Well, 2010 is nearly gone and, instead of eradication, we have more malaria than before … and a new target date: 2015. We will eradicate malaria by 2010, stricken families were promised a few years ago. This author Paul Dreissen states the case for the use of DDT quite well. DDT is used in Africa and Asia, but no one with any sense uses it to eradicate malaria - DDT screwed up that chance 50 years ago. There is no good case to be made that more DDT could provide any benefit.ĭDT is still manufactured in astonishing quantity in North Korea, for one. Malaria death rates are the lowest they have been in human history. Why use a poison that is not very effective, but very deadly, when there are better alternatives available? This sets the stage for mosquitoes to come roaring back, with all the natural checks on mosquito population out of commission. There are studies that show DDT is also weakly repellent, but there are better, less-toxic repellents, and there is no reason to use something so deadly to all other creatures in the ecosystem to get a weak repellent effect.īecause of the biomagnification, DDT kills the predators of mosquitoes much more effectively, and for a much longer period, than it kills mosquitoes. Where once it killed them dead, they have developed immunity, and now digest the stuff as if it were food. DDT is not harmless to people at all - it is just not acutely toxic, generally.įifth, as I note above, DDT is no longer highly effective in controlling mosquitoes. (There are a couple of studies done on plant-eating birds which showed that the chicks did not die before hatching - they died shortly after hatching.)ĭDT is astoundingly effective at screwing up the reproduction of birds.įourth, studies show that humans exposed to DDT rarely get an acutely toxic dose, but that their children get screwed up reproductive systems, and there is a definite link from DDT exposure to the children of the mother - the cancer goes to the next generation. If by some miracle the chick does not die from acute DDT poisoning, the eggshells produced by a DDT-tainted female bird are often too thin to survive the growth of the embryo - either way the chicks die. DDT in the egg kills the chick before it can fledge from the nest, often before it can hatch.
If the dose is sub-lethal, it screws up the reproduction of the bird. By the time an insect or crustacean-eating bird gets the critter, the dose is millions of times stronger, often to fatal levels for the bird. The next level of consumers get about a ten-times dose from what was sprayed, and that multiplies exponentially as other creatures consume the lower-level consumers. A minimal dose of DDT to kill mosqsuito larva in an estuary, for example, multiples many times as zooplankton and the mosquito larva soak it up. Third, all serious studies indicate that DDT greatly affects environment, with doses of the stuff multiplying from application through the top of the trophic levels in the ecosystem. WHO had to fall back to a malaria control position, because pro-DDT groups sprayed far too much of the stuff, in far to many places, mostly outside. DDT simply is not the effective pesticide it once was, and for the WHO project to eradicate malaria, this problem was the death knell. Unfortunately, overuse of DDT by agricultural interests, in the early 1960s, bred mosquitoes that are resitant and immune to DDT. If someone told you DDT is not being used, they erred. DDT is in use right now by the World Health Organization (WHO) and at least five nations in Africa who have malaria problems.
Second, DDT has never been out of use in Africa since 1946, nor in Asia. Beating malaria is possible with discipline, accurate information, and sustained effort. DDT was not available for use for another seven years.Įarlier we had defeated malaria and yellow fever in Panama, during the construction of the Panama Canal - long before any insecticide existed.
By 1939, malaria was essentially eliminated from the U.S.
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We worked for 30 years to improve medical care, beef up the Public Health Service and county public health officers, educate people on how to drain mosquito breeding areas near their homes, be certain people with malari were fully treated to a cure, and to raise incomes to improve housing so that people could live in a home where mosquitoes could not enter at night (the times malaria-carrying mosquitoes bite). First, DDT was not the weapon that eradicated malaria in the U.S.
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