This article originally appeared in MarketWatch.
Ebola has infected about 1,800 people, according to the World Health Organization, and over 1,000 of the victims have died, many of them in Africa. Global attention is focused on the potential spread of this horrific disease, which has no known cure. Yet 300 million to 600 million people suffer from malaria each year, and it kills about 1 million annually, 90 percent in sub-Saharan Africa.
If the world really cared about Africa, why not reverse the ban on DDT to help fight malaria? An African death from malaria, a protistan parasite that has no cure, is equally tragic as a death from Ebola. Now we are debating how we should allocate experimental drugs to treat Ebola. But we have the means to reduce malaria—and we are not using it.
Eighty-five percent of malaria deaths occur among children under five years old, and it is the leading cause of death for this age group. Symptoms include fever, chills, trembling, flu-like symptoms, anemia, and jaundice. Because there is no treatment and malaria spreads rapidly by mosquitoes, the disease is a serious problem in developing countries that already have constrained healthcare services. Most people in these areas are poorly educated, and may be unaware of the risks of malaria.
Under the Global Malaria Eradication Program, which started in 1955, DDT was used to kill the mosquitoes that carried the parasite, and malaria was practically eliminated. Some countries such as Sri Lanka, which started using DDT in the late 1940s, saw profound improvements. Reported cases fell from nearly 3 million a year to just 17 cases in 1963. In Venezuela, cases fell from over 8 million in 1943 to 800 in 1958. India saw a dramatic drop from 75 million cases a year to 75,000 in 1961.
This changed with the publication of Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, which claimed that DDT was hazardous. After lengthy hearings between August 1971 and March 1972, Judge Edmund Sweeney, the EPA hearing examiner, decided that there was insufficient evidence to ban DDT and that its benefits outweighed any adverse effects. Yet two months afterwards then-EPA Administrator William D. Ruckelshaus overruled him and banned DDT effective December 31, 1972. This was a big win for the mosquitoes, but a big loss for people who lived in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.
Malaria has no known cure. Chloroquine alleviates symptoms but does not cure the disease, and several strains are now resistant to Chloroquine. Another compound, Artemisinin, is effective against the parasite and is given sparingly to avoid development of drug-resistant parasite. Some forms of malaria in Indochina, Africa, and South America are already resistant to Artemisinin. American travelers are given pills (usually malarone) to avoid malaria, but that does not treat the disease.
Carson claimed that DDT, because it is fat soluble, accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals and humans as the compound moved through the food chain, causing cancer and other genetic damage. Carson’s concerns and the EPA action halted the program in its tracks, and malaria deaths started to rise again, reaching 600,000 in 1970, 900,000 in 1990 and over 1,000,000 in 1997—back to pre-DDT levels.
Many say that DDT was banned in vain. There remains no compelling evidence that the chemical has produced any ill public health effects. According to an article in the British medical journal The Lancet by Professor A.G. Smith of Leicester University,
“The early toxicological information on DDT was reassuring; it seemed that acute risks to health were small. If the huge amounts of DDT used are taken into account, the safety record for human beings is extremely good. In the 1940s many people were deliberately exposed to high concentrations of DDT thorough dusting programmes or impregnation of clothes, without any apparent ill effect…In summary, DDT can cause toxicological effects but the effects on human beings at likely exposure are very slight”
Even though nothing is as cheap and effective as DDT, it is not a cure-all for malaria. Some mosquitoes are resistant to DDT, because wide-spread use of the chemical allows the population resistant mosquitoes to grow.
A study by the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences concluded that spraying huts in Africa with DDT reduces the number of mosquitoes by 97 percent compared with huts sprayed with an alternative pesticide. Those mosquitoes that do enter the huts are less likely to bite. As we try to help Ebola sufferers, we should consider how to bring DDT back to Africa to save the million people who die every year from malaria.
By forbidding DDT and relying on more expensive, less effective methods of prevention, we are causing immense hardship. Small environmental losses are inferior to saving thousands of human lives and potentially increasing economic growth in developing nations. Countries with a high incidence of malaria can suffer a 1.3 percent annual loss of economic growth. According to a Harvard/WHO study, Sub-Saharan Africa’s GDP could be $100 billion greater if malaria had been eliminated 35 years ago.
Rachel Carson died in 1964, but the legacy of Silent Spring and its recommended ban on DDT live with us today. As we mourn the thousand people who have died of the latest outbreak of Ebola, and we look at the photos in the New York Times of the sad African children, we should remember the millions of people who are suffering from malaria as a result of the DDT ban. They were never given the choice of living with DDT or dying without it. William D. Ruckelshaus made that choice for them in 1972. Before millions more die, we should recognize the benefits of DDT and encourage its use in fighting malaria.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor, directs Economics21 at the Manhattan Institute. You can follow her on Twitter here.
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