The World Health Organization has approved the indoor residual spraying of the long banned pesticide DDT in an effort to avert one million deaths each year from malaria. This is, I think, long, long overdue.
"One of the best tools we have against malaria is indoor residual house spraying," said Dr. Arata Kochi, director of the World Health Organization (WHO) malaria department. "Of the dozen pesticides WHO has approved as safe for house spraying, the most effective is DDT."
For about $5 per house, indoor spraying with DDT is a cost-effective response to malaria, which kills about a million people annually, most of them children under five.
In parts of Africa and Asia where malaria-carrying mosquitoes spread the disease, 85 percent of home dwellers approached by health workers allow their houses to be sprayed, global health officials said at a news conference.
DDT came into common use in the 1930s as an agricultural insecticide. It became notorious after biologist and ecologist Rachel Carson's 1962 book "Silent Spring" exposed how DDT entered the food chain, killing wildlife and threatening humans.
This is not the widespread outdoor use that the chemical used to have. This is a very limited, indoor only campaign.
Richard Tren, director of the group Africa Fighting Malaria, stressed the difference between agricultural DDT sprayed outdoors and the residual spraying meant to act like a giant mosquito net over individual houses.
"The environmental impact associated with spraying insecticides — whether it's DDT or other insecticides — indoors is minimal, it's negligible … This is as unrelated to 'Silent Spring' as anything," Tren said. "The science is very clear that there are no harmful human effects."
Tren said environmental groups in Africa support its use.
Finally, even the Sierra Club has reluctantly embraced the use of this pesticide. It only took around 30 million deaths plus to reach this point.
Making Rachel Carson one the biggest mass murderers in history. In the thirty years since the wide spread banning of DDT no effective substitute has been found, while a lingering chemical no true level of toxicity has been determined, and the thining of eggshells still has not been proven as being a product solely of DDT.
As proponents of banning promised during the fight American agriculture really hasn’t been hurt by the ban. As predicted the costs of doing business went up, but as the Watermelons were told this was simply passed along. Nor was the effect on third world populations explored. Food costs more and they die in droves from malaria.
But then I’ve always suspected that most Greenies wouldn’t mind seeing the human race vanish.
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