This is good news as millions have died because of the mistaken stoppage of using the most effective weapon in the war against malaria.
An excerpt.
Tina Rosenberg: Fighting malaria with DDT
By Tina Rosenberg - Published 12:00 am PDT Friday, October 6, 2006
Of all the wars in Africa, the most deadly is between humans and mosquitoes. More than a million Africans die of malaria every year, the vast majority of them small children. Malaria shrinks the economies of countries where it is endemic by 20 percent over 15 years. One reason the mosquitoes are winning is that the world had essentially discarded its single most effective weapon, DDT.
But Washington recently resumed financing the use of DDT overseas, and the dynamic new malaria chief of the World Health Organization, Arata Kochi, has said that the WHO, too, endorses widespread indoor house spraying with DDT.
This is excellent news for the humans in Africa. DDT both repels mosquitoes and kills them. It is the cheapest, longest lasting and most effective insecticide, and it will not threaten the ecosystem.
Unlike in the past, DDT will now be sprayed inside houses once or twice a year in minute amounts.
DDT was the most important insecticide in the eradication of malaria in the United States, and in malaria control in southern Europe, Asia and Latin America. With DDT, malaria cases in Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, dropped from 2.8 million in 1946 to 17 in 1963.
But Rachel Carson's 1962 book "Silent Spring" documented how DDT, sprayed over crops and over cities, built up in the ecosystem, killing birds and fish. William Ruckleshaus, the first head of the Environmental Protection Agency, banned DDT in 1972 for all but emergencies.
This was the right decision -- for the United States. Malaria was no longer an issue, and Washington needed to ensure that it would not be used on crops. But the decision had deadly consequences overseas.
"If I were a decision maker in Sri Lanka, where the benefits from use outweigh the risks, I would decide differently," Ruckleshaus told me in 2004. "It's not up to us to balance risks and benefits for other people."
