De-Demonizing DDT
In 2001 & 2004, I, the Pittsburgh Trib and later the NY Times called for the careful use of DDT to wipe out the scourge of deadly malaria that continues in poor countries.
I wrote my small quota of in-house editorials for the conservative/libertarian Pittsburgh Trib between 2000 and 2009. This one from 2001, one of my favorites, stuck up for DDT, the politically disgraced super-chemical that rich and healthy countries outlawed for use in the poor and sick parts of the Third World in the early 1970s — after they had used it for 30 years to eradicate the scourge of malaria in the First World. Three years later the New York Times editorial page caught up with the Trib’s progressive position. Today cases of malaria are being reported in the USA for the first time in 20 years.
Here’s my editorial and a column I wrote later, which began, “God bless the New York Times.”
The editorial:
June 21, 2001
The buzz - use DDT
Bzzzzzz … splat.
That was the sound of one mosquito dying.
Using the palm of your hand is one way to kill a pesky mosquito.
A more efficient — but illegal and politically incorrect way — is to use the powerful pesticide DDT.
Once upon a time, DDT was a miracle chemical. By 1970 its widespread use in homes and mosquito-breeding sites had all but wiped out malaria, a mosquito-borne scourge of mankind that either kills outright or becomes a recurring disability.
But as every school kid knows by rote, DDT killed more than bad bugs. Its excessive use by American farmers, and by a federal government that often forced DDT on private property owners, poisoned the land and threatened bald eagles and other birds with extinction.
DDT was outlawed in America in 1972 for environmental reasons and because of fears about long-term toxicity to humans. Today it is used in only 23 countries.
Unfortunately, no low-cost, effective substitute for DDT has been found. Not un-coincidentally, malaria is back and as deadly as ever in the Third World. Hundreds of millions suffer from it. Somewhere a child dies from it every 30 seconds.
In Sri Lanka, for example, where DDT had cut deaths from malaria to zero by 1961, malaria is a major killer again.
The United Nations knows of malaria's deadly return. It, the World Health Organization and the World Bank have launched a program called 'Roll Back Malaria.' It uses insecticides, early detection and prevention to fight malaria epidemics, but it won't use DDT.
But DDT is not plutonium. Scientists now know it was heavy spraying by clueless farmers and government agencies that made DDT toxic for humans and birds.
It's time to de -demonize DDT and use it sensibly where it's needed most desperately, namely poorest Africa. With millions of human lives at stake, the small environmental costs are worth paying.
My column:
Sunday, April 25, 2004
Are the 'Greens' killing blacks?
God bless The New York Times.
Unlike the rest of the East Coast left-liberal-environmental-wacko media complex, it is not afraid to speak well of dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane -- DDT to you English lit majors.
Two Sundays ago, in fact, The Times devoted six pages of its esteemed Sunday magazine to explaining why DDT is a wonder pesticide, not the killer you and your children have been misled into thinking it is for four decades.
It's truly shocking to see The Times' important assault on enviro-political correctness. The headline -- "What the World Needs Now is DDT" -- is brave.
And the subhead asks the morally correct rhetorical question: "Malaria kills millions of people every year. The careful use of DDT in developing countries could drastically reduce that number. So why are we standing in the way?
Tina Rosenberg, a Times editorial writer, delivers all the important/amazing pro-DDT facts you need. She explains how it is cheap, unsurpassed in effectiveness by other pesticides and safe for humans.
She reports how spraying DDT on crops and on the interior walls of houses in the '50s and '60s all-but eradicated the deadly scourge of malaria from the developed world.
But today, with DDT use prohibited or strongly discouraged by the insane anti-DDT policies of foreign-aid agencies, between 300 million and 500 million humans get malaria each year. Already-poor African economies are crippled by it. Two million die from it in Africa alone. Most are children under 5.
The virtual global outlawing of DDT is thanks in large part to Pittsburgh's great junk-scientist, Rachel Carson, founding mother of the environmental movement and patron saint of millions of Al Gores.
Her book "Silent Spring," serialized in 1962 in The New Yorker and hyped beyond reason by credulous media, pointed out the tragic consequences of DDT's overuse in North America (mainly by cotton farmers and pushy government agricultural agencies) on things like the thickness of eagle's eggs.
But as Rosenberg points out, Carson conveniently "forgot" to point out the counterbalancing scientific factoid that DDT had, by 1962, saved upwards of hundreds of millions of lives. Of course, they were only humans.
Folks of the nonliberal persuasion, including this newspaper and even New Yorker magazine itself (perhaps for reasons of guilt), already have decried the tragic idiocy of banning DDT.
Others, as Rosenberg carefully does, have noted the immoral hypocrisy of enviro-weenies in rich, developed countries that have already benefited from DDT's magic depriving poor brown and black countries of a cheap, proven life saver.
But Rosenberg's piece is a major turning point. She's writing in The New York Times, which, despite recent credibility and bias problems, remains the single most influential force in the world of mainstream (i.e., liberal) journalism.
That means Rosenberg's defense of DDT, and her scolding of environmentalists and international do-gooder agencies, will not be ignored. It will be echoed by editorialists at a hundred daily newspapers who look slavishly to the Almighty Times for cues on what issues are newsworthy and what is politically OK to believe.
The liberal Times has spoken. DDT is no longer the devil. Look for it to be rehabilitated soon on "60 Minutes" and the cover of Newsweek. Stand by for Bono's "Concert for a Lovely Pesticide."
And if we're lucky, in 100 years, our descendants will be able to find a balanced treatment of DDT and Carson in their schoolbooks.