I was picking up my kids at their church youth group recently, and as I did they handed me a flyer: it’s the fall mission project to help save lives from the scourge of Malaria in the third world, particularly Africa, and the church has partnered with a missionary group active in the area. The mechanism for saving lives lost to the plague of malaria? Mosquito nets, with a natural insecticide on them.

I will probably buy a net or two. This is a solid evangelical church, and I want to support it in any way I can.

I just wish I could contribute to a DDT fund.

Seriously.

The charity rightly recounts that over a million lives in the third world are lost each year to Malaria. Some estimates put it at three million, and yes it’s mostly pregnant women and children. Hundreds of millions more are sickened every year. When not being able to work means not being able to eat, what a tragedy!

But what’s most sickening is that it is such an unnecessary one. After World War two, Malaria started disappearing from many countries. It all but disappeared from the U.S., but even in countries like Sri Lanka, there were 2.8 million cases of malaria in 1948, and 29 in 1963. Yes, you read that right. From 2.8 million cases to 29.

Why? Because of DDT, developed during World War II. Sprayed in trace amounts on the inside of homes and schools to kill and repel malaria causing mosquitoes, it proved to be a kind of miracle.

But since the late 1970s, malaria rates in Sri Lanka and around the world have again sky rocketed, solely because environmentalists in the West have gotten unnecessarily squeamish about the miracle pesticide DDT.

Let’s review. There is not one peer-reviewed, replicated scientific study which has ever shown harm to humans from DDT. Not one. At most, there was some environmental damage shown from its wide use in agriculture in the 1940s and 50s. (The damage was reversible, even the much ballyhooed damage resulting in the thinning of some bird egg shells.)

Meanwhile, Rachel Carson penned her famous thriller, “Silent Spring” in 1962. (Al Gore call your office) And so the environmentalists in the west went to work making DDT if not outright illegal, so politically incorrect (and tied to first world funding) that few third-world governments dared use it.

And rates of malaria skyrocketed. It’s as simple as that.

DDT is not the only chemical in the anti-malaria arsenal. It should be rotated with other chemicals. But DDT is uniquely cheap and effective. Here’s why: when mosquitoes eventually build-up a resistance to the chemical, they are still repelled by it.

Still, major relief organizations, like the World Health Organization and the Agency for International Development, repeatedly say “no” to requests for funding from poor countries for DDT spraying.

Meanwhile, some 600 malariologists have gotten so frustrated with the situation they have signed an open letter asking that the effective world-wide ban on DDT be reconsidered. And, in fact, DDT has begun creeping back into use in some countries, with dramatic and positive effect on reducing malaria rates.

What is the ban on DDT all for, anyway? So western environmentalists can sleep better at night, while women and children literally die? And yet the politics of DDT even here in the western suburbs of Chicago are such that a great church, which genuinely wants to help the malaria plague in the third world, has to settle for nets with a “natural” pesticide – something far less effective than what we know works.

I’ll happily buy a few nets for the church mission project. Nets are, in fact, helpful in the fight against malaria. I just wish I could really help those third-world folks – by spraying them with just a touch of DDT.
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Betsy Hart is the author of “It Takes a Parent: How the Culture of Pushover Parenting is Hurting our Kids and What to do About It” (Putnam Books, 2005.)

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