The New Ledger:

For two years the United Nations paid lip service to the truth that the insecticide DDT is a vital component of malaria control, but last week UN abandoned science in favor of superstition. The result is UN promotion of more dangerous and less efficient malaria control techniques.

On May 5th, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Environment Program announced plans to reduce DDT use by 30% by 2014 and completely eliminate it by around 2020. In the mean time, the UN will roll out initiatives in 40 countries to test non-chemical methods of malaria control. In particular UN wants to scale up the programs of Central America, which have relied on “pharmacosuppression”.

Essentially, uninfected people in high risk locations are given the antimalarial drug chloroquine to suppress any future infection. In 2004, 3,400 malaria cases were diagnosed in Mexico, 6,897 in Nicaragua, and almost half a million in Brazil. But both Mexico and Nicaragua each distributed more anti-malaria pills (mostly chloroquine pills) than Brazil. Chloroquine is a wonderful drug at combating malaria and has saved millions of lives when used therapeutically, as in Brazil,, but prophylactic use is not safe because it is quite toxic and has led to heart problems when used repeatedly. As scientists at the University of Colima in Mexico explained last year, chloroquine “can induce lethal ventricular arrhythmias.”

Ironically, chloroquine is only slightly less toxic than DDT yet people have to eat chloroquine pills, they don’t eat DDT. The UN does not mention this, or that the Central American policy cannot be used in most other regions because of extensive resistance to chloroquine and high cost. So even if pharmacosuppression were clinically appropriate, it couldn’t be done in Africa anyway.

The UN’s push for a “zero DDT world”, ignores the millions of lives DDT has saved over the past century, with little to no adverse environmental impact and no harm to human health. From the late 1940s until the early 1970s, spraying DDT was the mainstay of anti-mosquito campaigns responsible for successfully eradicating malaria from North America and much of Europe. Thanks to DDT, by 1970, an estimated one billion people no longer lived in malaria-endemic areas; in Southeast Asia, cases fell from a high of 110 million in 1950 to nearly zero by 1969.