Book urges reversal of DDT ban to fight millions of malaria deaths

[dale]

By Tim Cocks
ABIDJAN, April 21 (Reuters) - Six years after the insect killer DDT was globally outlawed on grounds of environmental damage, two researchers say there are new reasons for doubting the chemical is harmful and are urging its use against malaria.

In a book launched on Wednesday, Donald Roberts, professor of tropical medicine at the U.S. military's Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences, and Richard Tren, head of the pro-DDT lobby group Africa Fighting Malaria, argue that DDT is today the only effective weapon against the deadly mosquito-borne parasite.

DDT's unprecedented power to kill insects won its inventor a Nobel prize in the 1940s and it was considered a wonder chemical until evidence emerged of its toxicity to wildlife and people, leading Western nations to ban it in the 1970s.

A treaty to forbid its use worldwide along with a dozen other industrial chemicals came into effect in 2004, but some countries like South Africa and Ethiopia still take advantage of tightly limited exemptions allowing indoor spraying.

Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloromethylmethane (DDT) has been blamed for birth defects in humans and threatening endangered birds such as the bald eagle by thinning their egg shells.

"There are an almost endless list of claims that DDT causes one kind of harm or another but ... with each claim, the evidence that the DDT is the cause is simply not there," Roberts told Reuters in a telephone interview. "The Excellent Powder" claims new evidence shows DDT is harmless because it is similar to organic chemicals found in nature that animal life can deal with.

The book also tackles the issue of resistance to the poison, saying DDT is a good repellent, not just killer, of mosquitoes.

Malaria kills roughly a million children a year, mostly in Africa, according to the World Health Organisation.

In the humid, tropical West African nation of Ivory Coast, malaria kills 176 children under five each day, the government's top malaria official, Dr Sam Koffi Moise, told Reuters.

...

"Millions of malaria deaths ... occurred during ... decades of environmental activism (against) DDT," the book concludes.

Tren, a free market lobbyist who has also criticised tobacco control, said bird species harmed by DDT were already under threat and that DDT was "a minor source of harm compared to the hunting, shooting, poisoning and land use changes".

[jeanne]

Maybe this idiot should be "treated" with ddt to see how harmless it is. 

[Annette]

Not again. 

[jeanne]

It is another example of a dumb, destructive person writing something.  A year or so ago, some guy wrote that since pandas are endangered, the costs to increase their survival are so great and their reproductive rate so minimal, that they should be allowed to die off.