We Won the War Againt Malaria - Why Are we Fighting the Same Battles?

As many as 3 million people a year die from Malaria (and millions more are sickened). As TIME magazine reported this week, the war against Malaria continues. The latest idea, actually quite successful, are mosquito nets treated with an insecticide. They are about 10 dollars a piece. Cheap for the west, hugely expensive to Africans, where Malaria continues to rage and destroy.

Here’s what outraged me about the piece, by Jeffrey Sachs. We talk about a “war against malaria,”? but we largely waged and won that war after WWII, with — gasp - DDT. For example, there were 2.8 million malaria cases in 1948 in Sri Lanka, but thanks to DDT there were only 17 in 1963! Malaria was eradicated from Europe and North America, and much of Africa.

But it’s been back with a vengeance for decades, largely because of anti-DDT hysteria in the West, thanks to the 1970s work of environmental extremist Rachel Carson. In her book “Silent Spring,”? she made it seem like we were all going to perish as a direct result of the insecticide.

But as Amir Attaran of Harvard University's Center for International Development points out, "The scientific literature does not contain even one peer-reviewed, independently replicated study linking DDT exposures to any adverse health outcome" in humans. Not one.

Roger Bate and Kendra Okonski of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., in their paper, "When Politics Kill: Malaria and the DDT Story" that, at worst, DDT may have caused some environmental harm when it was widely used in farming in the 1950s and '60s. That harm, shown to be reversible, included such things as producing thinner egg shells in certain birds. But Bate and Okonski demonstrate that "spraying (small-to-minuscule amounts) of DDT in houses and on mosquito breeding grounds was the primary reason that rates of malaria around the world declined dramatically after the Second World War."

But today, using DDT in a plague ridden community or country, far cheaper and more effective than buying the sleeping nets using a different pesticide for the same number of people, is largely politically untouchable or downright illegal.

Finally more and more scientists are waking up to this. The Malaria Foundation International circulated an open letter signed by some 600 leading malariologists and other scientists declaring that "setting a firm deadline to ban DDT places an unethical burden on the world's poorest countries."

But we’re not getting the message. Bill gates has poured tens of millions into developing an anti-malarial vaccine, that won’t be available for ten years or more, and will almost certainly be too expensive to be useful. The nets are getting attention, but they won’t do enough. DDT, while not the only weapon in the anti-malaria fight, is still the most effective in the arsenal, the cheapest, oh and yeah - it had already won much of the war before being pulled off the battlefield.

Don’t look for it to be redeployed soon.

I’ve said it before: the evidence suggests that environmentalists may love the world, but they sure don't like people very much