Save malaria now

By Kenneth Smith Copyright 1999 The Washington Times September 2, 1999

The National Academy of Sciences called it the greatest chemical ever discovered, a lifesaver for 500 million people whose deaths were otherwise inevitable. And environmentalists want to make sure the world can never use it again.

The chemical is DDT. Though it is banned here in the United States as a possible threat to man and animals, public health authorities around the world have been using it for years to control the mosquito that carries the dreaded malaria parasite. The disease already kills some 2.7 million people and afflicts half a billion annually - about 90 percent of them children and pregnant women - and it could get much worse. Next week United Nations diplomats are scheduled to gather in Geneva to vote on a treaty that would ban alleged pollutants, among them DDT, by 2007.

Pushing hard for the ban are the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and other environmental activists who argue that even trace exposures to the chemical can cause cancer and disrupt human hormones. On the other side are the Malaria Foundation and some 370 medical researchers, including three Nobel Prize winners from 57 countries who consider the proposed ban an exercise in Third World population control rather than healthy public policy.

In an open letter to U.N. negotiators, they accuse the WWF of "surprisingly blatant" distortion of the debate by its selective use of scientific findings. For example, the WWF cites studies linking breast cancer to exposure to DDT and other chemicals. But when the medical researchers went back to look at the studies, they found that one actually concluded just the opposite, that is, the "data do not support the hypothesis that exposure . . . increases risk of breast cancer." Environmentalists are misleading the world about the real risk here. "It would be ironic indeed if in running from the bogeyman of these speculative health risks," the open letter says, "we banned DDT and ran directly into the familiar and deadly hands of malaria."

Just how familiar and how deadly the developed world has largely forgotten thanks to a combination of eradication efforts and general migration away from those mosquito incubators known as wetlands. But for peoples who can't afford a mosquito net much less a townhouse, malaria is a genocidal tyrant on a scale beyond anything, say, a Hitler or even Stalin could comprehend. Partly that's because of the size of its army. Four different parasites carried by 35 species of mosquitoes - flying syringes, some call them - can infect humans. Once injected inside, the parasites slip past the body's unwitting defenders and regroup in the liver, gathering their strength and multiplying until finally they launch back into the blood system, gorging themselves on red blood cells and debilitating, even killing their human host within a matter of hours. Wrote Ellen Ruppel Shell in the Atlantic magazine two years ago: "I have seen greatly enlarged photographs of malaria parasites pouring from the ghostly white hulks of dead blood cells, like soldiers fleeing a scorched-earth spree, and the sight is frightening."

There is no vaccine against malaria. It evolves and mutates, hiding like a sci-fi villain, making it hard for a vaccine to find, much less attack. It's true that the disease is treatable in most cases, but after a while the malaria parasite develops a resistance to drugs. The result is that in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, the malaria researchers say, the disease destroys 70 percent more years of life than do all cancers in all developed countries combined.

Faced with so formidable a foe, researchers continue their hunt for the vaccine. But in the meantime, public health officials decided that if they couldn't beat the parasite, they would take on the mosquito. Armed with DDT, they discovered that by spraying the interior walls of huts twice a year, they could kill or at least deter the female mosquito carrying the parasite before she could plant her deadly kiss. And for a while that approach worked. The number of malaria cases around the world fell sharply. Researchers wondered if the disease might go the way of smallpox.

Then came a woman named Rachel Carson. In an apocalyptic book titled "Silent Spring," she predicted that man would destroy the Earth, chiefly through the use of sinister, profit-making pesticides like DDT, which would essentially poison the food chain. At its heart, the book was a religious, rather than scientific, tract whose premise was a creationist myth: Man had eaten of the forbidden tree of technology, and for that he would lose his access card to Eden, a gated community; he gets the card back when he gets rid of DDT and other pesticides. The book helped bring about the U.S. ban on the chemical.

Well, the Africans live (in a manner of speaking) in this version of paradise, and they're dying to get out. It has been a very silent spring for the tens of millions of people who have died of malaria.

"Malaria keeps Africa down, and down is where the rest of the world wants us to be," a medical editor in Senegal told the Atlantic. "If this was a disease of the West, it would be gone." Several Western scientists even told the magazine that population control, not disease control, is the central mission of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Africa. Said one scientist, "I'd rather die of malaria than of starvation."

There's no need for such a choice. There was no evidence at the time DDT was banned in the early '70s, and there is no evidence now that when used as directed the chemical posed a serious human health threat. Nor is it clear that its use had anything to do with declines in certain bird species, many of which had been having problems long before the advent of DDT. Why then deny the Third World access to a cheap, effective pesticide for which there is no substitute?

DDT, editorialized the British Medical Journal in 1969, "has incontrovertibly been shown to prevent human illness on a scale hitherto achieved by no other public health measure entailing the use of a chemical." Who now wants to save malaria from it?

Kenneth Smith is deputy editor of The Washington Times editorial page.His column runs on Thursday.

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