Tucson, Arizona Sunday, 25 August 2002
Pesticides good for the world
By Rich Lowry
Sometime in the 1970s, the pesticide DDT became the most loathed and feared three letters this side of KKK. This was a coup for DDT scourge and "Silent Spring" author Rachel Carson.
But it hasn't been so wonderful for the world's poor, who have suffered countless thousands of needless deaths thanks to an exaggerated fear of DDT and other pesticides.
As the United States battles the mosquito-borne West Nile virus, this summer is a reminder of something that the rest of the world never had the luxury of forgetting: Mosquitoes don't just buzz, bite and irritate - they, or at least the diseases they carry, can kill.
In the Third World, the plot of "Men in Black" isn't so fanciful: Man does battle with bugs, and if he loses, death and mayhem ensue. In 2000, malaria infected some 300 million people, and roughly 1 million died. As Richard Tren and Roger Bate have demonstrated in their important work for the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute, DDT literally changed the course of human history - for the better.
Earlier this century, malaria was still prevalent in Europe and North America. In 1914, 600,000 cases were diagnosed in the United States.
That all changed, thanks to DDT. Malaria disappeared from Europe and North America, it and seemed to be on the way out in the developing world as well.
Within 10 years of the start of its DDT-spraying program in 1946, Sri Lanka cut its malaria cases from 3 million to 7,300. In 1964, when it thought the disease had been vanquished, it stopped spraying. By 1969, malaria cases had jumped from a handful back to 500,000.
Meanwhile, DDT hysteria in the United States was building. Carson demonstrated that DDT hurt birds - especially such raptors as bald eagles that are higher up the food chain - but there was no credible evidence of harm to humans. It was banned anyway in 1973.
DDT is so effective because of its "persistence." This creates trouble for raptors who eat other animals with DDT stored in their body fat. But it also means that sprayings do not have to be endlessly repeated in a way that is too expensive or too logistically difficult for poorer countries.
Nonetheless, Western environmentalists want to export DDT bans to the Third World through such international agreements as the Persistent Organic Pollutants Treaty (yes, DDT is technically organic) and pressure from international aid organizations.
Mosquito trouble for most enviros means finding one in their double-skim latte. Elsewhere, the problem is much grimmer: Most of those who die from malaria are children and pregnant women.
DDT can save them. According to Roger Bate, as Latin America as a whole stopped using DDT in the 1980s and 1990s, its malaria cases soared, while Ecuador, which continued using the pesticide, saw its malaria rate fall.
It doesn't take much. By one estimate, the amount of DDT used on an American cotton field in the 1960s is enough to treat all the at-risk homes in Guyana.
In Africa, people spray a small amount of DDT on the walls inside their homes. This has no environmental effect (unless there are bald eagles in the attic), but, thanks to DDT's extraordinary "excito-repellancy," it keeps mosquitoes away for six months to a year.
Enviros talk up other methods of mosquito control, including preventive ones like draining swampy areas. As Donald Rumsfeld might put it, however, there's no substitute for simply killing the bastards, which means using pesticides.
Consider New York City's experience. As Jennifer Zambone of the free-market Mercatus Center has written, the city nipped its West Nile problem in the bud last year when it started spraying, while outlying counties reluctant to apply dreaded pesticides continued to experience cases.
Environmentalists would rather suffer a death of 1,000 mosquito bites than admit it, but the West Nile virus here and malaria worldwide demonstrate an inconvenient fact:
Pesticides, and even DDT, are good, especially for the world's poor.
* Rich Lowry is editor of The National Review, 215 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10016; e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. |
