DDT
DDT, Malaria, Rachel Carson
ut strong opposition to DDT arose, spurred by the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Environmentalists got DDT banned in the U.S. and, eventually, in dozens of other countries. Western nations, which fund anti-malaria campaigns throughout the world, largely refused to underwrite any efforts that employed DDT. As a result, DDT use shrank--and malaria surged.
In India the number of cases increased to 30 million in 1977. In Sri Lanka the number went to 2.5 million in 1969. (Source.) More recently, other forms of malaria control--such as installing bed-netting and reducing the presence of standing water--have lowered the incidence of the disease worldwide. But they are generally less effective than DDT. In South Africa, for example, after DDT spraying was halted in 1996, malaria infections rose from under 5,000 in 1995 to over 60,000 in 2000. At which point DDT was reintroduced--and six months later the number dropped by half. (Source.)
This hostility to DDT was not based on science. For instance, DDT was said to be carcinogenic, because of studies in which mice developed liver tumors--but only after receiving doses of DDT 100,000 times higher than what a person would typically absorb (source.) Further, the opponents of DDT ignored many facts contradicting their views--such as the fact that during the period of highest DDT use (1944-1972), deaths from liver cancer fell by 30 percent (source)--or that workers who regularly handled DDT were found to have no higher rates of cancer than the general population (source)--or that people who voluntarily ingested DDT daily for up to two years suffered no ill effects (source)--or that the amount of DDT (per kilogram of body weight) required to kill mice is greater than that of aspirin (source).
What, then, was the motive behind the anti-DDT crusade? It was based on the premise that the man-made is inherently suspect--that the natural is good and the non-natural is bad, that human "intervention" in nature is deleterious and that we have to protect nature from man, not for man. The millions of lives saved by our "non-organic" use of DDT--and the millions lost when it was not used--were disregarded. Instead, the thinning of the eggshells of the bald eagle was presented as an intolerable effect of DDT.
