hough Africa's sad experience with colonialism ended in the 1960s, a lethal vestige remains: malaria. It is the biggest killer of Ugandan and all African children. Yet it remains preventable and curable. Last week in Germany, G-8 leaders committed new resources to the fight against the mosquito-borne disease and promised to use every available tool.Now they must honor this promise by supporting African independence in the realm of disease control. We must be able to use Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane -- DDT.
The United States and Europe eradicated malaria by 1960, largely with the use of DDT. At the time, Uganda tested the pesticide in the Kanungu district and reduced malaria by 98%. Despite this success, we lacked the resources to sustain the program. Rather than partner with us to improve our public health infrastructure, however, foreign donors blanched. They used Africa's lack of infrastructure to justify not investing in it.
Today, every single Ugandan still remains at risk. Over 10 million Ugandans are infected each year, and up to 100,000 of our mothers and children die from the disease. Recently Ugandan country music star Job Paul Kafeero died of the disease, a reminder that no one is beyond its reach. Yet, many still argue that Africa's poor infrastructure makes indoor spraying too costly and complex a means of fighting malaria.
Uganda is one of a growing number of African countries proving these people wrong. In 2006, Uganda worked with President George Bush's Malaria Initiative to train 350 spray operators, supervisors and health officials. In August 2006 and again in February 2007, we covered 100,000 households in the southern Kabale district with the insecticide Icon. Nearly everyone welcomed this protection. The prevalence of the malaria parasite dropped. Today, just 3% of the local population carries the disease, down from 30%.
This exercise pays for itself. With 90% fewer people requiring anti-malarial medication and other public-health resources, more healthy adults work and more children attend school. When we repeated the test program in Kabale and neighboring Kanungu district this year, our spray teams required little new training and were rapidly mobilized. Our health officials at every level were able to educate our communities, implement spraying programs and evaluate operations. With each passing year, it will now be easier and less expensive to run the programs.
But DDT lasts longer, costs less and is more effective against malaria-carrying mosquitoes than Icon. It functions as spatial repellent to keep mosquitoes out of homes, as an irritant to prevent them from biting, and as a toxic agent to kill those that land. The repellency effect works without physical contact. And because we will never use the chemical in agriculture, DDT also makes mosquitoes less likely to develop resistance.
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A Doctor and Documentarian Against the DDT Ban
By Dr. D. Rutledge Taylor
Besides being a film producer, I have a preventive medicine practice in Los Angeles. As it happens, California was leading the nation in West Nile virus cases in 2005, and I was being asked about it more frequently by my patients. Meaning only to get up to speed on vector-borne diseases, I found myself reading volume upon volume of studies on malaria and vector-borne diseases. I was feeling like a budding Albert Schweitzer M.D., wondering what I could do to actually make a difference. Well, like Schweitzer, I could go abroad and work on one patient at a time, but from what I was finding, this would hardly be efficacious.
In February of 2005, I met with Dr. Art Robinson in San Francisco. He had once worked for many years with Dr. Linus Pauling and currently has his own laboratory where he conducts protein research among other studies. We talked at length about malaria, DDT, and Third World countries. I found him to be honest, forthright, and willing to pour out what he knew. On my evening flight back to L.A., everything seemed surreal. I knew somehow my life as I knew it had been discontinued.
I told my production partner, an environmentalist, about the conversation and she had a lot of trouble with it. Yet, she was hearing it from me and she also knew I had met with a very ethical and prominent scientist. We agreed to research further. The more I read about vector-borne diseases, the more convinced I was that prevention, rather than treatment, was by far the superior approach. From what I could find out in regard to malaria and other vector- (insect-) borne diseases, treatment was the order of the day and had been for many years. From what we could see, it was an abject failure. Our research showed that the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Europe eradicated malaria and many other insect-borne diseases from 1945-70 with the use of DDT. Prevention was the main or first line of defense, followed by other measures.
Something happened in America in the 60s, and it was not just Vietnam. Rachel Carson wrote a "novel," not a scientific study subject to peer review, but a novel, called Silent Spring. Fear spread across the face of this land -- I could see this as I read articles, journals, editorial comments, and ads in the New York Times suggesting mothers were poisoning their nursing children with DDT-tainted breast milk. DDT was allowed, a very slight amount, even in baby food.
Whipped into a frenzy by Rachel Carson's book, fearing cancer, people were in effect fearing the unknown. After Earth Day in 1970, it was clear to politicians that the public was demanding getting rid of the most innocuous of chemicals -- DDT. It was legally banned in 1972 by people who knew better at the time -- people who were "supposed to know." People who said they were protecting us and wildlife. Were they? Did they?
Traveling the World to Witness the Ban's Effects
In order to find the answers we put together a team and actually traveled the world. Our travel time was a coincidental yet prophetic forty days and forty nights. Why this ban on DDT? What have been the gains for the U.S. citizenry for this ban? Why have no major news media worth their salt plastered the resulting death rates all over the media? We interviewed people in places ranging from the streets of South Africa, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Panama to the U.S. Senate committee hearings in Washington -- from doctors, clinics, hospitals, NGOs, Environmental Defense Fund, fighters for malarial relief to people on the streets of the U.S.
Insect-borne diseases are on the rise all over the world. Malaria alone infects more than a half-billion, mostly women and children, yearly with more and more deaths piled upon the deaths of the preceding years. Something was terribly wrong. This ban was touted by the Environmental Protection Agency and environmental groups everywhere as a "success" story and still is to this very hour. But they are going to have to come forward with more than words, more than feel-good, look-good soundbites. The result of the DDT ban has been an unspeakable death toll -- and a sad, deception-riddled tale.
It took us what has seemed like forever to wade through the junk science held up to be valid, to get to the hard peer-reviewed data. There have been literally thousands of studies of every possible aspect of DDT. What peer-reviewed, replicated scientific data supports the ban on DDT? None.
Instead we found that DDT, the most effective chemical for preventing malaria and a veritable host of other diseases (West Nile virus, Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Dengue fever, lice, yellow fever, river blindness, elephantiasis, St. Louis encephalitis virus, typhus, Chagas disease, bubonic plague, Japanese encephalitis, bed bugs, and many others -- not to mention many bird and animal diseases), had been made a chemical scapegoat, a glorified whipping boy. DDT had to go down to satisfy politics, resulting in massive deaths among mostly black, brown, and yellow human beings.
Guilt and a Creative Response
Now, the threatened faces are lighter, whiter. We admit that our parents' generation made a grave mistake by banning DDT. They were scared. What they did in ignorance, we must redress with knowledge. We will stand by our parents by helping to make this right again. My friend, a prominent psychologist, says, "the unconscious guilt our parents carry in this regard can be terrible."
Unaware of the havoc and pain hasty actions would set in motion worldwide, our parents are perhaps being mentally weighed down without their even knowing it. The burden of partial awareness of all those deaths is being borne by the American people, and the burden is looming large. The carnage just goes on and on with no end in sight. Even a malaria vaccine would leave mosquitoes and other insects free to spread many cases of the disease -- and there would be an astronomical loss of life while we "wait" for a vaccine. Billions do not have time to wait. Their voices crying for help have been silenced over the years, but they are now getting desperately louder, shriller. I heard firsthand the sound of their silence and it was deafening.
What has been done with the stroke of a government pen can be undone. How? By stirring up awareness so that more people will come to know and experience the power of many voices speaking as one.
It is our hope that 3 Billion and Counting http://3billionandcounting.com/, (the result of this research) a film I directed and produced due out later this year, will be a catalyst in this awakening. As a brief glimpse of this powerful footage from the film reveals, (Africa Slaughtered) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFBDTuv10H8 we are dealing with the greatest human death toll in known history, far greater than the Holocaust and all wars combined- the greatest crime against humanity that this world has ever known.
It is time that we wake up and do what is right for humanity.
Dr. D. Rutledge Taylor
Los Angeles, CA
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