use. Carson's facts,
however, were wrong.10 Extensive hearings on DDT before an EPA
administrative law judge occurred during 1971-1972. The EPA
hearing examiner, Judge Edmund Sweeney, concluded that "DDT is
not a carcinogenic hazard to man... DDT is not a mutagenic or
teratogenic hazard to man... The use of DDT under the 17 regula-
tions involved here does not have a deleterious effect on fresh-
water fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wild-
life."11 Overruling the EPA hearing examiner, EPA Administrator
William Ruckelshaus banned DDT in 1972. Ruckelshaus never at-
tended a single hour of the seven months of EPA hearings on DDT.
His aides reported that he did not even read the transcript of
the EPA hearings on DDT. 12 How could this have happened? Be-
cause banning DDT was a political, not a scientific, decision.
And its author was President Richard M. Nixon. "On February 10,
1970 he announced: 'we have taken action to phase out the use of
DDT and other hard pesticides.' In December 1970, the admini-
stration created the EPA to implement executive environmental
policy. As a 1975 study out of Northern Illinois University
notes, 'This is important. Long before the EPA hearings were
convened and even before the EPA was created, Ruckelshaus' boss,
President Nixon, had stated that DDT was being phased out. This
leaves the hearings themselves superfluous, satisfying only a
court requirement.'"13 The DDT ban by EPA was followed by a
USAID and WHO shift away from killing mosquitoes and toward
other methods of malaria control (drug treatments, mosquito nets
and more nebulous notions like "capacity building" and "inte-
grated vector management"). However, these methods have not
proven even remotely as effective as indoor residual spraying
and other pesticide programs.14
A now debunked, odiously Malthusian population control logic
also supported the de facto DDT ban in Africa and other poor re-
gions. A USAID official reportedly said of those whom malaria
would kill as a result, "Rather dead than alive and riotously
reproducing." Others have made similar statements.15 Physician-
author-medical researcher Michael Crichton has said the de facto
ban on DDT to control malaria "has killed more people than Hit-
ler."16 This is all the more tragic because, in the nearly half-
century since Silent Spring was written, no connection between
DDT and cancer, birth defects or any other human malady has ever
been scientifically demonstrated. The only documented environ-
mental effects of residual DDT are possible reproductive harms
to raptors, including thinning of their eggshells, and even
these have not been demonstrated conclusively.17 DDT junk sci-
ence drove the world to the brink of imposing a universal ban on
DDT via the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollut-
ants (POPS). The convention, known as the POPs Treaty, would
have made the de facto ban legally binding and permanent. How-
ever, conscientious scientists and public health officials ral-
lied to carve out a "DDT exemption" in the treaty. That exemp-
tion: 1) restricts DDT use and production to disease vector
(e.g. mosquito) control only and does not permit the insecti-
cide's renewed use for agriculture; 2) requires that countries
using DDT must follow WHO guidelines for disease/vector control;
3) requires that countries notify the WHO if they use DDT; 4)
requires that rich countries pay the "agreed incremental costs"
of more expensive alternatives to DDT (this is located elsewhere
in the treaty); and 5) encourages rich countries to support re-
search and development of alternatives to DDT. What the treaty
does NOT require is equally important. 1) It does NOT require
that a country notify WHO before it sprays DDT; thus, in an epi-
demic, a country may spray first and report to the WHO later. 18
2) It does NOT require that a country obtain the WHO's approval
at any time. 3) It does NOT require that poor countries bear the
added cost of alternatives to DDT. 4) It does NOT set a deadline
by which countries must stop using or producing DDT. 5) It does
NOT restrict DDT use to malaria control, but allows its use for
controlling any vectorborne disease.18
And yet, environmental imperialist ideology and inertia inside
US-funded aid agencies keep ensuring the deaths of millions each
year: USAID spent $80 million on malaria in 2004, but not a dime
of it actually purchased insecticides and only $4 million may
have gone toward promoting or buying insecticide-treated bed
nets. Most was spent on conferences, consultants and training
programs.19 Overall, the world spends about $400 million a year
in connection with malaria, most of it US money. Almost none of
it is actually spent on killing and repelling mosquitoes. Al-
though signed in 2001 by the Bush Administration, the POPS
treaty has not yet been ratified by the United States Senate.
Ratification, if it occurs at all, should be conditioned on
prior legislation tying US aid monies to DDT deployment for
killing and repelling malarial mosquitoes.
Even big media have seen the light on DDT. In recent years, the
New York Times, Washington Times, Newsweek, Forbes, Wall Street
Journal, Chicago Sun-Times and other papers have run editorials
strongly advocating the use of DDT to control mosquitoes and re-
duce malaria. The New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, Time,
Washington Monthly, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor
and numerous other periodicals have carried articles and opinion
columns advocating expanded DDT use to combat malaria and save
lives. Even some Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund officials
have conceded the life-saving need for DDT. "If alternatives to
DDT aren't working, you've got to use it. If there's nothing
else and it's going to save lives, we're all for it," their
spokesmen have said.20
DDT proponents advocate it primarily for indoor residual spray-
ing on unpainted mud or cinderblock walls, which usually is the
most cost-effective way to kill/repel malarial mosquitoes. This
is akin to Americans spraying Raid insect killer on the walls of
their homes, though DDT application typically would not involve
aerosols and would have to occur far less often. With indoor
spraying, there is a vanishingly-small risk that DDT will even
reach the environment.
DDT opponents, however, downplay or ignore the undeniable dis-
ease, disability and death tolls that their anti-DDT policies
have wreaked in Africa and other malaria-endemic regions. They
falsely equate indoor residual spraying (IRS) with aerial spray-
ing which itself involves only hypothetical, unproven risk to
birds, and may be cost-effective and appropriate (whatever the
insecticide) in swampy areas near population centers. They ele-
vate minor hypothetical environmental risks from pesticides over
major, very real human risks that those pesticides would reduce
or eliminate. DDT opponents ignore the fact that Dade County,
Florida and numerous other U.S. communities routinely spray in-
secticides to control mosquitoes and other insects that carry
far less lethal diseases, like West Nile virus, or simply prove
irksome to residents and tourists. They refuse to acknowledge
that, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the US government
sprayed much of the flooded and devastated areas with insecti-
cides, to halt the spread of insect-borne diseases. DDT oppo-
nents choose birds over little boys and girls, in a false di-
chotomy that requires the sacrifice of neither. They advocate
the development and distribution of vaccines, bed nets and
treatment drugs, plus the implementation of sanitation and other
programs. But these interventions will likely take 19 decades to
become effective, if they ever do so and during that time ma-
laria will needlessly slaughter millions more people, who would
live if their countries could acquire and deploy DDT and other
pesticides now.
We recognize that achieving our objective may require aggressive
and public discrediting of these institutional opponents of DDT
for IRS who may, even now, be willing to sacrifice the lives
of countless millions of men, women and children in Africa and
on other continents, before the altar of junk science, nature
worship and callous eco-imperialism. We will not hesitate to ex-
pose these organizations or the individuals who set their poli-
cies. Deploying DDT in developing countries is good for the
United States. Cutting malaria and other mosquito-borne disease
rates: (1) permits strides in education, individual productivity
and economic growth in Africa and elsewhere reducing foreign
aid claims on U.S. politicians and taxpayers; (2) eliminates or
quells the kinds of misery and non-productivity that often un-
derlie regional unrest and result in requests for US military
intervention, and (3) diminishes the ever-present danger of out-
breaks, and even pandemics, of exotic, insect-borne diseases in
the United States as a result of global travel by infected per-
sons.
Probably no other single action by the United States has the po-
tential for saving more lives, reducing or eliminating more dis-
ease, curtailing more human misery, and promoting greater devel-
opment and prosperity than support for DDT use to control ma-
laria. Adding this insecticide to the world's disease control
arsenal, by compelling USAID and other aid and healthcare agen-
cies to support its use, would arguably be the greatest single
humanitarian and human rights action taken in the past quarter
century. Its potential for changing world perceptions about the
United States is likewise extensive. By contrast, failing to
Kill or Repel Malarial Mosquitoes NOW will clearly and inevita-
bly result in the needless sickness of billions of children and
parents in Africa and other malaria endemic regions of the world
and the needless deaths of millions. It will be seen by the
world as a callous continuation of a DDT ban that Michael Crich-
ton properly called "one of the most disgraceful episodes of the
twentieth century history of America." It is fraudulent science,
incompetence and adamant refusal to face reality rather than
deliberate, calculated murder that has spawned and perpetuated
this slaughter. But the death toll equals or exceeds that of the
Holocaust (6 million men, women and children) every five years.
Since the ban on DDT was first implemented, the body count has
surpassed that of all World War II. People of compassion and
conscience simply cannot permit the slaughter of innocents to
continue. We know we can safely use DDT and other insecticides
to save lives through humanitarian and environmentally sound
programs. We must muster the moral clarity and political will-
power to do so NOW. 20
References:
1 However, insecticides/repellants other than DDT are contem-
plated herein for outdoor or indoor applications, including ro-
tation with DDT for IRS, if adjudged most cost-effective for ma-
laria control by national health administrators for any given
country.
2 Testimony of Dr. Anne Peterson, Assistant Administrator for
Global Health, USAID, before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on
East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Committee on Foreign Relations,
October 6, 2004.
3 Murru, Maurizio, "Malaria and DDT: Myths and Facts, Health
Policy and Development, Vol. 2, No. 2, August 2004.
4 Ibid. See also Roger Bate and Richard Tren, Malaria and the
DDT Story, Institute of Economic Affairs (2003),
http://www.iea.org.uk and Roger Bate, "The Blind Hydra: USAID
policy fails to control malaria," testimony before the United
States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Af-
fairs, Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government
Information & International Security, May 12, 2005.
5 WHO, Fact Sheet on Malaria, http://www.who.int
6 See The Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2005 (editorial): "The
brainchild of Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, the Consensus
is an attempt by leading economists (including three Nobel Prize
Laureates) to set priorities for spending on development using
traditional cost-benefit analysis. 'We need to know what we
should do first,' says Mr. Lomborg. 'Not being willing to pri-
oritize does not make the problem go away: It simply becomes
less clear and, most likely, more expensive to solve in the
end.'" In a responsive June 21, 2005 letter to the editor of the
same periodical, physician James Horton said that malarial "dis-
ease control was crucial to the rise of the [American] South.
The lesson from Southern history is that Third World economies
improve when we address the burdens of diseases like malaria."
7 See Richard Tren and Roger Bate, "South Africa's War on Ma-
laria" Policy Analysis No. 513, March 25, 2004, Cato Institute,
Washington DC; Gautam Naik, "Novartis drug shows promise against
malaria," Wall Street Journal, October 3, 2005 ("Malaria infec-
tions and deaths plunged 96% in a three-year period," Naik
noted, when South Africa combined new Artemisin-based drugs with
DDT indoor spraying in KwaZulu-Natal Province, a region the size
of Indiana.)
8 See Karen Barnes, David Durrheim, et al., "Effect of Arte-
mether-Lumefantrine policy and improved vector control on ma-
laria burden in KwaZuluNatal, South Africa," PLoS Medicine
(Public Library of Science), Volume 2, Issue 11, November 2005;
http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-
document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020330
9 See http://www.who.int/malaria/docs/FAQonDDT.pdf
10 For example, Carson claimed "exposure to DDT, even when doing
no observable harm to birds, may seriously affect reproduction.
Quail into whose diet DDT was introduced throughout the breeding
season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile
eggs. But few of the eggs hatched." In fact, the Journal of Ag-
riculture and Food Chemistry study she cited actually determined
that, when birds were fed high doses of DDT throughout their
breeding season, 80% of the quail eggs hatched (compared with
"control" birds that were fed no DDT and hatched 84% of their
eggs), and more than 80% of pheasant eggs hatched (compared with
"control" birds that hatched only 57% of their eggs). See Ed-
wards, J. Gordon, "DDT: A case study in scientific fraud," Jour-
nal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Vol. 9, No. 3, Fall
2004; http://www.jpands.org/vol9no3/edwards.pdf; Alexander
Gourevitch, "Better Living Through Chemistry: DDT could save
millions of Africans from dying of malaria if only environmen-
talists would let it," Washington Monthly, March 2003; Tina
Rosenberg, "What the world needs now is DDT," New York Times
Magazine, April 10, 2004.
11 Sweeney, EM. 1972. EPA Hearing Examiner's recommendations and
findings concerning DDT hearings, April 25, 1972 (40 CFR 164.32,
113 pages). Summarized in Barrons (May 1, 1972), The Oregonian
(April 26, 1972) and J. Gordon Edwards (op. cit.). But in 1970,
then Assistant US Attorney General Ruckelshaus said: "DDT is not
endangering the public health and has an amazing and exemplary
record of safe use. DDT, when properly used at recommended con-
centrations, does not cause a toxic response in man or other
mammals and is not harmful. The carcinogenic claims regarding
DDT are unproved speculation."
12 Santa Ana Register, April 25, 1972 and Edwards.
13 Bate, Roger, "The Worst Thing Richard Nixon Ever Did,"
4/15/2004 at http://www.techcentralstation.com/041504I.html
14 See Donald Roberts, Professor of Tropical Medicine, Uniformed
Services University of the Health Sciences (Bethesda, MD), tes-
timony before U.S. Senate Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific
Affairs, Committee on Foreign Relations, October 6, 2004.
15 Desowitz, R.S., Malaria Capers, W.W. Norton Company, 1992.
Jacques Cousteau told Nouvelle Observateur, "In order to stabi-
lize world populations, we must eliminate 350,000 people a day."
Asked whether banning DDT would result in more deaths from dis-
ease, Environmental Defense Fund scientist Charles Wurster once
said, "People are the cause of all the problems. We need to get
rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any." Club of
Rome director Alexander King wrote in The Discipline of Curios-
ity, "My chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it greatly
added to the population problem." Sierra Club director Michael
McCloskey opined, "By using DDT, we reduce mortality rates in
underdeveloped countries, without the consideration of how to
support the increase in populations."
16 In a 2003 speech to the San Francisco Commonwealth Club,
Crichton said: "Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful epi-
sodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew bet-
ter, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world
die, and we didn't give a damn."
17 Further details on the faulty science behind claims against
DDT can be found on CATO Institute adjunct scholar Steven Mil-
loy's website: http://junkscience.com/ddtfaq.htm
18 Attaran, Amir, Malaria Foundation International website, at
http://www.malaria.org/DDTpage.html .
19 Bate, Roger, "The Blind Hydra," testimony before U.S. Senate
Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Infor-
mation & International Security, May 12, 2005.
20 Kristof, Nicholas, "It's time to spray DDT," New York Times,
January 8, 2005.