Better living through chemistry: DDT could save millions of Africans from dying of malaria—if only environmentalists would let it

Washington Monthly, March, 2003 by Alexander Gourevitch

Impressed, the U.S. military deployed DDT in 1942 to fight a third front against diseases like malaria, dengue, and typhus, which until then had seriously impaired U.S. fighting forces, especially in Italy and the Pacific Theater. Army personnel sprayed soldiers, dusted beachheads, and even deloused concentration camp survivors with DDT. After the war, DDT came into use for commercial and public health purposes. Farmers used DDT to protect cash crops like cotton, corn, and apples from a wide variety of agricultural pests. Around the same time, the U.S. government launched an ambitious DDT-centered malaria eradication project which by the early `60s had virtually eliminated malaria from Southern Europe, the Caribbean, and parts of East and South Asia. (In India, for example, annual deaths went from 800,000 to zero.) At the time, DDT was thought to be such an effective and useful substance that in 1948, Muller received a Nobel Prize in medicine. "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT," declared the National Academy of Sciences in a report in 1970. "In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria."

But by then, the tide had begun to turn against DDT. During the 1960s, reports began to emerge of increasing resistance to the drug among insects, probably sparked by its widespread use in agriculture. At the same time, case-detection followed by medical treatment began to emerge as the new model for malaria control. (By 1979, the World Health Organization had formally endorsed this approach over that of preemptive insecticide spraying.) Most important, however, was the publication of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring in 1962.

Carson's book was a lyrical broadside against synthetic chemicals in general, but against DDT in particular. She noted that as DDT seeped into the ground and ran off into streams, worms and fish stored it in their fatty tissues. Over time, songbirds like the robin and other prized avians, including bald eagles and peregrine falcons, ingested enough contaminated prey that they died of DDT poisoning. If they didn't die outright, Carson warned, studies also showed that DDT prevented reproduction by thinning eggshells. Carson also trumpeted studies of rats which suggested DDT was a liver carcinogen, and gathered anecdotal evidence of harm in human beings, like a farmer whose bone marrow wasted away after repeatedly inhaling a mixture of DDT and benzene hexachloride he used to spray his fields.

Silent Spring practically launched the modern environmental movement. The Environmental Defense Fund cut its teeth in national politics raising public alarm over--and bringing lawsuits against--DDT use, which in turn pushed the recently created Environmental Protection Agency to hold a series of hearings on DDT. The critics were so successful that, although the administrative judge presiding over the hearings concluded that "DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man ... DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man," the EPA banned it anyway in 1972. (Chemical companies, of course, were more than happy to supply the less practical, more expensive alternatives.) The U.S. ban was a turning point; soon after, anti-DDT sentiment went global. Environmental organizations campaigned against its use abroad, wealthy countries began to restrict funding for DDT projects, and the World Health Organization shifted away from promoting it for public health uses. By 2000, a group of environmental activists, led by the World Wildlife Fund, was promoting a U.N. "persistent organic pollutants" treaty known as the Stockholm Convention, which would have banned DDT worldwide for all uses. Only at the last minute was an exemption added for public health use.