http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/4264030/DDT-is-safe-just-ask-the-professor-who-ate-it-for-40-years.html
By Terence Kealey
12:00AM BST 19 Jul 2001
THE World Health Organisation, Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, the
UN environmental programme and its development programme, USAID, and
almost all the other international representatives of the great and the
good now campaign against DDT.
But, perversely, the Third World still uses it. To those who believe
that America under George W Bush and his gas-guzzling,
permafrost-drilling accomplices is the source of all global pollution,
this Third World defection is disappointing. Where are the virtuous
blacks when we need them?
DDT was introduced as an insecticide during the 1940s. In Churchill's
words: "The excellent DDT powder has been found to yield astonishing
results against insects of all kinds, from lice to mosquitoes."
And astonishing they were. DDT was particularly effective against the
anopheles mosquito, which is the carrier of malaria, and people once
hoped that DDT would eradicate malaria worldwide. Consider Sri Lanka. In
1946, it had three million cases, but the introduction of DDT reduced
the numbers, by 1964, to only 29. In India, the numbers of malaria cases
fell from 75 million to around 50,000.
But, in 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the book that
launched the environmental movement. In that book, Carson showed how DDT
was imperilling wildlife, particularly predators at the top of the food
chain that accumulated the chemical in their fat and in their thinning
egg shells.
Within a decade, the developed countries had banned DDT, as did some
developing countries, to the detriment of their health. In Sri Lanka,
cases of malaria soon rose to 500,000. Worldwide, malaria has returned
with a vengeance, accounting annually for 300 million cases and, sadly,
one million deaths, mainly of children.
As the Third World now knows, there is no ready substitute for DDT. The
spraying of houses with DDT prevents malaria because most people are
infected after dusk as they sleep indoors. DDT permeates the walls of
buildings, and a single spray will provide indoor protection for months.
Other chemicals are available, but they are generally less effective,
shorter-acting and - most importantly for the Third World - more
expensive. And DDT is extraordinarily safe for humans. Prof Kenneth
Mellanby lectured on it for more than 40 years, and during each lecture
he would eat a pinch.
Nor need DDT imperil wildlife. The destruction that Carson described was
caused by the agricultural use of DDT as a mass insecticide in vast
quantities on crops. But the discriminating application of DDT indoors
involves only a tiny, contained, environmentally tolerable, reversible
fraction of the dose. That is why some international health (as opposed
to environmental) agencies, including Unicef, still support the
judicious use of DTT. Even the WHO is now softening its stance.
Malaria was once endemic in Britain. Cromwell died of it and both Pepys
and Shakespeare described it. Until the 1930s, it was still active in
Essex. But we are lucky in our frosty climate, which kills anopheles,
and we have eradicated the disease. Yet Greenpeace and other
environmental agencies resist the appropriate use of DDT in the tropics.
Politics has long bedevilled malaria. Its first effective cure was
quinine, which was discovered by Jesuit missionaries in South America
during the 1630s, but for decades Protestants preferred to die rather
than swallow "Jesuit's Powder". Today, Third World health is endangered
by comfortable Western environmentalists, some of whom, discreetly, view
black natives as threats to the local wildlife.
Supporting those black natives, however, are two researchers, Richard
Tren and Roger Bate, whose Malaria and the DDT Story, recently published
by the Institute for Economic Affairs in London, shows how to foster
both a healthier and an environmentally friendlier Third World.
Greenpeace, in its self-assurance, embodies a contemporary cultural
imperialism as offensive as any Jesuit's.
* The author is the vice-chancellor of Buckingham University
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