JCP,
here more relevant information on DDT and how it used to save millions of lives in the USA and elsewhere.
A link to the complete article provided below.
Taro
The Miracle Chemical DDT
Before the 1930s, insect-borne diseases were responsible for taking millions of lives each year. In 1935, India alone endured an estimated 100 million cases of malaria and up to a million deaths. In World War I, typhus epidemics killed at least three million Russians and untold millions more across Europe.
But in the late 1930s, Paul Hermann Müller discovered that tiny amounts of the chemical that came to be known as DDT killed just about every insect he used it on. Even when some mosquitoes eventually developed resistance to it, DDT still acted as an effective repellent, driving them from homes.
The U.S. military began using DDT in 1942 to fight widespread malaria and typhus epidemics. They sprayed soldiers, dusted beaches, deloused concentration-camp survivors with DDT, without apparent ill effects. These measures saved millions of troops and camp survivors. As A.G. Smith of the British medical journal Lancet put it: "If the huge amounts of DDT used are taken into account, the safety record for human beings is extremely good."
After the war, the United States launched a global malaria eradication project. “From colonial times until the 1940s, malaria was the American disease,” says Dr. Robert Desowitz, professor of tropical medicine at the University of North Carolina. Up to seven million Americans were stricken every year until the mid-1920s; 3,900 died in 1936. By the 1960s, however, the disease had been almost eliminated, not just from America, but also southern Europe, the Caribbean and much of eastern and southern Asia. In India alone malaria's horrific annual toll in lives plunged from a million deaths per year to fewer than 50,000 total cases of infection in 1961.
For his discovery, Müller received the 1948 Nobel Prize in medicine. "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT," the National Academy of Sciences later reported. "In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria."
But that changed in 1962, with publication of Rachel Carson's anti-pesticide classic, Silent Springthe book that launched the modern environmental movement. The fledgling Environmental Defense Fund, joined by the Sierra Club, initiated lawsuits against DDT use and pressured the Environmental Protection Agency to hold hearings. Though the presiding administrative judge concluded that DDT was not a hazard to man, EPA administrator William Ruckelshaushimself an Environmental Defense Fund memberbanned it in 1972.
The U. S. ban became the spearhead of a worldwide assault on DDT. Under pressure by green groups, other wealthy countries joined the ban and began to restrict funding for DDT projects. That campaign continues to this dayand its consequences are untold death and misery, especially in the Third World. Since the EPA ban in 1972, over 50 million people have died from this once nearly vanquished disease.
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