Insecticide or Suffering? By Gilbert Ross, M.D.
American Council on Science and Health, Sunday, January 18, 2009
Next week, the European Parliament will debate stringent regulation of a number of effective pesticides. It is apparently too much to expect a sense of shame from European public health officials and their activist "environmental" collaborators when the subject of chemical pesticides is raised.
What about some sense of history? Or compassion? Not likely, as the European Parliament votes next Tuesday on a proposal to tighten the already onerous restrictions on many common insecticides. If this regulation is passed, the consequences will be devastating -- not in Europe, but in Africa and Asia.
Over the decades from World War II through the late 1960s, widespread use of the potent and safe insecticide DDT led to eradication of many insect-borne diseases in Europe and North America. But at the doorstep of global malaria control, DDT became the poster child for environmental degradation, thanks to Rachel Carson's polemic, Silent Spring.
Based on no scientific evidence of human health effects, the newly established U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT, and its European counterparts followed suit. Subsequently, more than 1 million people died each year from malaria -- but not in America or Europe. Rather, most of the victims were children and women in Africa and Asia.
Today, even while acknowledging that indoor spraying of small amounts of DDT would help prevent many deaths and millions of illnesses, nongovernmental organizations continue -- with great success -- to pressure African governments not to allow its use. In order to stave off such pressure and be allowed to sell their agricultural products in Europe, African public health officials cave, and their children die needlessly. Yet, rather than learning the tragic lesson of the DDT ban, the European Union leadership in concert with activists wants to extend this unscientific ban to other effective insecticides, including pyrethroids and organophosphates -- further undercutting anti-malarial efforts.
The currently debated regulation would engender a paradigm shift in the regulation of chemicals, from a risk-based approach -- based on real world exposures from agricultural applications -- to a hazard-based standard, derived from laboratory tests and having little or no basis in reality as far as human health is concerned. Of course, this is fine with anti-chemical zealots in the activist camps. Their concern is bringing down chemical companies in the name of "the environment" -- tough luck if African children have to be sacrificed to their agenda, as was the case with DDT (which is still banned in the EU and not under consideration in the current debate).
Further consequences involve discontinuation of currently used insecticides, leading to higher prices and decreased availability of these chemicals, which would worsen food shortages and increasing malnutrition. Moreover, farmers and marketers of agricultural products in the world's poorest regions would withdraw from using restricted pesticides out of fear of discrimination against their exports in the EU, with similar consequences for farmers' yields, income and local nutrition. Such bans would, in effect, become nontariff trade barriers against poor African farmers.
The banned insecticides will not be easily replaced -- researchers in this area of chemistry will take note of the new, stringent standards and decide the potential return on their investment is not worth the effort of passing through the regulatory hurdles. Development of newer, more effective pesticides will come to a halt.
Most poignantly, the fight against malaria and other insect-borne tropical diseases would take another hit, with resulting illness, disability and death disproportionally affecting children under five and pregnant women.
And what, after all, is the "danger" of these chemicals being debated? In fact, there is no evidence to support the activists' contention that insecticides pose a health threat to humans. Even DDT, one of the most studied chemicals of all time, has been conclusively shown to be safe for humans at all conceivable levels of exposure sufficient to control malaria and save millions of lives.
So these new restrictions would have no benefit, yet contribute to much suffering. Is it asking too much for someone in power in the European Union to care?
Gilbert Ross, M.D., is medical director of the American Council on Science and Health in New York City.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
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You said: "Over the decades from World War II through the late 1960s, widespread use of the potent and safe insecticide DDT led to eradication of many insect-borne diseases in Europe and North America. But at the doorstep of global malaria control, DDT became the poster child for environmental degradation, thanks to Rachel Carson's polemic, Silent Spring."
ReplyDeleteActually, it was window screening and improved housing, coupled with improved health care that wiped out malaria in most of the developing world. In the U.S., malaria was essentially gone by 1939, a full seven years before DDT became available for use. Rising incomes allowed even poor people to screen windows from mosquitoes, and that combined with draining mosquito breeding areas is how the U.S. and most of Europe got rid of malaria. DDT was available at the end of those campaigns, but it was never the principal agent.
Can you document the eradication of any disease due to DDT? WHO attempted a bold campaign to knock down mosquitoes for six months or a year world wide, which would have been enough time for malaria to die out in humans, thereby breaking the cycle. This campaign was frustrated by agricultural over-use of DDT, however, which quickly bred resistance and immunity to DDT into the mosquitoes. By the middle 1960s, WHO abandoned this campaign as impossible. WHO was not successful in eradicating malaria. DDT was part of campaigns against other diseases, too. But in the history of disease, other methods have been more successful, for longer.
Rachel Carson's book was an eye-opener. She had worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which had hard evidence of the destructive nature of DDT well prior to 1950. Studies kept demonstrating harm from the stuff, and U.S. policy was to limit use of DDT, starting with the Department of Agriculture in 1958. WHO abandoned DDT largely in the 1960s because mosquitoes were resistant, as Carson had warned they would be. Carson's claims were backed by more than 50 pages of citations. President John F. Kennedy asked the President's Science Advisory Council to check out Carson's claims. In May 1963 they reported that Carson's book was accurate in every way but one -- she had underestimated the damage being done by DDT, and quicker action was called for against the stuff. In 2007 Discover magazine counted and found more than a thousand peer-reviewed studies that back Carson's claims about the harms of DDT on birds. For the past several years I have looked hard, and I have discovered there is not a single study done which finds DDT is not harmful to birds as Carson wrote. If Dr. Ross has such a study in his hands, I invite him to make it public -- but it runs contrary to every other study ever done, and must be weighed against the overwhelming preponderance of evidence, if it even exists.
You wrote: "Based on no scientific evidence of human health effects, the newly established U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT, and its European counterparts followed suit. Subsequently, more than 1 million people died each year from malaria -- but not in America or Europe. Rather, most of the victims were children and women in Africa and Asia."
There is no significant evidence that DDT ever made significant inroads against malaria over a two- or three-year period. Ross would have us believe that African despots like Idi Amin refused to spray DDT to save Uganda from malaria because he followed religiously the urgings of a gentle, dead American scientist. Complete fantasy.
The U.S. ban on DDT was ordered by two federal courts on the basis of the mountains of evidence they had accumulated at trial -- Ross fails to mention this, for what reason I cannot imagine. EPA ordered that DDT be stopped from agricultural broadcast spraying -- use on cotton, essentially -- but left loopholes for emergencies in health. Manufacture of DDT continued in the U.S. through at least 1984, and it continues in other nations today (almost every DDT manufacturing site in the U.S. is now a Superfund cleanup site; that tells us a lot about the "safety" of the stuff).
In fact, DDT use has been constant in Mexico and India since 1946 -- and yet, those nations, too, see the resurgence of malaria. Were DDT the panacea that Dr. Ross paints it to be, malaria would have been wiped out of both of those nations long ago.
Clearly, DDT is not a panacea.
Here are the facts: EPA's action changing the registration of DDT in 1972 was not the cause of the cessation of DDT use in Africa in the 1960s. One need only be able to read a calendar to understand that. Further, stopping the spraying of DDT on cotton in Texas did not cause an increase of malaria in Africa. One need only to be able to crudely read a map to understand that.
Science journals, newspapers, magazines and broadcast widely and accurately reported that the bald eagle has largely recovered, due to the cessation of use of DDT. Several other species are recovering, including brown pelicans (even despite die offs to a different cause in the past three months in California), osprey and peregrine falcons.
Malaria deaths were reduced from about 2 million a year to under a million a year without DDT. Malaria and yellow fever among Panama Canal construction workers was largely beaten 30 years before DDT became available for use against mosquitoes, and malaria was essentially wiped out in the U.S. and Europe before DDT became available. Methods other than spraying DDT have proven more effective and longer lasting, and much less destructive to croplands, food fish, and wildlife.
DDT isn't coming back. Africans will not allow it, regardless any stand any environmental or anti-environmental cleanup group like the American Council on Science and Health say. We cannot poison Africa to health, even if Africans would allow it.
Bednets, draining mosquito breeding pools, providing effective medical care, and education on exposure to vectors are safer, cheaper in the long run, and more effective means of fighting malaria.
I invite Dr. Ross and ACSH to stop slamming the reputation of Rachel Carson, to stop fighting scientists, and join in fighting malaria instead. We could use the help, and so could Africa -- much more than it needs one more over-used poison.