Net Gains
By Jessie Stone [Bracketed bold comments by JunkScience.com]
Kyabirwa, Uganda
To many of us in the malaria-control business, it came as no great surprise last week when the World Health Organization recommended wider use of DDT in Africa to combat the mosquitoes that cause the disease, which kills more than a million people a year, most of them children in Africa.
The W.H.O.’s endorsement of DDT for spraying inside houses has the support of Congress and the Bush administration. With the W.H.O.’s encouragement, several African nations have approved DDT for use in indoor residual spraying (that is, spraying the walls of huts to kill the mosquitoes that wait there until dark). Uganda’s Ministry of Health and National Malaria Control Program, for example, have embraced this approach. Newspaper articles across Africa have assured readers that DDT has gotten a bad rap and is, in fact, safe for use.
But people have short memories. Doesn’t anyone remember the American bald eagle? DDT brought it to the brink of extinction. In part because of that, the use of DDT was banned in 1972. [Three points to make here. First, the bald eagle was on the verge of extinction decades before DDT was used in the U.S. Bald eagle populations began rebounding during the period of greatest DDT use. No experiments show that environmental levels of DDT endanger birds or thin egg shells. Second, precisely what kind of physician would equate North American bald eagles with African children? Third, DDT was banned because the EPA administrator at the Time, William Ruckleshaus, was sympathetic to the activist group urging the ban, the Environmental Defense Fund. Without explaining his decision, Ruckleshaus overruled the EPA administrative law judge who sat through 7 months and 9,000 pages of testimony and concluded that DDT posed no threat to humans or the environment] (The Department of Health and Human Services, the International Agency for Research on Cancer and the Environmental Protection Agency have all listed DDT and its breakdown products, DDE and DDD, as possible carcinogens.) [There is absolutely no evidence that DDT causes cancer in humans. Claims that DDT is a possible carcinogen are based on laboratory animal studies where already cancer-prone rats are literally poisoned with impossibly high doses of chemicals. These studies are not relevant to humans or the real world.]
DDT is a persistent organic compound and can remain in the environment long after its initial use, [That’s why one reason it works so well] entering the food chain and accumulating in fatty tissue [Such tiny accumulation is not toxic]. Even when the United States instituted spraying in 2000 to kill the mosquitoes that carry West Nile virus, it didn’t use DDT. [That’s because DDT was banned in 1972.]
Although DDT helped eliminate malarial mosquitoes in South Africa, the case was unique — that type of malaria was directly related to the length and intensity of the rainy season, when malarial mosquitoes are active — and we still don’t know the broader impact of its use there. [This is just fearmongering. DDT was used to eradicate malaria in North America and Western Europe with no adverse side effects.] In the African countries where the burden of malaria is greatest, the disease is endemic. Uganda, where it rains throughout the year, could not be more different from South Africa in terms of malaria, and it is a mistake to apply the same formula here. The use of DDT for indoor residual spraying will not produce the same results and will almost certainly have dire consequences. [Indoor use of DDT will help some. Outdoor use would help more. Economic development coupled with political reform would help the most.]
And spraying is costly. [DDT is the cheapest insecticide available. That along with its efficacy and safety are what made it so popular for almost 30 years.] This year in Kabale, in southwestern Uganda, 100,000 huts were sprayed as part of an indoor spraying project. A permethrin derivative, not DDT, was used and the spraying was controlled and safe. The cost was close to $2 million. [Permethrins don’t last as long as DDT, so spraying must be done more frequently.] Uganda has a population of 28 million, with 7 people on average to a hut. Any comprehensive, nationwide spraying effort would have to reach some four million huts, costing more than $80 million, and that’s only for the first of several rounds of spraying. [Hmmm… with about 4 million huts, it looks like it costs $20 per hut to spray insecticide, according to Stone’s figures. The major cost is the labor of spraying, which is the same for Permethrins as DDT. But DDT is cheaper than Permethrin, lasts longer and requires less frequent spraying.] With Uganda’s resources already overburdened, it makes little sense to embrace an approach that is exceedingly costly from fiscal, human and environmental standpoints. [DDT is less expensive, more effective and safe than Permethrin.]
In Uganda, where I run a malaria education, prevention and treatment program, the most effective weapon against the disease is basic education about how people contract it and how they can protect themselves. [I suppose you call this being “educated to death.”]
For instance, insecticide-treated bed nets can reduce the incidence of malaria by at least 50 percent and perhaps as much as 90 percent. [Nets haven’t worked so far, hence the high death toll from malaria.] Combination-drug therapy along with targeted non-DDT spraying inside huts will also be effective in controlling malaria. [Drug therapy hasn’t worked either.]
DDT is not the magic bullet that will eradicate malaria. We need to refocus resources and attention on something most Africans do not have: basic malaria education, and prevention with insecticide-treated bed nets. [Africans need DDT, economic development and political reform, not quack advice from wide-eyed Western eco-imperialists.] A mosquito net costs $6.50 and can last up to five years. An average of three people can sleep under it, [that sounds practical] and the only harmful effect we have heard about, after having distributed 11,000 nets in the Kamuli, Jinja and Kayung districts over the last two years, is people being hot at night. [If bednets are uncomfortable, they won’t be used correctly or at all.]
We do not have to reinvent the wheel here. We just have to help educate people — even those with the best intentions. [Stone should be unceremoniously booted out of Africa.]
Jessie Stone, a medical doctor, is the founder and director of Soft Power Health, a nonprofit organization in Uganda
[Finally, in my last FoxNews.com, entitled “Day of Reckoning for DDT Foes,” I inadvertently omitted the New York Times from the list of groups that ought to be held accountable for their crimes against humanity with respect to DDT and malaria. The Times was found guilty by a jury for libeling scientists who defended DDT in the 1970s. The apparent reason that an appellate judge reversed the verdict was because the judge was personal friends with Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. For the full story see the book “Silencing Science,” copies of which are available to supporters of JunkScience.com.]
