The United Nations' Retreat From Science in Controlling Malaria

For two years the United Nations paid lip service to the truth that the insecticide DDT is a vital component of malaria control, but last week UN abandoned science in favor of superstition. The result is UN promotion of more dangerous and less efficient malaria control techniques.

On May 5th, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Environment Program announced plans to reduce DDT use by 30% by 2014 and completely eliminate it by around 2020. In the mean time, the UN will roll out initiatives in 40 countries to test non-chemical methods of malaria control. In particular UN wants to scale up the programs of Central America, which have relied on "pharmacosuppression". Essentially, uninfected people in high risk locations are given the antimalarial drug chloroquine to suppress any future infection. In 2004, 3,400 malaria cases were diagnosed in Mexico, 6,897 in Nicaragua, and almost half a million in Brazil. But both Mexico and Nicaragua each distributed more anti-malaria pills (mostly chloroquine pills) than Brazil. Chloroquine is a wonderful drug at combating malaria and has saved millions of lives when used therapeutically, as in Brazil, but prophylactic use is not safe because it is quite toxic and has led to heart problems when used repeatedly. As scientists at the University of Colima in Mexico explained last year, chloroquine "can induce lethal ventricular arrhythmias."

Ironically, chloroquine is only slightly less toxic than DDT yet people have to eat chloroquine pills, they don't eat DDT. The UN does not mention this, or that the Central American policy cannot be used in most other regions because of extensive resistance to chloroquine and high cost. So even if pharmacosuppression were clinically appropriate, it couldn't be done in Africa anyway.

The UN's push for a "zero DDT world", ignores the millions of lives DDT has saved over the past century, with little to no adverse environmental impact and no harm to human health. From the late 1940s until the early 1970s, spraying DDT was the mainstay of anti-mosquito campaigns responsible for successfully eradicating malaria from North America and much of Europe. Thanks to DDT, by 1970, an estimated one billion people no longer lived in malaria-endemic areas; in Southeast Asia, cases fell from a high of 110 million in 1950 to nearly zero by 1969.

But by the 1980s aid agencies lost interest in funding malaria control. When malaria re-emerged as a global priority in 1998, even the most limited use of DDT — for indoor spraying, in tiny quantities — was off the table. Deaf to appeals from Southern African public health experts who were successfully using the chemical, aid groups opted to promote less controversial bed nets and antimalarial drugs.

Read up on the history of malaria control efforts. It was almost completely wiped out in the US *before* DDT was introduced. And it was already beginning to fail significantly in Africa due to mosquitos’ development of resistance, *before* it was banned over exaggerated (though not completely unfounded) environmental concerns. The mantra that “DDT is essential to save the world from malaria” is in many ways a right wing edition of the leftist-promoted global warming alarmism.

What Africa needs is civilization. Without that, no amount of DDT is going to save them from malaria or anything else. I lived in Rwanda as a preschool (my father was stationed there as a US diplomat) and I had malaria twice, but its effects aren’t usually severe unless accompanied malnutrition and other infections. I didn’t have access to any Western medical care, because there simply wasn’t any there (and the minimal locally available treatment was sufficient, so I wasn’t flown to Europe for treatment, as I was when I needed my tonsils out urgently), but I still pulled through fine.

I don’t where DDT has resulted in the long term severe reduction of malaria. I do know that it was virtually gone from the US before DDT was introduced here, and that the chief reason for introducing it at all was out of fear that the large numbers of US soldiers who were returning to the US from malaria-infested parts of the world would reintroduce it. I suspect that any other places where the near-eradication of malaria actually did coincide with DDT use, and has been sustained, were places where the level of civilization is largely responsible for the lack of return, and would probably have resulted in a comparable reduction in malaria even without using DDT.

As noted in the article you linked to, the speed with which mosquitoes become resistant to DDT is very fast — much faster than the time required to do anything close to “wiping out” malaria. As a result, proposals to spend gazillions of dollars (always mostly provided by US taxpayers) on another DDT boondoggle in the third world, will not result in any long term reduction of malaria, but would just suck more money into socialist programs that bear no fruit at all for the free, civilized world, nor any long-term fruit for the third world.

And then there are the unintended consequences, illustrated in the linked article by the story of the rise of roof-eating bugs and bedbugs in Malaysia, as a result of the DDT repelling/killing the wasps and ants which the natural predators of those bugs’ larvae.

And then there’s the whole issue of government force. Soper’s proposal was scientifically correct — every single home had to be sprayed, no exceptions, and if even a sprinkling of residents didn’t allow the spraying, the eradication wouldn’t happen. His success in Brazil was due to approaches such as: “he had worked with the country’s dictator to make it illegal to prevent an inspector from entering a house”. In what part of the world would it be politically safe and reasonable to use that sort of approach, and not have it yield horrible unintended consequences? Dictators are quick to misuse any power they derive from the free world.

And then there’s the cultural problem. The countries where malaria is a serious problem, are countries full of ignorant, superstitious, illiterate people, who are prone to being suspicious of legitimate efforts to help them and equally prone to having faith in utter quackery that harms them and their societies, because they have no clue how to tell the difference. They refuse vaccinations because they heard the Westerners are using vaccines to poison people or to transmit AIDS, they rape babies because they heard that sex with a virgin will make them immune from AIDS, and they kill albino people because they heard that albinos’ body parts can be made into magical charms that will bring wealth.

Letting nature take its course is not “genocide”. Overwhelmingly, the efforts of Westerners who have gone into the third world with the idea of “helping” have accomplished very little other than to unnaturally increase the population growth rate (by unnaturally decreasing the death rate), so that it hopelessly outpaces economic and political and cultural development. Europeans had to get their economies and cultures fixed through their own efforts, because there was no one to come and “save” them. The very harsh experiences of things like the bubonic plague decimated population (over and over again), and that was in fact a necessary part of allowing the economy and culture to develop sufficiently that Europeans eventually stopped breeding like feral cats, without regard for the misery and astronomical death rates of their offspring, and began to plan ahead and consider the consequences of the various actions they were thinking of undertaking.

While I don’t think it’s utterly impossible to help the third world, I do think that notions of riding in like white knights and “saving millions of people” are crazy and harmful. Saving them for what? Is it better to have 10 million ignorant, starving, fast-reproducing people, than 1 million of the same? Not in my book — it just multiplies suffering 10 times over, and the endless supply of desperate hordes of ignorant people is powerful fuel for the rise of tyrants, and of extremist ideologies such as radical Islam and various brands of communism, as well as the brutal exploitation of the weaker members of the hordes. The Indian government has recently estimated that there are over a million child prostitutes in that country, and most of them are girls who were sold by their parents — law enforcement efforts to rescue them are minimal, because there’s simply no place for them in the economy, no jobs, no schools, and yet their parents and brothers and luckier sisters are back home churning out more babies. It’s also quite common in India for families to literally dump their elderly relatives — not enough food or space at home with the ever-growing number of children, so just drop grandpa off at some distant roadside to die. So saving people from dying of malaria in India just means more little girls sold to brothels to die young of AIDS after a brief life of hell, and more frail grandparents dumped on the streets to starve to death slowly. What’s the point? Why should I pay for this? Civilization has to come first.

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