Malarial Fever, or, as it is often called, Paludism or Intermittent Fever, is perhaps the most important of all diseases which afflict humanity.
- Ronald Ross, 1902 Nobel Lecture
After having tested different chemical combinations, you found one which killed, not flies alone, but also many other kinds of vermin, and with that you had made one of the greatest discoveries within the recent history of prophylactic medicine. DDT kills the fly; it kills the mosquito, which spreads malaria; the louse, which spreads typhus; the flea, which spreads the plague; and the sandfly, which spreads tropical diseases. In the mind of the layman you stand out as a benefactor of mankind of such stature that also the humility of a saint is required to escape the danger of falling a victim to the worst of all spiritual diseases - hubris.
- Gustaf Hellström as quoted by Paul Müller in his Nobel Banquet Speech
Today is the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Google has even commemorated the event with a special doodle dedicate to Rachel Carson, posed heroically as a defender of the natural world:
Rachel Carson, though, is no heroine. Silent Spring helped to give birth to a movement which makes human interests subservient to that of the natural world, and which sacrifices thousands of human beings each and every year to otherwise preventable deaths. Malaria is a very real threat to human life across the world, and the unwillingness to use DDT has resulted in unnecessary suffering. In short, the fight against it is immoral and at a global level Neocolonialist.
The mosquito is the most deadly animal in the world. Hundreds of thousands die each year of malaria because of mosquitos, and Silent Spring has been an obstacle to saving those lives. The mosquito is an important vector for the spread of diseases like malaria. Consequently, constraints to controlling the population of mosquitos will have dire consequences for human flourishing in malaria regions.
Too many environmentalists speak from the easy point of view of a Westerner in where the costs of their proposals are not too hard to bear. Elsewhere in the world, though, the costs are much more severe, and that is no more true than in the case of malaria. Ronald Baley at Reason writes about how DDT helped save millions of lives in the decades before Silent Spring in an article on the fortieth anniversary of that book titled “Silent Spring at 40":
DDT's insecticidal properties were discovered in the late 1930s by Paul Muller, a chemist at the Swiss chemical firm J.R. Geigy. The American military started testing it in 1942, and soon the insecticide was being sprayed in war zones to protect American troops against insect-borne diseases such as typhus and malaria. In 1943 DDT famously stopped a typhus epidemic in Naples in its tracks shortly after the Allies invaded. DDT was hailed as the "wonder insecticide of World War II."
As soon as the war ended, American consumers and farmers quickly adopted the wonder insecticide, replacing the old-fashioned arsenic-based pesticides, which were truly nasty. Testing by the U.S. Public Health Service and the Food and Drug Administration's Division of Pharmacology found no serious human toxicity problems with DDT. Muller, DDT's inventor, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948.
DDT was soon widely deployed by public health officials, who banished malaria from the southern United States with its help. The World Health Organization credits DDT with saving 50 million to 100 million lives by preventing malaria. In 1943 Venezuela had 8,171,115 cases of malaria; by 1958, after the use of DDT, the number was down to 800. India, which had over 10 million cases of malaria in 1935, had 285,962 in 1969. In Italy the number of malaria cases dropped from 411,602 in 1945 to only 37 in 1968.
Nevertheless, DDT’s history of alleviating the threat of malaria across the Western world, where we rarely think of malaria as being a large issue, has been mostly forgotten. Paul Müller was even awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1948 "for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods.” In 1963, Müller was invited to Greece and hailed as a national hero because DDT eradicated malaria there.
One of Silent Spring’s consequences is that it has had an indirect effect in persuading so many poor nations to stop using DDT. That wouldn’t have been a problem if it weren’t for the fact that those nations were in equatorial regions where malaria thrives. There is a very moral issue to the use of DDT in the fight against malaria, and that is proven by just how many people die because of it. DDT is one of humanity’s strongest weapon against the vectors that spread malaria, and yet it is all too often used. An example of the dangers of rolling back the use of DDT is illustrated in a 1999/2000 malaria outbreak in South Africa. During the 1950s, an indoor residual spraying campaign had successfully controlled the population of mosquitos there, and only a small malaria outbreak had been recorded since then. South Africa started to roll back their use of DDT, and started using pyrethroid insecticides instead. Mosquitos eventually developed a resistance to those insecticides, and a malaria outbreak ensued which resulted in an explosion of 4,117 cases in 1995 to 64,622 cases in 2000.
Multiply such occurrences throughout the world and we have a lot of unnecessary deaths because of a modern phobia of fighting against nature. Nature sometimes needs to be fought against and malaria is certainly one of those cases. Even though DDT has unintended consequences, nobody should try to ban the most powerful weapon we have in a fight against a disease which kills hundreds of thousands each year. The unintended consequences are simply worth it.
At the very least, we should at least stop thinking that DDT is a global issue and should let people dealing with malaria in their own communities make independent decisions about whether or not to use DDT. The Stockholm Convention is little but Neocolonialism: Nations in the richer part of the world, which suffer much less deaths due to malaria, get to decide how the other parts of the world should fight the vectors that spread malaria.
Just because the deaths due to malaria occur beyond our spheres of knowledge and perception in the West doesn’t meant that they don’t happen. If tens of thousands of people were to contract malaria in, say, Mississippi, I have no doubt that the reaction would be to use DDT, despite its negative impact on the environment. We should allow the poorer world to have the same choice. We should stop thinking that DDT, or any other chemical, is a world-wide issue; instead, they are issues which always manifest themselves within the particular circumstances of different situations. In the richer world and in the world relatively unaffected by malaria, the costs of not using DDT are such that it might make sense to ban the substance, but within nations in which tens of thousands get sick a year, it is absurd to not use DDT.
If this were to happen in the United States en masse, we wouldn't be holding back the big guns. We wouldn't just be distributing nets. We would be going after the mosquitos directly and with a vengence.
In Genesis 1:28, God gives Adam and Eve the exhortation to “Be fruitful and multiply , and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every other living thing that moves upon the earth.” The environmentalist creed is all too often the direct inversion of that. Rather than the natural world being subdued for the betterment of humanity, humanity is subdued for the betterment of the natural world, and not just subdued as in not getting another coal power plant, but subdued as in allowed to die.
The unwillingness to use DDT as a front-line defense against malaria is a poignant manifestation of that idolatrous tendency. Human life is sacred per se, and if we do not defend it with our utmost effort, we fail to give it proper reverence. DDT is part of that utmost effort against malaria.
Rachel Carson is therefore no heroine; rather, she and the movement she spawned are indirectly responsible for hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. Gustaf Hellström was right: DDT, by killing the animals which spread malaria, stopped the spread of the disease and was therefore one of the greatest discoveries in medicine.