Malaria’s burden is enormous. Each year, the disease infects 350 to 500 million people and kills at least a million – the vast majority in Africa, mostly children under 5. As decades have passed, science has shown that Carson was wrong about some of the dangers she associated with DDT. It’s also true that the insecticide can be a valuable tool in the arsenal against malaria. But blaming Carson and the environmental movement for malaria’s death toll is not supported by evidence from generations of scientists and malaria researchers.
“Groups are latching onto the emotional impact of the malaria story, which is truly a human tragedy, to discredit environmentalists,” says John M. Balbus, chief health scientist with Environmental Defense. “Are there places where DDT may have been beneficial? Probably, yes.” But is the 1970s DDT ban “the cause for rampant malaria and millions of deaths? Absolutely not.”
Historians and scientists have shown that despite some benefits of DDT, few African countries made the pesticide a part of their malaria control efforts over the past quarter century. Many factors led to the decreased use of DDT – factors that had nothing to do with Carson. In fact, the decline in DDT use coincided with a drop in malaria rates.
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According to the EPA’s Ellenberger, the decision was backed by sound science, with evidence of DDT’s negative effects on wildlife continuing to mount.
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Tren, who is allied with libertarian and free-market think tanks, such as the Institute of Economic Affairs, believes that anti-insecticide sentiment scared donors away from DDT programs. “By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the donor nations were starting to withdraw support from insecticide-spraying programs and from the use of DDT,” Tren says. “I am confident in saying that the anti-DDT crusades harmed malaria control and cost lives.”
That is misleading, say Litsios and Clive Shiff, a malaria researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who has participated in malaria programs in Africa for decades. They stress that aid organizations weren’t anti-DDT during that period, they were pro-medicine. Through the '70s and '80s, most countries, on the advice of the WHO, “changed their approach to malaria control from insecticide treatment to treating people with chloroquine” – which kills the parasites that cause malaria – “because that was a way they could impact the mortality of the disease,” Shiff says. “I don’t think the ban of DDT in the U.S. had any impact on malaria control programs in Africa, certainly not in southern Africa where I was working.”
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But many of the dangers Carson warned about, such as the detrimental effects of DDT on birds, have held up. It is now well accepted that when DDT accumulates in the environment, it causes eggshells to thin and crack, leaving predatory birds such as ospreys and other raptors especially vulnerable. DDT is also toxic to many fish. “In retrospect, the facts have borne out the concerns,” says Environmental Defense’s Balbus.
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As for the DDT debate in vogue at the moment, Berenbaum says, “it’s all emotional and not rational.” She fully agrees that malaria is an international tragedy, and she doesn’t “place the lives of ospreys above the lives of people,” she says. But neither would Berenbaum pin her hopes on one insecticide – a point Carson herself understood half a century ago. “Carson’s point wasn’t that DDT was evil,” Berenbaum says. “It was that if you put all your eggs in one basket, that basket’s going to break.”