ON THE CUTTING EDGE: Something Old, Something New In The Fight Against Malaria
Contrarian columnist John Stossel cheers the World Health Organization (WHO) lifting its 30-year ban on the pesticide DDT:
DDT is the most effective anti-mosquito, anti-malaria pesticide known. But thanks to the worldwide environmental movement and politically correct bureaucrats in the United States and at the United Nations, the use of this benign chemical has been discouraged in Africa and elsewhere, permitting killer mosquitoes to spread death.
I don't expect any apologies from the people who permitted this to happen. But I am thankful this nightmare is ending.
DDT was banned by President Richard Nixon's Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1970s, after Rachel Carson's book, "Silent Spring," claimed to show that DDT threatened human health as well as bird populations. But some scientists found no evidence for her claims. Even if there was danger to bird eggs, the problem was the amount of DDT used, not the chemical itself.
While the return of DDT is a good short-term solution to eradicate disease-spreading mosquitoes, scientists at University of Maryland in Rockville, MD, are working to alter the bugs genetically so that they can no longer harbor the parasite that causes malaria:
The mosquito picks up the parasite by biting an infected person. The parasite mates and produces offspring that are deposited in the next person the insect bites. …
Malaria is believed to have killed more people than all wars and other illnesses combined.
The Washington region, now malaria-free, once harbored the disease, and George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are believed to have had it. Malaria is thought to have killed Dante, Saint Augustine and Genghis Khan and to have sickened Mother Teresa, Ho Chi Minh and Christopher Columbus.
"Nothing really tops malaria in terms of an insect-borne disease, in terms of deaths," [David] O'Brochta says. … "Nowadays, those it kills are "mostly kids in Africa under the age of 5."
"The magnitude of the problem really hasn't changed in decades," he says. "In fact, it's getting worse. The number of deaths from malaria is actually going up worldwide, not going down, which is kind of a startling statistic in this day and age."
Though scientists at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, MD, and elsewhere have been trying to come up with a malaria vaccine for decades, thus far there efforts have been fruitless. Since some mosquitoes will eventually become resistant to the effects of DDT – and pass this trait along to their offspring - genetic engineering seems to be the most promising line of attack against malaria.
Unfortunately, environmentalists are also against genetic manipulation, so The Stiletto expects that they will fight tooth and claw to prevent this research from moving from the lab into the field – no matter how many African children die as a result of their callousness.
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