Have we forgotten so soon? Two years ago, University of Washington researchers working in Africa, produced a new study, published in the journal, Science, that gave dynamic support to my contention and the contention of many scientists that the greatest mistake made by the U.S. and foreign nations in the 20th Century was the decision to ban the miracle pesticide and insecticide, DDT.
The U.W. study, reported by the Associated Press, told us that malaria
is fueling the spread of AIDS in Africa by boosting the HIV in people’s bodies for weeks at a time, pinning down the deadly interplay between the dual scourges. It’s a vicious cycle, as people weakened by HIV are, in turn, more vulnerable to malaria.
It’s necessary to repeat some history. The new pesticide, DDT, was created by scientists to combat malaria primarily, and it soon proved its worth when it was introduced in the 1930s, not only in the U.S. but also in those countries with climates and conditions conducive to promoting malaria in mosquito-laden swamplands.
At the time, the total number of deaths attributed to malaria was approximately 3,000,000 a year! After the application of DDT in swamplands everywhere, the number of malaria cases dropped to a few hundred and by mid-century was headed for total elimination! It was a remarkable achievement, one that has never been matched in the world.
Then, along came Rachel Carson’s scientifically inaccurate book, Silent Spring, which sparked extremists in the new environmental movement to demand that DDT be banned everywhere, because, they said, they had discovered it was harmful to the eggs of eagles. It was not only a ridiculous assumption but one which eventually would cost the lives of millions of people, most of them babies and children.
After the extremists succeeded in forcing the U.S. to order its ban on DDT, many nations the world over followed suit. And the “malaria holocaust,” as I would hasten to call it, began. A terrible disease, which had neared its worldwide elimination, thanks to DDT, returned to plague the earth once again — and deaths from malaria annually have climbed back toward the 3,000,000 figure!
My longtime colleague, the late Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, detailed the remarkable DDT story in our second book, Environmental Overkill. But, despite that story and the entreaties of many scientists, no action has been taken by Congress or other nations to reinstate DDT as the greatest antidote to malaria ever developed.
Today, with the scary news from the U.W. study that malaria and AIDS are linked and abet each other, it is doubly important that the U.S. and other nations launch a new movement to bring DDT back into worldwide use to save the lives of many millions of people each year.
When I referred to a “malaria holocaust,” I was intentionally referring to the Nazi holocaust that resulted in the murder of more than 6,000,000 Jews and millions more who defied Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s. By my reckoning, the deaths from malaria since the ban on DDT has exceeded 100,000,000 — and that is undoubtedly a conservative estimate.
All this came about as a result of a silly charge that a few eagle eggs were supposedly harmed. Shouldn’t we be indicting the extremists for genocidal murder?