Use of DDT would have started earlier, the article says, but for lack of money.
So, participants in the defense of wise environmental policy and Rachel Carson, against the scurrilous charges of junk science purveyors, should take note:
There is no ban on use of DDT against mosquitoes, in a serious, controlled program of integrated pest management.
No environmentalist is to blame for the lack of DDT use in Uganda (and probably elsewhere). As with anti-malaria programs worldwide, lack of funding or lack of organization generally is the reason for any lack of action against malaria.
A single quote (interestingly it was repeated in two of the communications I received) will indicate the response that bothers me: “Rachel Carson is responsible for more deaths than Pol Pot.” Sadly, that statement represents the carefully mounted and continuing attack on Carson.
DDT played an extremely important disease-controlling role in World War II, but consider the following:
• Its supporters credit DDT with eliminating malaria in this country but that disease was already largely gone here by 1939 when Hermann Mueller discovered that the chemical was lethal to insects.
• An international campaign led by Fred Soper to eliminate malaria through use of DDT that indeed saved thousands of lives had largely run out of steam by the early 1960s when “Silent Spring” was published. Mosquitoes were building up resistance and geographical factors particularly in African countries, made spraying extremely difficult. Between 1960 and 1989 deaths from malaria actually decreased when treatment shifted from insecticides to medicine.
• Carson never did call for banning DDT and other pesticides in “Silent Spring.” She wrote, “It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I contend that we have allowed these chemicals to be used with little or no advance investigation of their effect on soil, water, wildlife and man himself.”
• The 1972 Environmental Protection Agency ban of DDT in America was instituted 10 years after “Silent Spring” was published and eight years after the author’s death from cancer. Although Carson’s influence was evident, the act cites substantial scientific evidence of DDT’s adverse effects on wildlife and increased insect resistance.
• The focus of “Silent Spring” was on the indiscriminative use of insecticides for agricultural purposes, not on its use as a public health measure. Carson critics have made much of the World Health Organization’s 2006 approval of DDT, but that approval is “under strict control and only for indoor residual spraying,” thus exactly the kind of use Carson supported.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
[Time passes and internet links die, expire, or otherwise fall into the black hole of irrelevancy. Alas. Rachel Carson is still right.]
Sometimes, when people make gross errors, they get caught. They apologize, or they mumble, and they move on.
A few times, when people make gross errors, they revel in it. Rather than admit the error, they make it again. They say it wasn’t an error. They repeat it, time and again, as if two wrongs make a right, or as if 126 wrongs make a right.
Whoooee! This is the result. Note the list of unquestioning links to other stuff on the web. (Yeah. “Milton Fillmore.” Probably not reading comprehension error so much as rant-blindness.)
If there is anything crazy and mean about Rachel Carson, it’s probably in that list. If there is any wild and insane claim about the safety of DDT, it’s in that list. If there were any accurate information, it would be a miracle. (Well, actually there’s some good information in the National Geographic story about malaria, but I doubt the blog writer bothered to read it.) The blog links to all the Lyndon Larouche crazies, all the tobacco lobbyist crazies, and acts as if such manure is golden.
Very little of it is accurate. Most of the material so far out to lunch, it’s not even wrong. The person who runs the blog sent me an e-mail saying my comments are no longer welcome there, because of the tone of my remarks. Too many links to too much refutation of blog’s points, I gather — too much real information!
DDT poisoning clearly is damaging, with effects far beyond anything Rachel Carson ever predicted.
This is the venal, vicious spirit that Sen. Tom Coburn defends with his hold in the U.S. Senate on honors for Mrs. Carson. This is the spirit with which the anti-Rachel Carson movement rails at environmentalists about malaria in Africa, while holding back funding for anti-malaria projects in Africa.
Woody Allen had a line in Annie Hall that may be appropriate: “There’s nothing wrong with you that couldn’t be cured with Prozac and a polo mallet.”
Reason and evidence won’t do it now. When someone starts out arguing that eagles were not threatened with extinction by the poison that a thousand studies verified was doing them in, you can’t reason them back to reality.
Below the fold: At the second outlet of that blog, conversation carried for a while, though not necessarily so for enlightenment. In 2015, I thought it a good idea to capture some of that.
Paul Driessen wrote a book, Eco-Imperialism, that in essence blames environmentalists for every case of malaria in Africa since 1962. It is possible, that overreaction to environmental concerns by African governments and by Africans in the path of malaria parasites has indeed caused some delay in decreasing malaria infections. I have not seen any convincing evidence to make that case.
But it is untrue that environmentalists advocate policies intended to hurt Africans. It is untrue that DDT is a silver bullet that meanie environmentalists refuse to let African governments use — environmentalists do not have the power to tell African governments what the governments can or cannot do. Plus, it’s unfair to the point of gross distortion to blame environmentalists for the many problems which still exist that prevented the eradication of malaria 40 years ago and continue to frustrate efforts to reduce the frequency and mortality of the disease.
I assume Driessen is well-intentioned, though I have no first hand information about his motivations.
Driessen calls for an “all-out war on malaria.” That would be good.
But then he accuses environmentalists of standing in the way of such a war.
False blame calling cures not a single case of malaria, nor kills a single malaria-carrying mosquito. If Driessen wishes to fight malaria, there are a lot of people who would like to help. We can start to fight malaria, any time. [More after the fold.]
Cover of August 2008 Emerging Infectious Diseases from the CDC, featuring: Jan Steen (c. 1625–1679). Beware of Luxury (c. 1665). Oil on canvas 105 cm x 145 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria
Weighing risks against benefits for DDT spraying is very difficult. Anti-environmentalists and junk science purveyors claim millions of deaths from DDT’s not being sprayed.
They never tell us about the kids DDT could kill.
When we combine data from North America on preterm delivery or duration of lactation and DDE with African data on DDT spraying and the effect of preterm birth or lactation duration on infant deaths, we estimate an increase in infant deaths that is of the same order of magnitude as that from eliminating infant malaria. Therefore, the side effects of DDT spraying might reduce or abolish its benefit from the control of malaria in infants, even if such spraying prevents all infant deaths from malaria.
* * * * *
The prohibition of DDT use for malaria control was probably not the sole cause of increasing malaria burden in sub-Saharan Africa (40), and thus DDT will probably not be the sole cure for the malaria epidemic there. Insecticide-treated bed nets, widely used in African households to prevent mosquito bites, are effective (41,42). Synthetic pyrethroid insecticides, cheaper than DDT, are available (43,44). Where DDT is used, all infant deaths, plus birth weights and the duration of lactation, should be counted. Some thought could also be given to a formal trial, since the risk and benefit calculations apply to individual dwellings, and an effective alternative, namely bed nets, is available. (Chen A, Rogan WJ. Nonmalarial infant deaths and DDT use for malaria control. Emerg Infect Dis [serial online] 2003 Aug. Available from: URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3020610/)
Go read it — the issue of spraying or not is complex, and this study talks only about infant deaths (there may be greater life saving among older children and adults that would make the infant deaths a trade off policy makers would consider, for example). It’s a study from the Centers for Disease Control, part of a continuing series of technical publications from CDC titled Emerging Infectious Diseases. This series tracks much of the work done to fight malaria world wide.
This is valuable information. It shows the issue is much more complex that just “spray or don’t spray.” It’s also information that JunkScience.com hopes you will not pursue. It’s real information, and it refutes the junk science claims from that site.
A more clear image from Wikimedia Commons of Jan Steen’s painting, “Beware of Luxury.” Click on cover of journal at top of post for a discussion of this painting and how it relates to infectious diseases.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Cover of November 2007 Discover Magazine, featuring an article on DDT’s continuing use in the fight against malaria, and vindicating Rachel Carson’s research citations with regard to injuries to birds.
The article details how DDT is used in integrated vector management (IVM), where pesticides are sparingly and carefully used to prevent their target pests from evolving resistance and immunity. DDT’s abuse had bred widespread resistance in mosquito populations in Africa and other malaria-endemic locations, forcing the World Health Organization to abandon its ambitious program to eradicate malaria in a program dependent on DDT working for at least a year.
Steven Milloy and the Usual Suspects and Comrades in Junk Science, in the War on Science at AEI and CEI will start their distortions of the Discover article any moment now . . . three, two, one . . .
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
One of the clues that someone is financing a public relations campaign for DDT and against care for the environment is the way “news” keeps popping out about the benefits of DDT, though there is no natural process for making such news in back of the stories.
We old PR flacks recognize that without the push from an agent, these stories wouldn’t get written.
Just over a month ago there was a flurry of stories about how DDT was “effective” even after mosquitoes developed immunity to it, because it repels mosquitoes, too — even though that wasn’t what the researchers concluded, and that wasn’t the major thrust of the research article.
We also saw a Hoover Institute fellow call for DDT to be used to fight the spread of West Nile virus, though no public health official called for such action, though there is no particular need for such a drastic change in policy, and despite the fact that DDT spraying for the mosquitoes that carry West Nile is one of the least effective means of killing them (DDT is not a larvacide, and larvacides are called for to combat West Nile).
This month? No real news, but the American Enterprise Institute, which nominally is pitched at promoting business interests, issued a new report recycling all the old canards, calling for increased use of DDT in Africa to fight malaria, despite already expanded use, and despite a lack of call from health officials to spray more DDT.
Here’s how it looks on the internet:
November 5, 2007 – Wall Street Journal opinion piece by AEI’s Roger Bate, over the years one of the most ardent salesmen of DDT as the solution to nearly every problem, so long as it bashed environmentalists. WSJ notes the piece is a shorter version of the AEI report.
Evolution denier Ray Bohlin is in Liberia telling the Liberians their salvation lies with DDT, at least in fighting malaria. Wholly apart from the theological problems of elevating a chlorinated hydrocarbon killer to the level of idolic deity, DDT can’t solve the many problems that conspire to keep Liberia in the grip of DDT as a killer of children and pregnant women.
What an odd conflict of faith and science. Bohlin is a Christian. His strong faith in DDT is a double puzzle.
[And, what is it with all this denial? Creationist/IDist/evolution deniers tend heavily to be HIV deniers as well, and global warming deniers — now DDT deniers? Have they all had close encounters of the third kind, too? Is it a virus? Is it a cult?]
Fighting malaria in Africa requires a concentrated, integrated plan that provides appropriate medical care to cure any human who contracts malaria, thus breaking a key link in the malaria cycle. Malaria kills children under 5 and pregnant women in larger percentages than other people. Bohlin correctly notes that malaria kills, and that the disease disrupts the nation’s economy. But his recommendation that Liberians increase DDT use, in the absence of an integrated pest management plan, is a prescription for dashed hopes at best, and disaster at worst.
Bohlin seems to urge junk science. DDT offers significant dangers, which Bohlin seems blithely to ignore.
Why won’t DDT help much in the fight against malaria?
Wholly apart from the inherent problems of DDT — mosquitoes develop immunity, or already are immune; DDT kills beneficial insect and arachnid predators of malaria vectors, so the mosquitoes come back in geometrically increased numbers; DDT kills the food fish of people who live on fish; DDT kills reptile, mammal and bird predators of mosquitoes, so the mosquito population roars back with increased killing efficiency — DDT cannot solve the other problems that play a greater role in frustrating the fight against malaria. DDT doesn’t treat the disease once humans catch it; DDT is just one, small tool to prevent infection, and perhaps not the most effective. Read the rest of this entry »
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
3. Every “ban” on DDT, since the first in 1970 in Europe, has included an out clause to allow use to fight malaria. Crichton seems to have missed out on the facts: DDT ceased to be effective due to the rise of immunity and resistance in targeted mosquito populations, and DDT was never implemented against mosquitoes in other places, due to political reasons unrelated to any environmental concern.
4. DDT was never the panacea against malaria, since it does nothing to cure the disease in humans and it does nothing to fight the parasites themselves. DDT can’t make up for poverty that prevents people from building suitable homes or putting screens in windows, or buying mosquito netting for their children. DDT can’t work if people don’t drain mosquito breeding places around their homes.
5. Eggshell thinning studies were repeated dozenshundreds of times, and DDT and its daughter products are clearly implicated as the culprits in the fatal thinning of eggshells. It is telling that eggshell thicknesses have increased as DDT levels in residual form in tissues of birds has decreased. Crichton also omits more damning evidence: Studies showed that DDT affected the viability of eggs wholly apart from the eggshell problems. DDT kills chicks in the egg.
6. Malaria did not “explode” as a result of the discontinuation of DDT. Over more than a decade, malaria rates rose because the campaign to eradicate malaria aimed for an impossible goal, and overspraying of DDT and political instability hampered efforts to fight malaria. Moreover, DDT was never banned for use against malaria. In many nations where malaria exploded, DDT was the weapon of choice to fight it. DDT often doesn’t work. In Mexico, for example, DDT use was never stopped — DDT use has been constant since 1946. And yet, Mexico has been fighting an increase in malaria for over a decade. Only when Mexico adopted Rachel Carson’s recommendations did they begin to roll back the disease.
7. Crichton gets it right when he notes that the EPA “ban” on DDT included a waiver for use against malaria. But why does he forget that in every other paragraph?
9. 30 million people may have died of malaria in a period Crichton doesn’t define, but it is incorrect to say they died as a result of DDT bans. DDT was still used in the countries where many of those people died (DDT has been in constant use in Mexico since 1946, for example, and malaria has come roaring back there as in other places). DDT was never used in several African nations where governmental instability prevented the creation of programs to fight disease. DDT can’t change governments. The global effort to “eradicate” malaria smashed into the parasites’ development of immunity to several drugs used to treat it in humans. DDT has never been effective in those cases. Crichton misattributes the deaths. (It’s nice he doesn’t cite the more absurd 500 million deaths figure that some people point to.)
10. Crichton’s claim that a lot of Americans “just don’t care” about malaria in Africa, because it harms people of color, is an interesting claim, but his implication that those people are environmentalists, and not the Bush administration which held up funding for malaria fighting, makes his concerns smell hypocritical.
While indicting hysteria against DDT, Crichton invokes hysteria in favor of the chemical. One wishes his science views were not so clouded by his politics.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
DDT is still a deadly poison, and still not a panacea against malaria. It’s nice to see reason having sway, probably due to the efforts of the Gates Foundation and its allies.
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While the treatment of complicated malaria now requires a cocktail of sulphate drugs, Cameroon has reinstituted Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, DDT for the prevention of malaria transmission. The organic chemical, DDT, to which the malaria vector was formally thought to be resistant, has been recommended as an effective insecticide against mosquitoes. According the principal officer, “that DDT was kept out for a long time could have given room for mosquito’s resistibility to be naturally eradicated, hence, making it again a good insecticide.” The treatment and proper use of mosquito nets is being recommended as a preventive measure.
[Update, 2018: No one noticed I’d spelled “Cameroon” incorrectly?]
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WHO’s former malaria expert, John Litsios, notes that controlling malaria requires integrated programs, especially including overhaul of local health care delivery systems.
Copyrighted article from Resources for the future. “Chapter 17: Malaria Control and the Future of International Public Health,” in The Contextual Determinants of Malaria (Washington DC: Resources for the Future), Elizabeth Casman and Hadi Dowlatabadi, editors
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
DDT-obsessed politicos look for any opportunity to slam scientists and policy makers who urge caution about using the chemical. Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-Okla) unholy campaign against the memory of Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, is only Exhibit A in how the obsession skews public policy now.
In earlier posts I’ve warned that there will be calls for more DDT use, with reports of West Nile virus spreading this season. Winter is coming slowly to the American Midwest, so mosquitoes still crop up carrying the virus. Voodoo science and junk science advocates look for such opportunities to claim that we need to “bring back” DDT, ‘since the claims of harm have been found to be false.’
No public health official, no mosquito abatement official, has asked for DDT to fight West Nile virus, even as the virus infects humans across the nation. Nor has any harm of DDT been refuted (quite the opposite — we now know of more dangers).
A survey of the nation, in places where West Nile is a problem provides a good view of how West Nile virus is fought by public health and mosquito abatement officials. DDT is used in no case.
California, Bakersfield – Emergency funds from the governor’s office will be applied to educating the public on how to avoid mosquito bites. Education emphasizes “the three Ds,” which is “dusk and dawn, drainage, and DEET.” Bakersfield’s Fox 58 News. The local newspaper, The Bakersfield Californian details how the $364,834 will be spent, on education efforts including doorhanger flyers, and a campaign to drain mosquito breeding places around homes.
Illinois, Lake County – The first case for 2007 was confirmed in a 70-year-old man from Lake Zurich (compared to 11 cases in 2006). Lake County News-Sun online.
Mississippi, Jackson – The Jackson Clarion-Ledger reports 15 new cases of West Nile in humans across Mississippi. With 99 cases reported this year, the newspaper reports, “The Health Department encourages all Mississippians to take the following precautions to reduce the risk of contracting West Nile Virus and other mosquito-borne illnesses: remove sources of standing water, avoid mosquito-prone areas, especially between dusk and dawn when mosquitoes are most active; wear protective clothing (such as long-sleeved shirts and pants) when in mosquito-prone areas; and apply a mosquito repellent according to the manufacturer’s instructions.” No call for DDT.
While you’re at it, take a look at what LeisureGuy has to say about DDT and scaria. Then wander over to Townhall.com, and see what scaria really looks like, in a shameless column from Paul Driessen, the author of the anti-environmentalist screed Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death. According to Driessen, it appears that environmentalists have been biting Africans to spread malaria, not mosquitoes. He may exaggerate some.
West Nile virus is a great problem for people in the United States. No health official, mosquito abatement official, or anyone else in a position of responsibility, has called for DDT.
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Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
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