Let’s Extend Full Human Rights To Africa
December 7, 2005
On Human Rights Day, Americans Should Push USAID to Supply Africans With Life-Saving DDT
Human Rights Day on December 10th often goes unnoticed amid the hustle and bustle of our annual holiday shopping binge. That’s a shame because committed Americans can make a huge difference by taking the day to heart.
One human rights cause we can take up this Saturday is to begin protecting millions of Africans from the lethal scourge of malaria the same way we waved ourselves from it forty years ago—with DDT.
More than 100 million Africans currently suffer the wracking agonies of chronic malaria. More than a million of them die every year, mostly children under five. Malaria alone is almost enough to explain the desperate lack of economic growth on the Dark Continent.
Large numbers of African lives could be rescued with one policy change: an aggressive program of spraying DDT inside Africa homes.
DDT is both the world’s best mosquito repellent and its most cost-effective mosquito killer. Instead of providing DDT, however, the U.S. Agency for International Development promotes bednets impregnated with less effective pesticides that cost far more and protect people only when they’re in bed.
For decades, USAID has refused to fund DDT for Africa’s malaria fight—chiefly because of American politics. Most Americans still believe Rachel Carson’s wrongful claims in her book “Silent Spring” that DDT causes cancer in humans and eggshell-thinning in birds.
Some environmental extremists also believe that the world has too many people; and, therefore, are all too willing for the population reduction to start in Africa, with a simple act of omission on our part—omitting DDT.
The irony is that the only countries still expanding their populations are the ones where people are too poor to afford window screens. Malaria doesn’t keep down population, it just increases suffering.
In most of the Third World, births per woman have dropped from 6.2 in 1960 to less than 3 today. In malaria-ridden Africa, the average woman still has more than 5 births.
The first world focuses its fund-raising concerts on the devastation of AIDs—but we can’t stop AIDs. We know how to stop malaria—but we refuse to help Africa do it.
Without DDT, no country has been able to get malaria under control. The alternative chemicals are too weak, too expensive, and too short-lived. With DDT, starting in 1955, the whole First World was able to eradicate malaria, and malaria suffering was radically reduced throughout most of Asia.
Sri Lanka suffered 7300 malaria deaths in 1948; with a strong DDT campaign, there were zero cases in 1963. Several Latin American countries have cut their malaria rates by more than 60 percent since 1993 with indoor DDT.
Since DDT was banned in America in 1972, however, activists in both Europe and the United States have used the myths of Silent Spring to block its use in Africa.
Rachel Carson said DDT “would be proven to be a carcinogen,” along with six or seven other then-used pesticides. Her prediction was flat wrong. The most recent confirmation was the federally funded Long Island breast cancer study published in 2002 that found no linkage to DDT or any other pesticide.
On eggshell thinning in birds, Ms. Carson just plain lied. She stated that the “classic study by Dr. DeWitt” proved that birds exposed to DDT hatched few of their eggs. Actually, Dr. DeWitt found more of the eggs from DDT-exposed birds hatched than did the eggs of unexposed birds. In fact, the Audubon Society counted more eagles in 1960, the heyday of DDT, than in 1941 before its use began!
For all practical purposes, USAID has refused to fund the use of DDT, even indoors. Would we whitewash our living rooms with proven-safe DDT if our kids were dying by the millions?
Of course we would. It’s time we grant the same life-saving opportunity to Africans.
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