Totally lift the DDT ban

From Front Page Magazine:

You missed the Africa Malaria Day celebration on April 25, didn't you?

Perfectly understandable. Unless you're headed for a three-week safari in Kenya, malaria doesn't appear on our modern radar screens.

But for the poorest, hottest corners of the planet, malaria remains a scourge for which there is no vaccine. The incapacitating disease, caused by a parasite transmitted from humans to humans by mosquitoes, afflicts from 350 million to 500 million people a year in Asia, Africa and South America. More than 80 percent are in rural Africa.

Every year malaria kills at least 1 million humans -- nearly 3,000 a day, mostly the very young or pregnant. The real figure could be 2.5 million annual deaths. No one knows for sure.

Despite these daunting statistics, the global war against malaria may finally be taking a turn for the better. The same miracle weapon that we and most of Europe employed to rid ourselves of malaria half a century ago -- the pesticide DDT -- is starting to be used more widely in Africa.

DDT isn't foolproof but works wonders. Lightly sprayed twice a year on the inside walls of living quarters, it's like Kryptonite to the mosquitoes that carry malaria. In 1945 when India began using DDT, it had 800,000 malaria deaths a year; by 1960, it had a few thousand.

Other malarial hells were not so lucky. In the early 1970s environmentalists spooked by Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring" successfully lobbied the federal government to outlaw DDT in the United States because it allegedly was killing off American eagles and was a cancer threat to humans.

It's turned out that DDT is virtually harmless to man, bird or beast. But that didn't help Africa's malaria sufferers, who for 30 years were deprived of DDT because Western relief aid was often contingent on recipient countries not using DDT. Most poor countries that needed it most stopped using it or never got it. Tens of millions died.

This is why I hate the left with every fiber of my being. The environmentalist and bureaucrats who banned DDT knew that it was harmless when they did it. It was nothing but an exercise in muscle flexing to "put the environmental movement on the map". The fact that it would kill millions of innocent people, most of them children, mattered not the slightest bit to them.

Things are changing now. DDT is being used again in the Third World, but that isn't enough. DDT does more than kill mosquitoes it is the most effective general insecticide ever devised by man and it does this while being the most harmless to non-insect life forms. The insecticides being used in the US today are deadly poisons to humans and other mammals. Go to the local Lowes or Home Depot and read the warning labels on the bug killers. Non of that would be necessary for DDT. You could drink a water glass of it with no ill effects.

The question we need to ask now is why the Third World deserves to have the blessings of DDT and the US does not.