Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM). Founded in 2000 by Roger Bate, an economist at various right-wing think tanks, AFM has run a major PR campaign to push the pro-DDT story, publishing scores of op-eds and appearing in dozens of articles each year. Bate and his partner Richard Tren even published a book laying out their alternate history of DDT: When Politics Kills: Malaria and the DDT Story. she says that one expert “now gives DDT the definite rating of a chemical carcinogen.”
Ironically, while Carson called for policy based on reason over myths, she opened her book up with a “Fable for Tomorrow,” describing a town in which chemicals have destroyed wildlife and people die from chemical exposures. She admitted it doesn’t exist, but somehow we are supposed act on her myth because, “It might have easily have a thousand counterparts in America.”
But Rachel was wrong. Humans were exposed to massive amounts of DDT without showing ill effect. And unlike Carson’s fable, malaria is a harsh reality today, killing more than a million people a year and making 300 million seriously ill, mostly in the developing world. Follow the links on this page to learn more about the malaria crisis and how DDT could help remedy the problem.
The pesticide DDT—which is short for Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane—have proven to be a critically important tool in reducing malaria transmission, practically eradicating malaria in some areas of the world. Paul Herman Muller discovered DDT’s insecticidal properties in 1939, which earned him the 1948 Nobel Prize in Medicine because his discovery provided a highly effective and affordable way to manage major public health risks carried by mosquitoes, lice, and other vectors. DDT has saved millions of lives around the world. It helped cleanse Nazi war victims of disease-ridden lice, and it was embedded in the uniforms to protect allied troops from vermin and typhus.
Several studies have attempted to link DDT with some cancers and other problems, but have failed to show a conclusive link. In particular, a number of studies have sought to establish a link between DDT and related pesticides and breast cancer, claiming that these produces disrupt endocrine systems and produce breast cancer. One study claimed to find a link in 1993, but it was deemed not definitive in part because of its relatively small sample size. Subsequent studies of greater scope could not find a link. The National Research Council concluded in 1999, in a report reviewing the “endocrine disruptor” issue, that the original breast cancer study and all the ones published before 1995 “do not support an association between DDT metabolites or PCBs and the risk of breast cancer.” More recently, U.S. researchers produced one of the largest and most comprehensive studies ever on the topic, assessing the impact of pesticides on breast cancers among women in Long Island, New York. This research could not find a link between the breast cancers and the chemicals most often cited as the problem (DDT and other pesticides as well as PCBs).
http://rachelwaswrong.org/malaria-legacy/
