'Environmentalism' Can Be Hazardous to Your Health

On 4: The discoverer of DDT's insecticidal properties was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1948. It was widely used in the 1940s and 1950s to combat typhus and malaria. In 1970, the National Academy of Sciences said in an official statement: "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. It is estimated that, in little more than two decades DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that would otherwise have been inevitable." Source here.

Why not go look at the original book? I did -- it's not in print, but NAS has it on line.

You are aware, I trust, that NAS called for the end of use of DDT in that book? They acknowledged, in that one line, that DDT had been valuable. But the Academy also noted that DDT was too long-lived in the wild and had wrought havoc on countless ecosystems. NAS noted that DDT belongs to a family of pesticides that cause all sorts of damage to animals, including people, such as the endocrine disruption that even Iain Murray worries about in his new book.

In short, while NAS said DDT had been valuable, they said its dangers outweigh its past value, especially since mosquitoes are resistant or immune to it, and especially since the problem with malaria seems to be on the human side more than the mosquito side.

So, if we quote the NAS, isn't it fair to quote the NAS conclusions? NAS said DDT should be phased out completely, to save lives. (I quote the exact text at my blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, if you're really curious.)

Moreover, the 500 million deaths prevented figure is a clear error. Think about it: By 1970, DDT had been used only 24 years against malaria vectors. 500 million deaths prevented would be nearly 21 million deaths annually prior to 1946. The actual totals were as high as 4 million, but hovered closer to 2.5 million deaths annually. At 2.5 million deaths annually, had DDT prevented ALL of them, that would have been about 200 years of use. Difficult to get 200 years of use out of 24 years.

NAS goofed on the figure, probably an editing error from the total malaria exposures in a year, which does run close to 500 million.

Bottom line: Rachel Carson was exactly right in 1962. Today, those nations showing progress against malaria are using the integrated pest management scheme Carson recommended in Silent Spring. How many millions died because corporate interests, anti-environmentalists, Tom Coburn and George Bush refused to do what Rachel Carson pointed out the experts said would work?

That's the real question.

Muirgeo

I'm saying the evidence is unambiguous that DDT is effective against malaria. I understand the parallel with penicillin you are trying to draw, but DDT also repels mosquitoes and lowers infection even where resistance is a problem. So at least some effectiveness - which you deny - can persist indefinitely.

Muirgeo

Since you're on record here denying DDT prevents malaria, your credibility is about zero at this point.

Posted by: ben

Ben,

Guess what? I'm a doctor and when my patients have an infection with penicillin resistant Staphylococci I pretty much think not to treat them with penicillin. Many people still die of Staph infection. Are you claiming its because we doctors don't use enough penicillin?

Muirgeo

Since you're on record here denying DDT prevents malaria, your credibility is about zero at this point.

It's all a bit funny to me because liberal economist are very concerned with peoples bias effecting the way they view the economy. When science comes out with things like the dangers of lead, mercury, DDT, CFC's or CO2 the economists own objectivism goes out the window because of their preconceived economic biases.

Eli

Ben dear, you are going to have to say WHERE access to DDT was curtailed in 1972, as I recall it was done in the US, where malaria had been wiped out, that it was banned other places for agricultural spraying but reserved for health.

What's your point? Are you seriously disputing that the US ban on DDT contributed nothing to the reduction in its use in developing countries?

Ben dear, you are going to have to say WHERE access to DDT was curtailed in 1972, as I recall it was done in the US, where malaria had been wiped out, that it was banned other places for agricultural spraying but reserved for health.

No obviously nets were not available in 1972, but interior spraying was. This is another area where inexpert ignorance appears. When I read these discussions I see the agressively clueless bens of the the world holding forth. Lots of libertarian economists proclaiming that Rachel Carson was the devil incarnate. When I read people active in the public health field or insect control or entymology, I read things like muriquo has posted and that Rachel Carson had it right.

Who to believe?

Eli

Let's take as given the results of the study you cite are correct and that these were known in the 1970s. Why, then, was access to DDT curtailed in 1972 without these apparently superior measures first being introduced?

With so many lives at stake, it is entirely irresponsible to advocate an alternative without properly implementing it. You don't abandon what works without first getting the alternative established. Demonstrably, that alternative was either not superior, or was not implemented. Therefore, DDT should not have been denied to those countries when it was.

When insects develop resistence to DDT further spraying is ineffective and stops, then, over time, the resistence lessens and new applications will be effective although the build back of resistence is more rapic. Agricultural spraying and broadcast spraying lead to relatively rapid evolutionary development of resistence. Interior spraying or use of bed nets does not generate evolutionary pressure and development of resistence.

To quote from comments by

Ian Gould at Deltoid

"The cost-effectiveness of lambdacyhalothrin-treated nets in comparison with conventional DDT spraying for malaria control among migrant populations was evaluated in a malaria hyperendemic area along the Thai-Myanmar border. Ten hamlets of 243 houses with 948 inhabitants were given only treated nets. Twelve hamlets of 294 houses and 1,315 population were in the DDT area, and another 6 hamlets with 171 houses and 695 inhabitants were in the non-DDT-treated area. The impregnated net program was most cost-effective (US$1.54 per 1 case of prevented malaria). Spraying with DDT was more cost-effective than malaria surveillance alone ($1.87 versus $2.50 per 1 case of prevented malaria). These data suggest that personal protection measures with insecticide-impregnated mosquito net are justified in their use to control malaria in highly malaria-endemic areas in western Thailand."

http://www.ajtmh.org/cgi/reprint/65/4/279.pdf

So if bednets are more cost-effective than DDT IRS spraying why are right-wingers promoting DDT over bed-nets.

Obviously it's because they hate poor people and want them to die.

What other reasonable explanation could there be?

Muirgeo

You are so completely wrong and ill-informed I suspect you don't actually care about what is really going on. It was precisely that dismissive wave of the hand in 1972 that inflicted so much harm in the developing world.

On points 2 and 3: "In Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) DDT spraying had reduced malaria cases from 2.8 million in 1948 to 17 in 1963. After spraying was stopped in 1964, malaria cases began to rise again and reached 2.5 million in 1969.33 The same pattern was repeated in many other tropical— and usually impoverished—regions of the world. In Zanzibar the prevalence of malaria among the populace dropped from 70 percent in 1958 to 5 percent in 1964. By 1984 it was back up to between 50 and 60 percent. The chief malaria expert for the U.S. Agency for International Development said that malaria would have been 98 percent eradicated had DDT continued to be used." Source: here.

"After South Africa stopped using DDT in 1996, the number of malaria cases in KwaZulu Natal province rose from 8,000 to 42,000 cases. By 2000, there had been an approximate 400% increase in malaria deaths. Today, after the reintroduction of DDT, the number of deaths from malaria in the region is less than 50 per year. South Africa could afford and did try newer alternatives to DDT, but they proved less effective." Source: here.

On 4: The discoverer of DDT's insecticidal properties was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1948. It was widely used in the 1940s and 1950s to combat typhus and malaria. In 1970, the National Academy of Sciences said in an official statement: "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. It is estimated that, in little more than two decades DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that would otherwise have been inevitable." Source here.

On 5: "Sharma et al. 17 demonstrated that DDT was effective against malaria even in the presence of resistance.

The fact is that the limited use of DDT for public health has continued to be effective in areas where it is used inside homes. As DDT's chief property is repellency, mosquitoes often avoid the DDT treated homes altogether. In so doing, they avoid the exposure that promotes resistance as well. Other insecticides, such as synthetic pyrethroids, tend to be used with insecticide-treated nets and in agricultural spraying as well, increasing mosquito exposure to the insecticide and with it the potential for resistance." Source here.

2,3,4 and 5 are wrong. But you got the first one right. Oh, your last two paragraphs are untrue as well but yeah lots of people die from malaria.

Muirgeo, which of the following facts do you dispute.

1) Millions have died of malaria since 1972, and hundreds of millions become sick each year from it

2) Where DDT was used, malaria was substantially curtailed

3) Where DDT was used and then not used, malaria returned

4) The extraordinary power of DDT to prevent malaria was well-known in 1972

5) DDT repels both resistant and non-resistant mosquitoes and lowers infection rates.

Any claim that the issue is complex is just obfuscation. Many, many people are dead from malaria and did not have access to the single most effective preventative measure.

Those people were denied access to that measure based on the flimsiest of evidence. What is so deeply offensive is not that the argument turned out to be wrong, it is that the environmental lobby was so willing to play fast and loose with so many other peoples' lives.

I understand john's concerns about the debate. But you don't have to much research to know that something is wrong with Bate's claims that the market failed at providing DDT to people who wanted to use it. It's not hard to make -- it was manufactured in industrial quantities using 1940s technology. Declining DDT use is because of lack of demand not because companies refuse to manufacture it.

"She's so much a hero to me my first born is named after her."

That has got to be the most specious argument I've seen in comment on this site, even in the realm of testimonial arguments. I was born in 1970, and there were always a couple of Spirows in my K-12 classes, for whatever that's worth.

The original sin in science denialism is tobacco. Not surprisingly it also was the source of Rachel Carson kills zillions

What is indeed irresponsible and repugnant is that Ms Carson, thru her views, helped kill millions of people.

Al Gore is peddling the same disinformation, and may possibly succeed in a similar feat.

John,

The issue is extremely complex. Such that to claim environmentalism and Rachel Carson killed millions of people is indeed a simplification and basically slanderous. But in 1962 for Rachel Carson to understand and express the idea that maybe we shouldn't be indiscriminately spaying this substance all over is an example of a person ahead of her time and with great insight.

It's beyond me how people who press the principals of liberty think its OK for some to release chemicals never before existing in nature for all to be exposed to and call it an infringement of the polluters liberty to not allow them to do so.

With amazing faculties of pattern recognition, I begin to detect a repeating motif.

Group 1 disparages Group 2 for cherry-picking facts, for finding conclusions based on a priori convictions, and, despite being well-meaning, causing well-documented destruction to the world. Place "environmentalists" in one of the slots and "economists" in the other.

Remember: for the most part, we all want the same thing. Let's try to be more open-minded and not immediately jump at whatever conclusion happens to fit our comfortable world view.

With regards to the issue of DDT: I haven't read the latest literature, though it seems equally plausible to me that (1) some groups may have been overly reactive in completely banning DDT and that (2) the use of DDT, over time, has traded long-term pesticide effectiveness for short-term gains. However, I'm not an ecologist and do not understand the dynamics of genetic pesticide resistance. I'm also not conversant on alternative pesticides or alternative malaria solutions. I wonder if those who've shown strong opinions on the issue (on both sides) are knowledgeable about the entire issue.

Rachel Carson has been attacked by Liberal economist for the same reason Al Gore has been so attacked..."Inconvenient Truths" ....

In her own words....

"No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored. The question that has now urgently presented itself is whether it is either wise or responsible to attack the problem by methods that are rapidly making it worse. The world has heard much of the triumphant war against disease through the control of insect vectors of infection, but it has heard little of the other side of the story - the defeats, the short-lived triumphs that now strongly support the alarming view that the insect enemy has been made actually stronger by our efforts. Even worse, we may have destroyed our very means of fighting. ...


What is the measure of this setback? The list of resistant species now includes practically all of the insect groups of medical importance. ... Malaria programmes are threatened by resistance among mosquitoes. ...


Practical advice should be 'Spray as little as you possibly can' rather than 'Spray to the limit of your capacity' ..., Pressure on the pest population should always be as slight as possible."

Carson probably saved many lives by helping to bring the facts of DDT resistance to light. Also this lady was largely responsible for the fact that our National symbol, the American Bald Eagle, still exist. She's so much a hero to me my first born is named after her.

Malaria is responsible for enormous suffering and death. The facts are readily available in the scientific literature. To blame a reduction in DDT usage for the death of 10-30 million people from malaria is not just simple-minded, it is demonstrably wrong. To blame a mythical, monolithic entity called the environmental lobby for the total reduction in DDT usage is not just paranoid, it is also demonstrably wrong. Your article is not only poor journalism, it is an insult to the people who work for the control of parasitic diseases that afflict developing nations.

letter to the Oz on DDT from parasitologist Dr Alan Lymbery,

http://tinyurl.com/ynkb56

yup, all the left-wing do-gooders accomplished by banning DDT was the death of millions of third-worlders. par for the course for the left. i question what "kernel of truth" Carson et al ever found.