No, no, it’s not that white stuff. It’s that other white powder. The one that makes some of us go mad with anger, whilst others relentlessly defend its use. That some claim will give you breast cancer, whilst others say you can drink and inhale it without any harm. That some claim will destroy our environment, whilst others oppose by saying it will save millions of lives.
Here’s the story of DDT: Mankind’s most controversial chemical ever. Discovered in 1874 by a chemistry student named Otmar Zeidler. Found to be a superb bug killing chemical in
the late 1930s by Swiss chemist Paul Muller. For which he got a Nobel Prize in 1948.
If you read this and live in the Southern USA, Europe, Russia, Australia, Taiwan, or the Carribean, say ‘Thank You’. Millions of houses in these parts of the world were sprayed with DDT between 1940-1960, resulting in the disappearance of malaria. Because of DDT, when you go to sleep tonight you don’t need to worry about malaria anymore.
But hold on. Didn’t we hear about DDT in school as the chemical that led to the (almost) extinction of the American bald eagle? The US national symbol with its white-feathered head? Because of thinning egg shells and loss of reproductive capacity? Yes we did. And weren’t we told that DDT was accumulating in the food chain and causing endless harm to the environment? Yes we were. And was it not thanks to biologist Rachel Carson that published the book Silent Spring in 1962, that the world opened its eyes making the stuff banned in the early 1970s? Indeed. So?
Listen to Carson first…
Lies, scare mongering, and environmentalist lobbying
According to Prof. Don Roberts and co-authors, who recently published the book ‘The Excellent Powder: DDT’s political and scientific history’, we were all fooled by a bunch of liars, including Carson. Roberts goes as far as accusing the greens for deliberately forcing the ban on DDT so that developing countries could not be protected from malaria and thus avoid an unbridled population explosion. Saving Africans from malaria would merely result in a population explosion. Better get rid of DDT.
Roberts uses 432 pages to tell us that the greens lied to us about the fate of the Bald Eagle, the peregrine falcon and robins during the period that DDT was used widely in US agriculture. He blames hunting and habitat loss instead of DDT and uses page after page to show us he is right. Every claim by the greens is met by an anti-claim of Roberts. Why does he do this?
DDT was responsible for freeing a major part of the planet from malaria. It is cheap, very effective, and saves lives because it kills mosquitoes. Roberts wants more widespread use of the stuff in Africa (beyond the 4-5 million kg sprayed there already each year). He argues that not a single person has ever suffered any health effects of DDT, that it biodegrades eventually, and that humans merely store it in the fat tissues and eventually get rid of it.
A report prepared by fifteen US/South African scientists, the Pine River Statement, condemned DDT and held on to what they consider studies that unequivocally demonstrated human health effects of DDT, still officially declared as a carcinogen. Roberts puts the (almost 500!) studies on which the report was based away as ‘un-replicated, contradictory, or statistically insignificant’. Roberts takes on a British Journal of Urology article by accusing them of ‘manipulating data’. Finally, his resentment of one of the foremost scientific journals Science is apparent by accusing them of being biased and guilty of fraud. Heavy statements.
But doesn’t DDT lead to resistance in mosquitoes? Yes it does. But Roberts uses endless studies to defend his point that resistance doesn’t matter. DDT is keeping mosquitoes from entering houses. Fewer bites, less malaria. That mosquitoes are becoming resistant to the stuff is not important, an issue for which Roberts goes head-on with the World Health Organisation. And if this isn’t enough he also accuses them of being weak and subjected to political agendas and falling for the nonsense coming out of environmentalists.
It remains to be seen if Roberts’ book will open the eyes of environmentalists and the broader public. Politicians will be careful to stay away from DDT – it is much too controversial. Scientists seeking new solutions to control malaria will continue to use DDT as the example of how things should not be done. The pesticide lobby producing what they consider more benign chemicals for mosquito control will support a permanent ban of DDT.
The net result: The disease that no longer bears on us is killing a million kids in Africa each year. And that’s our fault, thanks to the greenies, says Roberts.
Roberts and co-authors stand out from the crowd. But what if they are right?
Roberts, D., Tren, R., Bate, R. and Zambone, J. (2010). The excellent powder: DDT's political and scientific history. Dog Ear Publishing, USA. 432 pp. More about this book here.
Thanks for this interesting point Bart!
Just to add an information to your post, both Tren and Roberts are part of Africa Fighting Malaria which is an NGO in favour of the use of DDT… and this echoes a paper published in Le Monde Diplomatique a couple of years ago ‘Revenge of the DDT’ (in french: http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2006/07/RIVIERE/13617 in portuguese: http://diplo.org.br/2006-07,a1349) mentioning the link between this NGO and a couple of companies (including Exxonmobil)
It would certainly be interesting to know if any of those are producing DDT and how these relations affect (or not) the position of AFM on the use of DDT…
@Christoph. Thanks for bringing up these articles. The comment that ‘The ban of DDT caused more deaths than those caused by Hitler’ is particularly striking.
As far as I know, DDT is only being produced in India and China at the moment, and due to be phased out completely by 2017. Roberts and Tren fight to stop this complete ban, but the odds are against them I’m afraid.
However, when I read the book, it really did make me think twice about DDT, I must confess. Roberts certainly makes a compelling case.
And, with more than 600 views of this blog, and only 1 comment so far (from you) indicates that this is a very sensitive issue that people don’t want to get involved in…
So thanks for opening the debate, I look forward to seeing more contibutions.
@Bart,
Another comment…
I tend the find the sentence ‘The ban of DDT caused more deaths than those caused by Hitler’ a bit dubious.
How many malaria deaths are due to socio-economic hardship generated by the public health reforms (SAPs) in Sub-Saharan Africa or in Central and South America?
What would it cost to favour the development and use of efficient and environmentally friendly methods?
@Christoph. That is indeed a dubious statement, but powerful nevertheless.
The fight of Roberts and colleagues to get DDT more widely used again in malaria control does have a negative effect: the search for truly environmentally benign alternatives. This is what I eluded in in my blog that science may cripple development: http://development.thinkaboutit.eu/think3/post/can_science_cripple_development
In their book they do admit that robins were killed immediately after DDT spraying, they do agree that egg shells thinned (but did not make bald eagles extinct), and they do admit that DDE accumulates in the food chain. But they argue that that is not harmful…
Suppose that this is true. Then still the argument holds that we may not wish to have such chemicals lingering around in nature (at times for a very long time). It gets back to the ‘precautionary principle’, as there may be effects that we don’t know of yet but manifest themselves only after prolonged exposure.
In the book they argue that chemicals that are very closely related to DDT are present in the environment. I find that a weak argument - chemical A may be deadly, chemical B (with a minute structural difference) may be completely harmless.
They argue that because DDT is an organochlorine that other compounds with chlorines are accepted by us, and they use table salt (sodium chloride). Also this is a weak argument, as if all chlorinated hydrocarbons are the same…
Finally, and this argument will upset many, they claim that because of malaria, African families compensate for children lost to malaria by producing more. They than crawl under the skin of an African person saying ‘They may think “we must do something about this disease before we lose more of our children”. This is a pretty far-reaching conclusion (particulalry in view of the availability of bednets).
There are more issues raised in the book that are debatable, let’s see if others want to chip in here first…
Hi Bart,
Thank you for bringing up this topic. It is good of Roberts and co authors to research and compile the facts and issues related to DDT’s ban.
I will comment on the paragraph related to the development of resistance against DDT and the role of environmentalists.
Like you said, resistance will develop against DDT but it also developed against pyrethroids soon after their introduction over 30 years ago. The resistance against pyrethroids, has been proved possible to manage in many field situations. Same would have been the case for DDT.
As far as the environmentalists are concerned, the Golf of Mexican oil spill is the latest example, where the highly sophisticated, robust and perfect reasoning, from them, led to off-shore drilling (a big mistake) which in turn caused a highly sophisticated, robust and perfect disaster. Banning DDT was a similar big mistake…..
@Tullu
Your argument that the oil spill in the Golf of Mexico is due to environmentalists is really surprising… Given the disadvantages of oil sands (see the example of Alberta) because of the dangers for the environment and the natives, I do not think the environmentalists are the ones to blame.
On this point we should probably think that the fault is our dependence on fossil fuels and the nature of capitalism that is putting profit before safety and men.
@Tullu. The resistance issue is as follows: physiological resistance has been observed in many places (i.e. when the mosquito lands on a surface sprayed with DDT it no longer dies). However, Roberts claims that >70% of mosquitoes approaching a sprayed house do not enter it. So whether a mosquito has developed phsyiological resistance is not an issue as long as DDT repels.
But this is also the weakness of the story - because next to physiological resistance there will also be (or probably already is) behavioural resistance, where mosquitoes are no longer repelled by DDT and enter a house regardless. The same fate is there for pyrethroids…
Hi Bart
A major misrepresentation of the Stockholm Convention programme on DDT is that DDT is to be phased out by 1017. This is not true. It is only a considered target date for a plan towards phasing out DDT (http://chm.pops.int/Programmes/DDT/Overview/tabid/378/language/en-US/Default.aspx), and not at all a target of the Conference of the Parties.
The exact text states: “The hurdles in the future are the considerations of the Secretariat of the Stockholm Convention and do not reflect the views of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention.”
There is no decision by the COP to phase out DDT at any given date.
Oops…I meant 2017 in stead of 1017. Sorry
@Henk. The statement that it should be phased out by 2017 I got from the authors and is mentioned in this interview (at 3 min, 9 sec): http://biggovernment.com/tag/donald-roberts/
Tren states in this interview “However, there is a deadline that has been set by 2017, where the UN Stockhom convention wants to halt production of DDT and elimination completely by 2020, so no more production after 2017”.
So he is not telling the truth here?
It is in this interveiw and elsewhere represented as a deadline without any further clarification of qualification. DDT under Annex B of the Stockholm Convention is listed under “Restriction”, not in Annex A that is “Elimination”. For DDT to move to Annex A will need a COP decision. Language that speaks to banning or phasing out shoud be clear on the conditions.
Keep in mind that the “hitler” quote is from a fictitious character in the Michael Crichton novel. Bate and others are much more subtle; you might find an interesting read in http://www.nrns.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51:bate-and-switch-how-a-free-market-magician-manipulated-two-decades-of-environmental-science-
@Henk. Many thanks for adding this clarification. One more thing: considering that your work and involvement in the Pine River statement was mentioned in the book, what is your opinion that this review was put away as ‘un-replicated, contradictory, or statistically insignificant’?
@Philipe. Thanks for this link… not much good about Bate. I also found a recent website condemning Tren, asking what he has actually done with his organisation AFM besides lobbying against the ban on DDT…
I have sent an email to Don Roberts and Richard Tren, inviting them to comment on this blog and the discussion, but so far they remain silent…
@Bart. I have not read the book.
To reiterate the conclusions of the Pine River Statement by 15 scientists based on 494 refereed studies. You be the judge.
“Use restrictions have been successful in lowering human exposure to DDT, but blood concentrations of DDT and DDE are high in countries where DDT is currently being used or was more recently restricted. The recent literature shows a growing body of evidence that exposure
to DDT and its breakdown product DDE may be associated with adverse health outcomes such as breast cancer, diabetes, decreased semen quality, spontaneous abortion, and impaired neurodevelopment in children.
CONCLUSONS: Although we provide evidence to suggest that DDT and DDE may pose a risk to human health, we also highlight the lack of knowledge about human exposure and health effects in communities where DDT is currently being sprayed for malaria control. We recommend research to address this gap and to develop safe and effective alternatives to DDT.
@Henk. I have indeed seen these conclusions at the end of the review.
I’m sorry - but what does this mean? The study ‘suggests’ that DDT/DDE ‘may’ pose a risk to human health. Does this mean that 494 studies have still not provided conclusive evidence of negative health effects?
And then, if 494 studies have not tabled sufficient, solid, and conclusive evidence, then what’s the need to call for more research?
Let me ask a more explicit question: do you personally consider that these health effects do not warrant continued use of DDT at present?
@Bart
There are a number of issues and I will only touch on some of them. We have submitted a more extensive assessment of DDT for review and are awaiting a result, therefore some points.
1. Conclusive, irrefutable, cause-effect studies will only be possible with controlled, lab-type, exposures of humans over multiple generations - obviously impossible.
2. Therefore, you need to assess existing knowledge and judge whether that is conclusive. Obviously, that has a number of inherent drawbacks re extrapolation to say a malaria-type exposure scenario from factory exposures.
3. Also, newer and more sensitive biomarkers have become available, and we have a better understanding of the various modes of action of biologically active chemicals (say endocrine disruption, but there are more). As we are getting more and better information on how chemicals interact with biology, and more studies are throwing up red lights, than we cannot stop with research, but follow what the data (or its interpretation actually) shows us. Therefore, not only more research, but also better-informed research is needed. The 494 studies in the PRS (Pine River Statement) were only human exposure studies published between 2003 and 2008! This number does not include all the other non-human, environmental, and lab studies published during the same period…and more have appeared since then.
4. There are, however, very few epidemiological (effects) studies from malaria areas - this is a real and serious shortcoming, and a shame (again, more focussed studies needed).
5. Lastly, based on all the evidence one can make a judgement. Since more and more studies indicate effects on various systems (not on all mind you, but read the details in PRS), the picture becomes more coherent (read the details in PRS), and it provides for the latest and best-informed assessment on DDT (PRS), but with the added qualifications (this was the crux of your 1st and 2nd questions).
As to your last question: do you personally consider that these health effects do not warrant continued use of DDT at present? This is not an easy answer.
Let me quote from another article on active ingredients used for IRS, and breast milk. (Bouwman, H., Kylin, H. 2009. Malaria control insecticide residues in breastmilk: The need to consider infant health risks. Environmental health perspectives. 117:1477-1480. (Supplementary review online))
“The argument that malaria kills but deaths are not likely attributable to AIs [active ingredients such as DDT] under normal malaria control conditions does not reduce the responsibility to ascertain the risks posed by insecticides and delve deeper into how these risks can be mitigated. Assuming from the above that there is a health burden due to IRS AIs, however small it may be compared with death, it is likely to impose a lifelong (and possibly even transgenerational) disability, handicap, and burden on individuals and society. Malaria control cannot be halted because of these concerns. Therefore, new, safer, and alternative ways of controlling malaria should be pursued, and fortunately this is happening on many fronts..”
And..
“The eminently practical approach and effective use of chemicals to prevent mortal¬ity and morbidity from malaria is acceptable practice (where other methods do not work) and can be improved on.”
Please read this 2008 paper, as there are some more arguments in there. There are also more considerations, but this is in the submitted manuscript on DDT and I would rather wait for that, as there are co-authors involved. We are also planning follow-ups on related issues.
Bart,
Thanks for posting your evaluation of our book. I apologize for the delay in joining the discussion.
In the next few days I will try to respond in more detail to some of the specific statements and claims. Let me first say that the reason for the book relates to a need for truth about DDT.
History of the environmental movement’s tactics and strategies for dealing with dissenting voices forewarned us that the book and its authors would be heavily attacked. I think your readers can see in comments posted here that the ad hominem attacks are underway. I know my fellow authors and I can assure your readers that their role and their participation in writing this book was based on a sincere concern about what needs to be done to protect the health and welfare of people in developing countries. There was no underlying ideological motivation except to make sure that decisions being taken are based on a solid foundation of science.
We can now look back on a long history of struggles to use DDT in malaria control programs. This history shows that claims against DDT have been advanced, disproven, advanced again and disproven again. Each time a researcher finds and publishes some association suggestive of DDT harm—trumpets sound and the attacks rev up. Activists grab headlines and declare the study proves a cause-effect relationship and that, as a consequence, DDT should be eliminated. This pattern of anti-insecticide activism also informs us that the activists remain deadly quiet years later when the cause-effect relationship is disproven.
In a future post I will comment further on statements about the Stockholm Convention Secretariat’s plan for DDT elimination. The Secretariat is a major operational component of the Stockholm Convention process. It is disingenuous to suggest the Secretariat’s time line for DDT elimination is not important or that it has no bearing on what will happen vis-à-vis DDT elimination. The timeline is posted on the Secretariat’s website for the whole world to see and it has huge importance. What sort of message does it send to the only remaining DDT producer and what should we do about it??
Bart, I will take time to carefully study participants comments before commenting further. Thanks again for reviewing our book.
Quick follow up comment.
Bart, you mention a negative impact of DDT use would be to deter the search for environmentally useful alternatives. Personally, I know of no evidence that what happens with our public health insecticides (either use or non use) influences the search for alternatives. DDT elimination does not, in itself, ensure that there will be a search for DDT alternatives. In fact, if you review the Stockholm Convention positions you will find a commitment to support R&D for a DDT alternative, yet, even as the organization works to eliminate DDT, nothing substantial has been done in the search for a new ai as a substitute for DDT. Historically, DDT was largely eliminated from programs around the world as a consequence of anti-DDT political and economic pressures, yet there was no serious reflex action to search for DDT alternatives. Additionally, use of DDT should in no way deter the search for alternatives.
I think that if you review the track record of AFM advocacy you will find that we lobby intensively for renewed funding to find an acceptable DDT alternative. In my opinion, such an alternative could indeed be non toxic. After all, DDT functions mostly as a spatial repellent.
While we advocate for freedom of endemic countries to use DDT if they choose to do so, we definitely believe that we need a truly efficacious DDT alternative. Only then should this one-of-a-kind chemical be eliminated. I personally find it almost criminal that billions of dollars have been spent to, in one way or another, to demonize DDT; yet almost nothing has been spent to find an efficacious replacement.
@Henk. Thanks for further details. I appreciate the point that better tools to study the fate of DDT have become available. What strikes me though, is that 494 studies between 2003-8 end with a statement full with ‘if’, ‘may be’, ‘could be’, etc. This does not sound very convincing…
I think nobody will doubt the necessity for a replacement for DDT, and Roberts et al. will argue the same. So the goal is the same, but Roberts et al. want (see his comment) the truth about DDT and its unconditional use for malaria control until a suitable replacement has been found.
I appreciate how hard it is to really pin down negative health effects of DDT, but unless more firm evidence for this is tabled, it will be hard to negate the points raised in Roberts’ book, don’t you think so?
@Don. Thank you very much for joining this discussion - I am grateful that you as the lead author of the book, are willing to participate.
Indeed, the secretariat’s website has this nice horse race cartoon that definitely shows 2020 as the year in which use (not production) will be ended… If this is not what is meant, than the website should be changed.
Not sure where you got the ‘billions of dollars’ from that were spent on putting DDT in bad daylight, and it would be nice to have some firm evidence for this… Moreover, is the IVCC (Innovative Vector Control Consortium) not blessed with a generous 54 m $ grant from the Gates Foundation? Has Gates not started a project to search for spatial repellents with similar activity as DDT?
Curious to see your thoughts on this…
The debate about DDT is interesting. Can I as a user of DDT in the 1960s in agriculture in Africa make a few comments.
1. Back in the early days of DDT extensive testing was carried out in the UK and evaluated by the Insecticide Development panel of the Ministry of Production under the chairmanship of Professor Heilbron (see Journal of the Royal Society of Arts Vol 93 pp65-69 in 1945). Similarly three groups within the USA were assessing the toxicology of DDT. Their verdict allowed its extensive use in Italy and other countries for mosquito control during and immediately after WW II.
2. There is no doubt that the public health area needs new insecticides to provide different modes of action as mosquitoes become resistant to pyrethroids. Industry regards the public health sector as only a very small proportion of its market for pesticides so has concentrated on new insecticides with low persistence in the environment, yet for indoor residual spraying and long lasting bed nets, a chemical with a long residual activity is needed. Changes in formulation and looking back at inventories of insecticides is underway so hopefully there will be alternatives to DDT.
3. The real problem was that DDT was so inexpensive that it was over-used in agriculture; for example in the USA a mixture of DDT + toxaphene + methyl parathion was used on cotton at one stage with as much as 4lb/acre/application of DDT applied aerially, no wonder the environment was affected! [In Africa the maximum recommendation on cotton was one lb/acre/application and without the toxaphene or methyl parathion. (the latter was added for boll weevil, not a pest in Africa.)]
4. Many of the resistance problems may have been due to DDT and now pyrethroids being used in agriculture and this has affected the larval stage rather than its use as an adulticide in houses!!
5. Until a suitable alternative to DDT is available, it seems to me that it should be used inside houses for IRS as recommended by WHO, but what is badly needed is an improvement in the infrastructure of Ministries of Health so that there are more trained staff to manage and use insecticides more effctively in vector control.
6. Lastly a review of “The Excellent Powder” that I wrote is published in the latest issue of ‘Outlooks on Pest Management’
@Graham. Thanks for your input in the discussion.
Point 1: Is refuted by Henk Bouwman in the sense that during the old days the tools to study the impact of DDT on human health were not as advanced and therefore effects may have gone unnoticed…
Points 2-3: I agree.
Point 4: Resistance is not an issue according to Roberts and co-authors. The prime action of DDT is excito-repellency, so even if phsyiological resistance occurs, it can still be used for the control of malaria…
Point 5: Indoor use of DDT. Although this sounds ‘less harmful’ to the environment, I have also come across a study that showed that 60% of the DDT residues come off the walls and are swiped outside local houses when being cleaned. Thus, a lot of DDT still ends up in the environment…
Point 6: Would love to see your review but don’t have access to Outlooks on Pest Management…
Bart,
Sorry it has taken time to prepare a few comments about statements in posts to your blog. My focus in the following comments is on technical issues and I apologize if details are a bit lengthy.
I see from posted comments that there are doubts about our motivations in writing “The excellent powder.” I must say, it seems all too readily accepted that anyone who speaks in favor of insecticides is a shill of the insecticide industry. That, of course, has been a favorite smear tactic of anti-DDT activists.
Let me be perfectly clear on this point, I have no connections with the insecticide industry and I know of no private insecticide company that has any interest whatsoever in defending DDT. Why should they? They don’t produce, distribute, or sale DDT.
I am retired and have been retired now for over three years. I am on the board for Africa Fighting Malaria. I personally get no pay for writing in defense of DDT, for being a board member, or for participating as a partner in AFM’s work. AFM has a policy of not accepting funds from the insecticide industry. To be blunt, there is no financial stake in our defense of DDT that motivates our advocacy.
I want to comment on some of statements about DDT, bioaccumulation, and actions of other organochlorines.
Bart, you state that some chemical actions may not manifest until many years after the chemical was used. Well, people in the U.S. and other developed countries started heavy use of DDT in mid-1940s. Then, after almost 30 years of use, they stopped. It has now been almost 40 years since we stopped using DDT. During those 40 years, environmental scientists have conducted thousands of investigations, millions if not billions of research dollars have been spent, and vast numbers of papers published. In spite of all those expenditures and research efforts, researchers still cannot identify any true harm from almost 30 years of heavy DDT exposure. There was no increase in diseases and deaths during years of its use, and, it is critically important that no health improvements can be attributed to the very large reductions in environmental exposures since that time.
You state that my argument that chemicals closely related to DDT are present in the environment is weak. The formal foundation of my assessment is that we now know there is a great abundance of such chemicals and they are natural products, not man made. The ubiquity of such chemicals means that life evolved in conjunction with natural production and exposure to DDT-like chemicals. Thus, it is biologically implausible that mechanisms for dealing with chemicals like DDT did not evolve as well. We find evidence of pre-existing capabilities across the whole spectrum of living organisms, from bacteria and fungi (which exhibit a plethora of metabolic pathways for not only degradation but the actual synthesis of DDT-like chemicals) to predators at the top of the food chain (e.g., polar bear does not accumulate DDE). Perhaps our pre-adaptation to DDT-like chemicals explains why there has never been a documented human death that can be attributed to environmental exposure to DDT or to the build up of DDT in human fat. In fact, there are no replicated and confirmed epidemiological data showing that accumulation of DDT in human fat is unsafe.
We make the point in the book that humans will actually accumulate only a certain amount of DDT. Once an individual reaches a threshold level, all additional DDT will be degraded and eliminated. As for differences among chemicals, we repeatedly make the point that each chemical is different, some being more toxic and volatile than others, some being more persistent and fat soluble than others, and so forth. I suspect that there is no chemical that is completely harmless; but there are certainly chemicals that are harmless at known exposure levels. All of these assessments are supported by replicated and peer-reviewed literature. Yet, in spite of all countering evidence, scientific literature is saturated with papers that ignore these scientific findings and also ignore basic dose and exposure issues, and present data and interpretations as if any residue will cause harm (it won’t) or, that organisms are commonly exposed in the environment to extraordinary concentrations of DDT and other insecticides (they aren’t). In a subsequent posting I will use a paper from Henk’s research group to illustrate some of the issues of exposure, dose and chemical concentration.
The following review of a paper by Dr. Bouwman’s research group is used to illustrate issues of exposure, dose and chemical concentration that relate to claims that DDT is unsafe for human exposures.
A recent paper by Barnhoorn et al., (2009) deals with comparative levels of DDT in a watershed in South Africa. Sampling of water begins in an unsprayed region. Sampling continues as the watercourse traverses a region of DDT-sprayed houses. The authors cite several studies in the introduction to suggest that DDT and metabolites are harmful in almost every way. Papers cited are mostly experimental animal or biomarker studies entailing administration of very high doses of DDT in order to get a biological response. I will mention only two of their cited papers. A 1968 paper by Bitman et al., is cited as evidence that o,p’-DDT elicits estrogenic activity in birds and mammals. This seems to be a favorite paper of anti-DDT researchers. Of course they never mention that Bitman and coauthors dosed the birds and animals with roughly 180mg of DDT/kg body weight. Another cited paper (by Kelce, et al., 1998) characterizes DDE as an androgen antagonist and inhibitor of testosterone. Again, there is no mention that the in vivo studies entailed a dose of 100 mg DDE per kg body weight. Last but not least, Barnhoorn and coauthors do not mention a 2002 paper by Leavens, Sparrow and Devito, which reported that DDE does not produce anti-androgenic effects. In other words, Leavens and coauthors refute the findings by Kelce, et al. So a paper that makes a claim is cited and a paper that refutes the claim is ignored.
Barnhoorn and co-authors then report concentrations of DDT and metabolites in water, fish, birds and chickens. Overall, 2 or 3 water samples from upriver in the unsprayed area had detectable levels of p,p’-DDE. In comparison, only 2 of five samples from the sprayed region had detectable levels of p,p’-DDE. Concentrations of DDT and metabolites were characterized in 28 fish (composed of two species) and all but one was from the sprayed area. Six DDT isomers were measured in two species of fish as mg of DDT per kg of fish fats. Of 28 fish, eleven contained the sum of six isomers at concentrations less than 1 ppm. The average for all isomers in all 28 fish was 7.9 mg of sum DDT per kg of fish fats. Now, if fish are composed of 10% fat (see: http://www.annecollins.com/dietary-fat/fat-fish.htm), then 17 grams of fish fat will be consumed in a serving of 6 ounces of fish (28.349 grams X 6 = 170 grams of fish). This amount of fat will result in 0.134 mg of sum DDT being consumed. For a 60 kg adult, this will equate to 0.0022 mg DDT/kg of body weight. Now, to put this into perspective, doses of DDT in studies attesting to potential harm from DDT exposures that were cited by Barnhoor and co-authors in the introduction varied from 100 to 200 mg/kg body weight. A similar dose for a 60 kg adult would be 6,000 to 12,000 mg (6-12 grams) of DDT. Doses administered to the experimental animals were 45,000 to 90,000 times greater than the dose from fish collected in the area where houses are sprayed for malaria control. In the discussion section, Barnhoorn and co-authors give no weight to the fact that almost as much DDE was found in waters outside the sprayed area as found within the sprayed area. Additionally, one sample of fish collected on a farm outside the sprayed area contained practically as much DDT as was found in fish inside the sprayed area. Again, they assign no weight to this observation. All and all, the concentrations and distributions of DDT reported by Barnhoorn and co-authors suggest that houses sprayed with DDT are not an important source of environmental contamination. Additionally, the quantities they report for fish should be viewed as trace quantities only and do not represent any threat at all to human health. The point of this analysis is that the issues of chemical concentration, dose and exposure require much greater thought and analysis than is often seen in studies like that by Barnhoorn and co-authors.
Bart, the following comments relate to your assessments about points made in the book:
You conclude that our statements regarding different organochlorine compounds are weak because, as you state, “as if all chlorinated hydrocarbons are the same…” Of course we know, and demonstrate through different examples, that there is a great variety of chlorinated hydrocarbons. Indeed, your assessment would be much more appropriately applied to anti-DDT advocates. Those advocates commonly group all man made organohalogens together, characterize all their potential harms, then carry those characterizations over to DDT alone. In fact, DDT is not dieldrin, aldrin, a PCB, a dioxin, or any other organohalgen. It is unique among all those compounds and only DDT has proven efficacious in the long-term control of malaria. Additionally, our comments and comparisons were made in part because there is strong opposition to chemicals that contain halogens, and chlorine in particular.
You attack us for saying that if people’s children are being killed by malaria that they will tend to have more children to offset those losses. Your actual statements were: “Finally, and this argument will upset many, they claim that because of malaria, African families compensate for children lost to malaria by producing more. They than [sic] crawl under the skin of an African person saying ‘They may think “we must do something about this disease before we lose more of our children”. This is a pretty far-reaching conclusion (particulalry [sic] in view of the availability of bednets).”
I must say that it seems your analogy is designed to inflame Africans. Additionally, your statements misrepresent my position on this subject. Misrepresentation stems from the fact that my assessments were not about Africans. My geographical area of expertise is South and Central America, not Africa. My fellow authors, on the other hand, have greater expertise in malaria control in Africa. The quote you refer to is about all malaria endemic countries, not just African countries. The sentence you quote from the book was put there to trigger an explanation why it is not within the grasp of normal people as individuals to do much about malaria without improved standards of living or the use of insecticides. As for your comment about bed nets, remember, this book records the history of what happened with DDT. The environmentalist’s battles against DDT that ended effective malaria control programs were fought decades ago and there were no insecticide treated bednets at that time. If we bring this issue up to modern times, it is worth noting that many people have been selling and hyping bednets to the practical exclusion of any other method of malaria control since the late 1980s, yet we still have very large numbers of children dying from malaria. Given this reality, I don’t think our conclusion is far-reaching at all.
As for whether people will have larger families if large numbers of children are dying from malaria, I stand behind assessments in the book. I compiled historical data on fertility rates (plus data on other variables) for countries with and without malaria. I produced the correlations; but unlike the anti-DDT folks, I do not assume a correlation or statistical association proves a cause-effect relationship. Human fertility is a complex issue that is influenced by many factors. Regardless, in my opinion, it is naïve to think that if 2 of every 4 children are dying from malaria that such losses would not factor into decisions about family size. After all, those deaths are not something they just read about, they are part of everyday life. Poor people want their children to grow to adulthood and they hope for grandchildren too.
As a last comment, to prove that behavioral resistance has occurred, you would first need to engage the issue of how the chemical actually functions in the first place. So far that has not been done in a meaningful way. I agree that behavioral resistance could be a consequence of DDT use; but it cannot be accepted as an important issue until we have a lot more knowledge and information than we have today. The ultimate truth is that DDT functions primarily as a spatial repellent and it is still highly effective in control of malaria.
Thank you Bart for reviewing the book and starting this discussion. Prof. Roberts has done an admirable job of responding to some of the comments and so I will respond to just some of the statements.
@Christoph Boete raises questions about our funders and Prof. Roberts has responded to this. Let me reiterate that we have never received any funding from the insecticide industry and we will not accept funding from this source precisely because people will immediately assume that we are simply shills for industry and will dismiss any substantive arguments. Not only are we not funded by the insecticide industry, but we have been openly critical of them when they have tried to limit the use of DDT so that they could sell more of their own product. So the very idea that private industry somehow has a stake in the DDT issue is absurd. It is depressing that some people seemingly assume the worst motives when an individual or group defends the use of DDT, yet never assume any ulterior motive among those who attack DDT. Why is it, for instance, that no one raises the fact that anti-insecticide lobby groups are funded by the organic food industry. (and quite a growing profitable industry it is!) When they conduct their anti-insecticide campaigns, confidence in conventional farming decreases and the organic food market grows along with their profits – yet these corporate interests are seldom questioned. Furthermore to assume that those funded by government institutions or foundations are without their own selfish motives is naive in the extreme.
AFM has received some funding from a couple of mining companies. Both BHP Billiton and Anglo American have funded outstanding malaria control programs (separate from AFM funding), saving thousands of lives and they should be applauded for their work. AFM is proud of its association with these companies and grateful for their support. Exxon Mobil gave a small donation to AFM several years ago for general support for which we are grateful. Similarly this company has supported some excellent malaria control programs as well as research projects. Exxon Mobil is a donor to the Medicines for Malaria Venture and many other malaria advocacy and research groups. Does this support mean that MMV and all the other groups that Exxon Mobil funds are somehow tainted or illegitimate? Of course not.
@Philippe Riviere links to a scurrilous ad-hominen attack on one of my colleagues. These are not new – it seems that if you are going to defend the use of DDT and criticize environmental activists (who seem to be considered royal game and individuals with unquestionable motivation of the highest order) then people will muck rake and try to find any and all opportunities of undermining you. We prefer to get on with our work and ignore those who wish to snipe from the sidelines. Having said that, I recently had to describe in a blog post questioning our work here: http://blog.tropika.net/tropika/2010/06/16/advocacy-group-under-fire/.
@Henk Bouwman takes issue with statements we have made about the Stockholm Convention and the Secretariat’s intention to halt all production of DDT by 2017 and eliminate all production by 2020. I would like to add a comment to Prof. Roberts’ answer. We include in the book an analysis of the representation at the Stockholm Convention meetings – note that overwhelmingly those countries that use DDT are outnumbered by wealthy OECD countries that no longer need DDT and by anti-DDT activists who expertly lobby and influence the proceedings. Also remember that most of the representatives from malaria-endemic countries are not from the Ministry of Health that may have some knowledge and understanding about the need for DDT, but from the Ministry of Environment (i.e., people who prioritize environmental protection over public health).
And while we are on the topic of statements made during interview, perhaps Prof. Bouwman can finally provide the evidence for which we have been asking for relating to statements made on South African television that DDT is linked to harm to fish, snails and possibly birds. Prof. Bouwman even links DDT to a specific case of intersex in the South African athlete Caster Semenya. http://beta.mnet.co.za/carteblanche/Article.aspx?Id=3777 Please note that we asked for the evidence for his statements and were joined by several others, including scientists at the CDC and USAID. (I’ll be happy to forward the email trails to anyone interested) To date we haven’t had any response. Perhaps Prof. Bouwman is ready to provide the evidence for his statements here – or to retract them if he doesn’t have evidence that DDT is linked to the intersex case of a named individual, Caster Semenya.
@Donald-first comment. Thanks Don, for adding more information in this discussion.
Let me tell you up front that your book has certainly changed my views on DDT. As a young biologist I was brought up in University with the info that DDT was the worst thing mankind had ever come up with, until, almost in a fairytale-like manner, Rachel Carson appeared on the scene. I am convinced that the current generation of biologists is still being trained in the same manner, so you’re up against hordes of people with a dogmatic believe that DDT is bad.
As you state early on - this is about finding the truth.
I have never assumed that you or any of the co-authors of the book had any commercial stakes in DDT, so that’s no issue from my side (although others will remain suspicious…).
As for delayed effects: You are right, millions of kg of use in US agriculture did not result in some liver cancer epidemic ten years later. But the more subtle long-term effects will, no doubt, be more difficult to discern. This is not just an issue with DDT, but pops up in any discussion about products (not just chemicals) in terms of environmental risk assessments.
As for the parallel evolution of man with DDT-like compounds, I am still not with you. You know that changing a simple methyl group in a chemical can turn it from benign to carcinogen or into a deadly toxin. That’s why I find the comparison table salt and DDT not very informative. Salt has chlorine in it - and we consume lots of it every day. But we die if we drink seawater which has the same compound.
@Donald-second comment, ref Barnhoorn article (2009) - your argument here is convincing, and I hope that Henk Bouwman will chip in if he is not in agreement with your views.
@Donald-third comment.
Up front: ‘You attack us…’ is not the way to go. This is not my intention. My intention is to get to the truth, which is what we have as a common goal here.
I also have no intention to inflame any African person. My argument holds for any person living under the burden of malaria. My point is that I would like to see the truth (again) that your view on this is correct - what information is there to substantiate the point that malaria ranks high on people’s agenda in terms of ‘safeguarding against possible losses of children’. Having worked and lived in Africa for 11 years, I have not come across such thing - in other words, what I am trying to say, is that this may not be the best way to make a case for DDT (you have many much better justifications in the book than this one…).
As for behavioural resistance: I think that anyone who has read the book will have to agree that a list of 12 pages of studies demonstrating the repellent effect as the main mode of action of DDT is convincing.
My point is that the same has been said for synthetic pyrethroids that supposedly also have excito-repellent action. But, it is disappearing from places where it was present before. And this is not a surprise. The same fate will be there for DDT - there is absolutely no doubt. Ultimately you will have behavioural resistance and physiological resistance and the story will be over.
Recently, the Rothamsted group published a paper in PNAS, showing aegypti building up behavioural resistance to DEET over a number of generations. Without wanting to make a direct comparison between DEET and DDT, this does however show the resilience of insects.
@Richard.
- See my comment ref your involvement with the pesticide industry above.
- I have mentioned in my blog that you and Don, Richard and Jennifer stand out from the crowd that is simply not willing to change its opinion towards DDT. That this leads to people seeking all sorts of motives to attack you on a personal level is unavoidable. Again here, as Don states, it’s all about getting to the truth of the matter, which was the prime reason for me reviewing your book here and bringing it to the attention of the broader public.
- Ref your last point, the ‘intersex’ issue and urigenital defects in Limpopo, SA, I would like to see Henk’s response here too. Henk?
Recently I contacted the Greenpeace HQ in Amsterdam and asked them for their opinion on DDT, GM mosquitoes, and the Sterile Insect Technique (that uses a nuclear source to sterilise mosquitoes). They cling to dogmatic views and it is very hard indeed to have an open well-informed discussion. See my blog on this: http://development.thinkaboutit.eu/think3/post/malaria_greenpeaces_dilemmas
There is no chemical with a zero negative impact/effect on the environment and human health; DDT may be useful but we need thorough and comprehensive environmental and health impact assessments. Any articles on this? I also don’t understand if DDT is being banned because it is controvertial or because it is more dangerous than useful. What are the hard facts about DDT?
Personally I think the elimination of malaria depends on an integrated approach including strong political committment, socio-economic intervention (elimiate poverty, habits, etc), environmental control (proper hygiene/sanitation) and medical (proper diagnosis and effective/complete treatment), and research.
@Eric. Thanks for commenting.
- There is indeed no chemical that is completely benign - water (H2)) can kill. It’s all a matter of dose.
- The dispute about DDT has been centered on the interpretation of scientific data. Many argue that there is sufficient evidence to ban it because of environmental and human health effects. Some (like Prof. Roberts and co-authors) claim the opposite. Read the Pine River Statement referred to above for one view, read Roberts’ book for another. Both claim hard facts to work either for or against DDT.
- I don’t think anybody will argue against your suggestion for an integrated approach to the control/elimination of malaria. It’s merely that some want to see DDT as part of that, whereas others will fight to the bitter end against it…
Bart,
Yes, perhaps the word “attack” and harsh response was unwarrnated, my apologies.
We really appreciate the fact that you are hosting this important debate in a responsible and open way. We may differ about DDT-like chemicals, but we fully agree that, as you mention in a response to Eric, that the dose makes the poison. We look forward to further comments and reactions.
@Don. Thanks, and no hard feelings. I am hopeful that this discussion opens people’s eyes to get to the truth about DDT, and that a common understanding that judgement based on ideology is not the way to go in such matters will hopefully be the result.
It was quite [url=“http://planetgreen.discovery.com/work-connect/oceana-offshore-drilling-economy.html”>predictable</a> that DDT would become a discussion on Think 3.
It is a complex issue of course. DDT is a poison, that is why insects die from it. It is also harmful for humans. If the city council decided to spray your house with DDT, would you agree? If you had kids? IF you say yes -would you be able to convince your wife? Many people would not - and this is a major flaw with DDT. In order to be efficient EVERY house in a village must be sprayed,s o there can not be much of a choice for those who live there (what if they are ‘environmentalists’).
On the other hand - Malaria is a horrible disease, and we know for sure that DDT works against it for a period of time. So what we are choosing between is not a good thing or a bad thing, but between a bigger or lesser evil.
But please, please, Bart, do NOT bring up idiots like these :( We had more than enoguh of anti-science propaganda on think 2. The sources behind this are those the same that oppose climate change, and any kind of environmental legislation, which has been written about in a book that mades lots of headlines recently - Merchants of doubt.
Where does this anti-scientific resistance come from? I believe it is from a libertarina conviction, that can’t accept that human inventions can be harmful - that’s why climate change MUST be impossible, that’s why DDT MUST be a healthy and efficient.
As for @Tullu -to say that environmentalists endorsed off shore drilling is a blatant lie. Shame on you! It was a decision Obama took, and was <a ]critizised[/url] for by environmentalists. And who was it who coined the slogan ‘drill, baby drill’ before the election? The environmentalist Sara Pahlin. Is it maybe Greenpeace you want to replace Obama with?
@Daniel. Thanks for chipping into this debate.
Up front, I guess that you have not read the book this blog is all about. Hence, your views have been influenced by what you heard and read about DDT in the press. You have based your opinion on the slogans and statements thrown around by either the pros or cons regarding DDT. And that’s precisely the mistake that you make.
What Roberts and co-authors try to accomplish is to develop a meaningful debate that is governed by scientific information and NOT by feelings or perceptions. This is definitely to their credit. Getting to the truth about DDT is much better than anyone’s up-front uninformed ‘knowledge’ that DDT is harmful to humans. You lack the basics to substantiate these statements (and if so, please post that information here).
The people you classify as ‘Idiots’ (I regret your disrespectful approach here) are not at all refuting science - on the contrary, they use scientific information to back their arguments.
As for malaria control to be efficient, the common understanding at the moment is that coverage of 80% or more is sufficient to have (mosquito) population level effects. Your capital letters ‘EVERY’ is not correct. Sorry, my information is simply based on scientific facts, not on ideologies.
Clearly, I am sorry to say, you are misinformed about this matter. Confusing this matter with climate change is completely irrelevant, and your conviction that the authors of the book claim that DDT MUST be healthy is simply not correct.
Before you come back with another comment, could I please request that you read their book first?
Thanks.
At certain concentrations and in presence of certain living systems, salt is a poison, vinegar is a poison—what is your point? Labeling DDT as a poison does not have the impact you think it has, at least not if you have a basic understanding of the chemistry of life. If my children were at risk of malaria and my house was not screened or air conditioned, I would opt to use DDT in a heart beat. I have worked around DDT sprayed houses, even lived in DDT sprayed houses and have never seen any indications of harm to myself or to others. I remember my mother spraying DDT around the kitchen table. That was before common availability of air conditioning. My experiences span decades, not just a momentary event. I have conducted surveys in populations living in sprayed houses, and, again, never seen or heard of claims of harm. Support of DDT is not anti-science, it is pro-science and the claims of harm do not comply with even the most basic proofs of cause-effect relationships
For a discussion of DDT effects on humans, see Eskenazi et. alt. - The Pine River statement. I quoute from the conclusion:
“We are concerned about the health of children and adults given the persistence of DDT and its active metabolites in the environment and in the body, and we are particularly concerned about the potential effects of continued DDT use on future generations. We recognize the serious implications of restricting DDT use given that an estimated 880,000 people die each year from malaria, most of whom are < 5 years of age (WHO 2008).
[...]
“Current evidence on DDT exposure to human populations and on its potential health effects support the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, which emphasizes that DDT should be used with caution, only when needed, and when no other effective, safe, and affordable alternatives are locally available. ”
@Donald - “poison” was manybe the wrong word. My point is that DDT is something that stays in my body and is carried on to my children (see link above). No matter how much salt I eat -my children will not be born with increased level of salt in their bodies.
I apologize for using the word “idiot”. It is right - we should take care to keep the debate clean and worthy.
But are you not aware about the connections between climate change denial, denying that tobacco causes cancer and the pro-DDT lobby? Just take a look at the amazon link you provide - what other books did the people who bought this book like? Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America , The Great Global Warming Blunder, Climategate, and the book I refer to above, Merchants of doubt. See also what sourcewatch writes about Richard Trent
The DDT discussion is not only about chemistry, it is a very tense political field, and a very symbolic issue. Both for environmentalists and for right wing libertarians. I would like to hear your thoughts on that.
Meanwhile, I will try top find Robert’s book
I will post again after reading it. I would get
@Daniel. Thanks for getting back - although before you read the book…
The Pine River Statement conclusions were mentioned in the above blog, and it remains unclear why a review of nearly 500 studies that were conducted between 2003-2008 are concluded with ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’. I would assume that 500 studies on the possible negative effects of DDT would deliver a more firm verdict. Instead, as mentioned in the discussion above, it is argued that more research is needed…even more research? That sounds a bit strange to me, given the number of studies already published. But alas, I stand to be corrected here.
We accumulate lots of different chemicals in our body. The point that Roberts et al make is that millions of people have been exposed to DDT (sometimes in high concentrations) and that no negative healthe effects have been observed…
The link that connects climate, smoking, and health is meaningless to me. Here we are dealing with the intricacies surrounding DDT, and I frankly don’t care who is behind what lobby (whether they are conservatives of democrats will change nothing to the science of DDT). Let’s not blur the discussion with personal or political statements but face the facts.
Having read the sourcewatch piece about Tren, I must mention here that the relationship between climate change and malaria is indeed, as he argues, still being debated. That Tren has been involved in tobacco stuff is simply not relevant to the discussion here. Focus and evidence, that’s more important.
That DDT is a controversial chemical nobody will deny. I repeat myself by saying that what we need is objectivism, and not a debate driven by ideologies and activism.
Thanks for reading the book. I look forward to seeing your views here after you’re done.
Daniel,
Bart has, quite correctly suggested that we stick to the matter at hand - which is to say DDT and its place in malaria control. You do however make some bold statements about me personally to which I must respond.
Although you have apologized for calling those with whom you disagree as ‘idiots’ this attitude of conveniently dismissing anyone that holds an opinion that differs from you runs deep in your subsequent posting.
Let us be clear about the Sourcewatch listings. Sourcewatch is a project of the leftist Center for Media and Democracy and so it is little surprise that they would seek to discredit any individual or group with whom they disagree. But I would caution you to think a little more carefully about using Sourcewatch as a source. Note for instance, that SourceWatch includes a page on Hugo Chavez. Nowhere on this page is there any mention of the human rights abuses and restrictions of free speech as described by Human Rights Watch among many other organizations. Instead there is the statement that Chavez was ‘resoundingly reelected’ in the last election. I point this out not because I wish to start a discussion about human rights or free speech abuses in Venezuela, but because it turns out that SourceWatch has its own agenda and what appears to be an extreme bias in politics.
Regarding any link with the tobacco industry, let me be very clear that at no point have I or Africa Fighting Malaria ever received any donation or funding from the tobacco industry. Many years ago I did indeed write a short paper on the World Bank’s tobacco policies and did this with a respected economist, Prof. Hugh High and a foreword to the paper was written by another eminent development economist, Prof. Deepak Lal. We considered World Bank policies with regard to tobacco to be unhelpful for development in poor countries - you may disagree with this and I’d be happy to hear your opinions. However the fact that we wrote a paper criticizing World Bank policies does mean that I or AFM has any link to the tobacco industry.
Not only is AFM not linked to the tobacco industry, you conveniently ignore the fact that we were harshly critical of the tobacco industry for their opposition to the use of DDT in Uganda. Our press releases and statements on this are on our website.
Again for the record, AFM has never received any funding from the insecticides industry. Also as a matter of public record, we have also been highly critical of some within that industry that have sought to limit the use of DDT
Regarding climate change, I stand by the work that AFM has done on this. We are very clear in pointing out that the relationship between climate and malaria is highly complex and no simple statement can be made that climate change will make malaria worse. For many years AFM has maintained this line and I believe that our statements are in line with some eminent researchers such as Prof. Paul Reiter, Prof. Bob Snow, Dr. Simon Hay and others. I also stand by articles that I have written that explain that generic medicines will not magically increase access to treatment in countries with a poor health infrastructure. Regarding water markets - I’d be happy to discuss this with you off line, but it is irrelevant to this discussion on DDT. Again you may disagree with me on these points and I’d be happy to hear your opinions and I would do so without dismissing you with one or other pejorative term.
It seems that those of us that defend the use of DDT and support the actions of several African Ministries of Health are dismissed as corporate shills or called idiots. The idea that we have some sort of financial interest in defending DDT is laughable. It is curious though, as I have pointed out elsewhere, that I am unaware of any questioning of motives among those who attack the use of DDT or undermine insecticides for public health. The bias in this public debate runs deep. Scurrilous ad-hominem attacks are made and any and all attempts are made to undermine the credibility of those defending DDT.
To dismiss a person or organization and their publications based on a thin tissue of half truths, suppositions and bias is to view the world through deeply prejudiced eyes and to be blinkered to certain truths. In other circumstances such prejudice would be decried and denounced. Sadly it seems that when the topic is DDT or insecticides prejudice of this sort seems to be celebrated.
For the record - as this may not be clear to all reading this discussion - DDT is currently being used on a large scale for malaria control in Africa. At least 15 countries have had more than 6,5 million houses sprayed between 2005-2009, with funding from the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) and administered by USAID. The impact on malaria has been dramatic.
The concern that remains is that in most places this has been a one-off spraying campaign, delivering short-term benefits only.
A major problem at the moment is that DDT is administered through vertically organised and centrally staged control campaigns, the infrasturcture of which is lacking in most places where reliance on house-hold based methods like bednets, has become commonplace.
@Bart I think it is hard to get a clear verdict on persistent organic pollutants, since their effects depend so much on what substances they interact with etc. But after 24 hours of googling, yes - it sems that DDT is relatively safe for humans but very dangerous for the ecological system. “Roberts uses 432 pages to tell us that the greens lied to us about the fate of the Bald Eagle, the peregrine falcon and robins during the period that DDT was used widely in US agriculture. He blames hunting and habitat loss instead of DDT and uses page after page to show us he is right.” - He is not right about this. Can you find any kind of authoritative source saying this? I don’t think any biologist with knowledge about birds would agree about this.
In Sweden, and I guess also in teh Netherlands we have several raptor birds and sea mammal that were close to extinction in the -60’s, without any of the factors Roberts mention here. All of them eat fish, and I guess you know why - DDT doesn’t stay in water, but is consumed by waterdwelling species, like fish. The concentration then gets extremely high in the top of the food chain. There is no other plausible explanation to these animals decline, than the insecticides and pesticides that were in use in agriculture, but of course it is extremely difficult to say what effect DDT had, compared to the effect of quicksilver etc.
I strongly advice you not to be naïve about these guys. Do you know the site http://www.junkscience.com ? It is run by a man called Steven Milloy, who for years have been spreading disinformation about climate change. He has no interest in malaria - his interest is to protect big business from the public.
@Richard, I don’t stick the label “idiot” to anyone because of his or her opinion. What I referred to is the kind of conscious lying that goes on on sites like junk science. I am sorry if I was not clear about this.
Yes, I guess one could add a line or two about Hugo Chavez. But I think you also see that there are links to his opponents further down the site?
Sourcewatch has an agenda, of course, and that is to provide information on the kind of desinformational sources I mention above. I promis you - if you ever want information about climate change denial, that’s the best place to find it.
I didn’t write that you as a person were connected to the tobacco business, and you are not mentioned in the post I link to.
Sourcewatch claims that you are the author of Smoked Out: Anti-Tobacco Activism at the World Bank: A review of: Curbing the Epidemic: Governments and the Economics of Tobacco Control, World Bank, 1999. I presume this is the publication you mention? My opinion? Well… that tobacco is not necessarily the most unhealthy thing an individual can choose to do, but that it kills 2.1 mn people annually in the developing world, and 4.2 mn globally.(WHO)
Thanks for updating me on your activities in Uganda.
I am glad to see that AFM does recognize that ther is such a thing as man made warming. I agree - it’s effects are very diverse and impossible to predict. And the spread of malaria is probably not the most worrying thing about climate change. I would be more worried by loss of biodiversity, and this is also where I see a problem with DDT use. BUt I understand if the spread of malaria is what is your organization’s focus.
Where you get funding from is clearly visible on your website. I do think that it would be a massive strategic mistake for the tobacco industry to fund you. Just imagine what left wiung environmentalist bloggers would be writing.
As I wrote in my first comment, I don’t think that there are big financial interests behind pro-DDT writers “I believe it is from a libertarina (sic!) conviction, that can’t accept that human inventions can be harmful - that’s why climate change MUST be impossible, that’s why DDT MUST be a healthy and efficient.
Yes, these debates - DDT, climate change etc. have been completely devastated by “Scurrilous ad-hominem attacks”. Remember the fuzz about climategate? In such heated debates, words easily slip. I am not proud over using the word ‘idiot’ here. As I have already said, that refers to the junk science mafia - not to anyone thinking that DDT is a valuable tool against malaria.
I have a few questions for both Bart and Richard:
1. What is new about this? Is the information and the statements in The excellent powder in any way different from what Tina Rosenberg wrote in 2006?
2. Why do you refer the disappearance of malaria in the US to DDT spraying? It seems to have been more or less gone in the US even before second world war. If you have better sources than me, please tell me. I admit I can be wrong about this one, but there are also countries where malaria disappeared even without DDT spraying, e.g. Sweden. So DDT can not have been the only reason.
3. Noone is questioning that DDT is a realtively cheap and efficient way to fight malaria. Likewise no one I have come across, except for The excellent powder, and Steven Milloy, claim that DDT was NOT harmful for birds, did not harm their eggs etc. Not even Rosenberg in her article. What is the sense of bringing up this one, which will not exactly make it easier to work for increased use of DDT?
4. @ Richard. DDT has never been banned against malaria, and is being used today. What is it that you are working for? That it should be employed even outside the inside residual spraying? Or that more houses should be sprayed? That it should not be banned from use in agriculture?
4. @Bart As a malaria expert, what is your view? How much DDT can we use without endangering biodiversity and human livelihood?
@Daniel - thanks for your post and your clarifications. There is a great deal more in our book regarding the history of DDT, the campaigns against its use from the environmental movement and the population control movement, the science of how DDT actually functions in malaria control and much more - read the book and you’ll find out.
While malaria was declining in the US for years for various reasons, DDT spraying finally eradicated it.
There are organizations and individuals that campaign against the use of DDT - despite the fact that DDT use by the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) has been highly successful in reducing malaria transmission and saving lives, Pesticide Action Network has launched a letter writing campaign to President Obama to try to force him to stop its use. Of great concern is the fact that the Stockholm Convention Secretariat has announced its plans to halt all production of DDT by 2017 and end use of DDT by 2020. The Conference of Parties has to rule on this, but consider that the malaria community is not well represented in this Convention.
What are we working for? Fair, accurate and science based evaluations of DDT. We want to stop the fear mongering that has been taking place - such as spreading the falsehood that DDT spraying is linked to the case of intersex athlete Caster Semenya. Such fear interrupts malaria control and costs lives. We want people to understand how DDT works, we want to increase the power of malaria control programs to use the most appropriate tools for their circumstances and not be bullied away from DDT if they want to use it, we want to see some genuine effort to develop a true and proper replacement for DDT that will help to limit the spread of insecticide resistance. We do not and have never advocated that DDT be used outside indoor residual spraying - for one thing that would be a complete waste - we do indoor residual spraying because that is where malaria transmission takes place. History has shown that if you target the mosquito there, you will interrupt transmission of the disease.
I know you asked this of Bart - but let me offer an opinion on biodiversity and human livelihood. Understand that DDT - and the other insecticides that are used in IRS - is sprayed in small quantities inside houses. Can you explain what threat this is to biodiversity? Do you consider that the threat from truly tiny amounts of insecticide sprayed inside is a greater threat to biodiversity than say the poverty (which is closely associated with malaria) that forces people to be heavily reliant on their immediate environment for food and fuel? As for human livelihood - what can you mean here? If we can use small amounts of insecticides such as DDT to lift the threat of malaria, is this not beneficial to human livelihood? If you can provide some evidence that DDT use in malaria control threatened biodiversity and human livelihood, I’d love to see it.
@Daniel. Thanks for coming back once more - again without having read a page of the book (yet).
Roberts et al use a lot of background information in their book to describe what actually happened to the raptors, and what caused their decline. You, without having read any of this claim ‘He is not right about this’. What makes you say this? Let me put this the other way around: if you claim that they are wrong, then provide the evidence for it. That will help this debate. I find it very hard to accept your verdicts without you having ploughed through the evidence, be it for or against the case.
The same applies to your verdict: ‘There is no other plausible explanation to these animals decline, than the insecticides and pesticides that were in use in agriculture’. Where do you provide justification for this statement?
Finally, when you say ‘I strongly advice you not to be naïve about these guys.’, you of course mean to say that I am naive in this matter. Well, I have 20 years of research in the field of malaria under my belt. In the blog I mentioned that I was brought up with the same belief that DDT is all bad news. After reading ‘The excellent powder’, at minimum, I found it sufficiently compelling to open a debate over DDTs pros and cons. Nothing naive about that…
In your last comment you ask for my personal opinion. Up to this stage I have tried to avoid giving my personal view on DDT. But since you ask, let me put myself in the position of a rural Zambian family, void of virtually anything you or I have at our disposal. Having worked in a tsetse elimination campaign in Zambia for three years, I have seen some dramatic examples of poverty and starvation. If I was living under such extreme conditions and I would be given the option to have my house sprayed with DDT I would say ‘Yes, thank you’. It may all be good for us (you, Don, Richard, Henk, me) here to discuss the pros and cons of DDT, the fate of birds or polar bears, but in the real world people die like flies of malaria. Hard to argue against DDT from that perspective…
Daniel,
I will add just a couple of comments.
Tina Rosenberg’s article was excellent. However it was very limited in scope and detail. What we have tried to do in the book is provide in depth information on a whole series of DDT issues.
Earlier this year I reviewed the data on how DDT was employed to eliminate malaria in the U.S., published in “Outlook on pest management.” The paper was “Impact of anti-DDT campaigns on malaria control.” I went back to the original documents on the malaria control program to write that paper. Malaria was still a significant public health problem in the U.S. in the mid-1940s. It disappeared quickly with onset of DDT use and researchers of that era documented how DDT was the key to malaria elimination. All of this is documented in the Outlook paper and some of evidence is in our book. However, I have a lot of additional statistics on the decline of DDT and other insect-borne diseases in the U.S., as a consequence of DDT use.
There is no question that DDT harmed birds when it was freshly sprayed in the environment. The claims of insidious harm were the claims that were wrong. If you have heard no objections to those claims, then you have not availed yourself to the full spectrum of opinions and scientific studies. You may be surprised to learn that those who make the claims about DDT and insidious harm to birds have a clearly documented record of looking for no other explanations for their observations. We devote a lot of time to those issues in the book. Don’t be afraid of the book. We present data, scientific studies, and documentation of sources. You can go to the original sources and decide for yourself whether we are being honest and accurate. As to your question of why bring up the topic of DDT and harm to birds? Again, it is a matter of truth and accuracy. I can’t think of a better reason than that.
Your question of what we are trying to achieve in defense of DDT reflects as false understanding of what is actually happening, vis-à-vis, DDT use for disease control programs. Countries are being prevented from using DDT. This is not new. I can document case after case when countries, through economic and political pressures, were forced to stop using DDT in malaria control programs.
@Bart Why I can calim that DDT did in fact casue egshell thinning in raptor birds: (The critical substance is not DDT, but the breakdown product DDE)
1. This is the mainstream opinion among biologists, that has held sway for 30 years. in spite of being challanged. See for example this excerpt. But I think you know this as much as me.
2. In telephone conversations with sources in the regional ornitological assopciation, a man who has decade long experience of working professionally with ecological matters, and the researchers occupied with this subject on the Swedish Museum of Natural History I have been told that this, and adviced to not get into this discussion :/ These researchers highlight another important matter - the problem was not restricted to DDT, but to the general use of pesticides. Maybe we have forgotten today how they were once used… just take a look at the Carson-clip you posted.
This means that a DDT use that is restricted in a way that it does not reach the environment can easily be acceptable. But is there any research done about any possible effects on biodiversity from IRS?
There is however no discussion about the fact that pesticides, among them DDT, did threaten raptors, severly, and cause eggshell thinning.
3. Can you think of any other reasonable explanations to the story of the Swedish raptors?`How can it be that within 15 years of the mass introduction of pesticides like DDT, almost all our big raptors were endangered, as where seasls and otters? And that massive amounts of DDT and other pesticides were found birds, seals and otters? Unlike the situaton of the bald eagle in the US, these birds where not hunted, or threatened by land use before the second world war.
You must have similar stories from the Netherlands, also?
I deeply respect your knowledge as a malaria professional. But are you not at all worried that people like Milloy are trying to hi-jack your movement, and that they try to link the pro-ddt discussion with climate change denial?
In case you want to stay clear of politics and focus on the intricacies surrounding DDT, you must either avoid the political subjects, or take some sort of critical stance towards them. You know as well as me that ther is a hate campaign going on against Carson, and with that knowledge you can not simply reproduce statements about here without some sort of critical assesment of these statements.
Here is a good link on the political sides of the debate, and the hatred for Carson.
In a situation that you describes - oh yes, I would also ask to spray my house with DDT, if that was the only choice I was offerd. but I would prefer a bed net. Especially I would prefer a bed net that I had bought myself - that would free me from dependence on someone else to come spraying my house. Can you guarantee that there will still be funding to maintain IRS programmes until malaria is gone?
@Daniel - thanks for getting back for the third time without having read a page of the book (you note that this becomes repetitive, but it does signal a message to you…).
- If you read the book you’ll get the details about DDT, DDE, etc.
- You mention that ‘mainstream opnion amongst biologists’ as the fundament on which to conclude that DDT was a prime culprit with regard to the decline of raptors. For a long time people were convinced that the earth was flat…those that argued otherwise were condemned. Even if opinions are ‘mainstream’, does that mean that they are therefore always correct?
- If you are advised ‘to not get into this discussion’ you reach the heart of the debate. People not willing to discuss this matter openly, chip in scientific evidence, and contribute to a productive discussion, apparently have something to hide…
- I assume that you read Don’s latest comment. He mentions acute poisoning of birds immediately after area-wide spraying of DDT. In the book it is also mentioned that eggshell thinning did occur because of DDT, but that this was NOT the prime reason for the decline of raptor populations.
- I have no insight in the possible causes for the decline of raptor populations in Sweden (or the Netherlands) but loss of suitable breeding habitat certainly affected various species in Holland.
- Regretfully, DDT is being viewed as a ‘left wing’ versus ‘right wing’ political dilemma. If Milloy tries to link the pro-DDT discussion with climate change denial, so be it. This does not have my interest. What does interest me, is getting to the truth about DDT. ‘Hate campaigns’ are not bringing us anywhere forward, the point is that Carson’s views and claims in Silent Spring have been scrutinised and evaluated in terms of scientific merit. If her claims have been refuted on solid scientific grounds, than you may tell me if this should be considered as a ‘hate campaign’. I don’t think so.
- Carson has done what many people argue to be a good thing, she got the environmental movement going. That this movement is now there in a multitude of forms is grand, and I am happy about this. That the movement uses ideologies rather than solid scientific information as the basis for their activism, is something I regret.
@Richard What I, as a lay person can not really come to terms with is how the sprayee substance can stay indoors. Doesn’t this require that people don’t replaster their walls? What happen if their house is torn down, don’t the substances in the walls leak into nature, etc. ?
Insecticides is one threat against biodiverstiy, but as you highlight ther are also other. In the end the fundamental problem that we need to solve is povert. What is common for all countries that have liberated themselves from malaria, with or without DDT, is a prolonged period of economic growth. But of course there is also a point that malaraia creates poverty. Reality is complex.
@Donald I read your paper, thanks!
You mention well-funded environmentalist movements. This came quite as a surprise to me, usually we think of environmentalists as hyouthful enthusiasts, with a sever lack uf funds. Who provided the anti-DDT campaigns you write abou with funding?
I wam waiting for the book, as yo understand I must ahve it shipped from the US.
@Bart I get your message, but many intersting questions have came up here, that do not exactly require reading the book so… but I will, don’t worry.
The scientific community never held the opinion that the earth was flat - that was a prejudice. Of course the mainstream can be wrong, but I think that the academic science is in general more trustworthy than people think of it.
I do not think that her claims have been refuted on solid scientific grounds. It is truly sad that issues like these tend to degenerate into a lef-right brawl - that is why it is extremely important to draw a clear border towards those who want to abuse the issue.
Carsons book in deed spurred many things, and as an irony of history I think it also spawned her contemporary opponents
In society there is a much bigger willingness to challenge established truths (see our discussion here for example). This is not only due to Carsons book for sure, but it played a big role in the general anti-establishment thinking in the late -60’s. Which has created space for a much more radical right wing.
@Daniel. Interesting point. I have also heard that even when DDT is sprayed indoors on plastered walls, that a substantial amount is being swept out of the house when the plaster comes off the wall, and is brushed outside. I remember a figure of 60% within 6 months after spraying, but cannot recall the reference where I picked this up… Anyway, perhaps Don can enlighten us on this one.
@Daniel. Just read the science blog: Taking aim at Rachel Carson. When you read The Excellent Powder, please pay attention to the prime working mechanism of DDT: repellency. There are some 12 pages in the book listing studies from all over the world, that the prime mode of action is repellency, not killing. Puts the resistance story in the above article in a completely different context, agreed?
See recent comment on DDT by Drs. Hans Herren and Charles Mbogo here: http://ehsehplp03.niehs.nih.gov/article/info:doi/10.1289/ehp.1002279
@Bart Agreed. I think the repellancy is maybe the most intersting part of their claim as I understand it today.
Pretty harsh words in this review
I think I will do us all a favour if this is my last ccomment, and I rewturn after having read the book. Ciao for now!
@Daniel - many thanks for your contributions in this discussion, and indeed looking forward to see if your views will have changed after reading the book. Have fun with it!
Two points.
1. The IAAF have just cleared Caster Semenya (after many months of analysis of gender tests) and she is now free to run again as a woman. The comment made on South African TV that her controversial situation was somehow linked to DDT was highly regrettable.
2. Regarding the plight of raptors etc. in Sweden, Daniel keeps saying “DDT and other pesticides”. I would just like to remind everyone that along with massive use of DDT in the 1950’s and 60’s, there was also massive use of dieldrin and BHC, compounds that are far more toxic than DDT. Why are these chemicals never mentioned when discussions about environmental harm take place?
PS. Congratulations to Don and Richard for a well-written book. I found chapter 3 particularly useful.
I promised not to come back, but I can’t resist
The thing about Caster Semenya was completely new to me, but that sounds really eird. Regrettabel in deed.
They were mentioned at the time. The reason that DDT is in focus now is exactly that it can be used against malaria, and that’s why you have writers like Don and Richard propagating for using meore DDT, and other people propagating against it.
Yes, I know that DDT is the focus now. I was talking about the historical blame for environmental damage laid at DDT’s door when the likes of dieldrin was being thrown around with equal abandon. Many anti-DDT proponents use this historical so-called “evidence” to further their current agenda, without considering that other chemicals may have caused the damage - as in Sweden - and not DDT.
@Maureen. Thanks for chipping in. Funnily enough, I have the impression that if there would have been a strong lobby for IRS with dieldrin or BHC, that the amount of resistance from the environmental movement would have been much less, in spite of higher toxicity of these compounds. It’s the problem with DDT. As soon as these three letters are mentioned, all rationale subsides and classic statement surface without any justification.
Maybe so… I have a copy of Silent Spring in front of me, and Carson writes quite a lot about dieldrin and BHC.
But DDT was probably a symbolic thing right from the start - just take a look at the cartoon you start this article with. Have you seen cartoons about dieldrin?
As we discussed, Carson and environmentalism, was about much more than just chemical substances - it was a revolt against the technocratic western society in the 50’s. DDT, when it came, was a symbol for the new clean society, administered by professionals. DDT would often be deployed without councelling citizens, so when their birds died after spraying elm trees - this probably felt like the outmost misuse of power from a bureaucratic regime.
For Carson and the environmentalists after her, it was much easier to build on this image. That way they could also tap political support from the forces that today are attracted by the tea party movement.
Daniel,
We do not promote using more DDT. We promote and advocate for freedom of countries to use DDT if that is their preference. There is a difference between these two advocacy positions.
Bart ask for comments about removal of DDT from house walls. Material on walls are vulnerable and can be removed by washing, by flaking, and by absorption into mud, etc. There is no doubt that material sprayed on walls, for one reason or another, will fall to the floor. Such material will probably be thrown outside when the floor is cleaned. This chain of events explains why it is common for DDT residues in soil to be high in the first 2 or 3 meters near the house. It is important to note that its movement outside is not passive, it requires human action. Thus, concentrations in soil fall rapidly with distance from the house. In spite of such attrition, DDT is still highly effective for months after being sprayed on most walls surfaces. One might think that the material outside would then wash into the streams. However, DDT is not water soluble, so it will only wash into water systems if the soil itself is washed away. Thus, it can be said that DDT, to a very significant extent, remians where it is placed. By the way, DDT in tropical soils degrades much more quickly than DDT in soils in more temperate zones.
Don
@Donald - thanks for this additional information. What is your response to the Herren/Mbogo letter in EHP?
See: http://ehsehplp03.niehs.nih.gov/article/info:doi/10.1289/ehp.1002279
@Bart - I will respond to some of the other points later, but to answer your question about the Herren/Mbogo letter, our response has been published in EHP and is available here - http://tinyurl.com/2d79ce3
@Richard - thanks, I had not seen your reply. I have invited Hans Herren to also review the discussion here and contribute. I hope he will.
@Daniel - a comment on the left-right brawl as you characterize it. You seem to forget that some of the most powerful arguments in defense of using DDT have come from scientists that have focussed resolutely on the science and have never made any political issue of DDT. In 2000 over 400 scientists (including 3 Nobel laureates) from around the world signed a letter to the negotiators of the Stockholm Convention calling for an exemption for DDT for use in public health. These scientists would no doubt have come from across a broad political spectrum. You should also be reminded that some of the most effective defenders of DDT for malaria control have been African Ministers of Health and African Heads of State. So it may be appealing to try to view this debate as one between left and right, yet this is really not fair - much as some of those in the blogosphere would like to perpetuate this idea. I’m reminded that back in about 2000 or 2001 one of the best articles I read about DDT was written by the staff of LM (or Living Marxism as it used to be known).
Regarding your comment about you wanting to both buy and then use a bednet. Well good for you! We support the use of bednets, they are an important public health intervention and when used correctly have been shown to reduce malaria transmission. But just because in your hypothetical world you would choose to use a bednet doesn’t amount to an argument against IRS or specifically the use of DDT in IRS. Sustaining IRS programs and in fact sustaining all malaria control interventions requires funding and political will. Are you not being a bit naiive in your assumption that bednets sold in the market are necessarily a sustainable solution for malaria and that IRS is necessarily an unsustainable solution. First several African countries have sustained IRS for many many years - they have done so because of the great results from their IRS programs and because they have made the political commitment to fund them and to build up the expertise to sustain them. This of course isn’t easy, no one pretends that it is, but the sustainability of these programs and indeed other public health interventions such as adding chlorine to make drinking water safe all require political commitment. It seems to me that when people say that IRS is unsustainable, they are creating a self-fulfilling prophesy whereby no funding is ever put into IRS because it is supposed to be unsustainable and therefore it is impossible to sustain it.
Second, I think you will find if you look back that in the early years of the RBM campaign, there was a very slow uptake and use of bednets. The admirable progress in ITN/LLIN distribution and use in many countries in recent years has come thanks to a very substantial increase in funding for bednets and specific campaigns to distribute them for free or at subsidized prices. In addition there has been a greater effort to educate people about how to use them and follow up to ensure compliance that bednet coverage and use has increased. Such bednet campaigns require a great deal of money, effort, planning and logistics - of course the requirements of a bednet campaign are different to an IRS campaign but the idea that bednets are magically sustainable, that everyone will just go out and buy them and will use them properly and consistently ignores the evidence and is frankly dangerous.
Can I guarantee that there will be funding for IRS until malaria is gone? No - how could I? Can YOU guarantee that there will be sufficient funding for ITN procurement and distribution and to run ongoing campaigns out in rural areas to ensure that people are using nets properly? Understand that the Global Fund has procured and distributed over 100 million bednets (at what cost? upwards of $500m surely) - not for sale, for free distribution under Global Fund grants. My point is that none of this is easy or magically sustainable and don’t be seduced by those who would suggest otherwise.
Regarding Rachel Carson and the idea that her claims have not been refuted on solid scientific grounds ... well this is precisely why we wrote our book.
@Maureen - the whole Caster Semenya business is very regrettable indeed. It is clearly an extreme example, but we have seen over the years many bold claims made about DDT’s possible human health harm. Here is an example: In 1993 a study by Mary Wolff was published suggesting that DDE was a linked to breast cancer. The media picked up on this claim and ran with it, spreading great fear about DDT and cancer. It wasn’t until 2001 when a study concluded that in fact there was no link between DDE and breast cancer. Unfortunately this study was never reported in the media, save for (from what we could see) a misleading statement about it buried within a story in the Washington Post. So the public record is not put straight and the fear that DDE is linked to cancer persists. There have been many other examples - for some reason the media are keen to trumpet any claim of potential harm from DDT but the equally important and interesting finding of no harm from DDT is ignored. We have seen just such an episode play out in southern Africa with the report that links DDT with urogenital birth defects in boys. The media coverage has been sensationalist and of a very poor quality and the damage done by spreading fear in communities at risk from malaria has been great.
Thanks again Bart for managing this blog.
It was Bart, not I who said that “- Regretfully, DDT is being viewed as a ‘left wing’ versus ‘right wing’ political dilemma.”, and I simply agreed with that. I don not want it to be that way, and I completely believe you that the scientists writing to teh Stockholm Convention came from different ideological standpoints. I also don’t see anything in Marxism that would speak against DDT - after all North Corea is one of few countries still producing it.
I think over-interpret my comment about preferring a bed net, and no doubt all the points you make are true. I was just wondering about alternatives to DDT, and I know very well by now that AFM approves also of bednets.
Regarding your comment to Maureen. I think you should read once again what I wrote about why DDT has become the symbol it is. Unlike other pesticides, DDT was and is perceived as a symbol of Big Government and Corporate America. When people campaign against DDT, that is also a political statement for the specific blend of individual human rights and small scale solutions that are the core values of a tradition starting with Tolstoy, Thoreau and leading up to contemporary environmentalists. If you haven’t understood this, and tried to deal with it, you can not complain about media overlooking reports, and the public being suspicious of DDT.
For your information: wikipedia brought me to this 2007 study, with a differnt approach. Instead of assesing DDT/DDE levels at the time of the outbreak, it asseses DDT/DDE levels at the time when the women were growing breasts. I quote from the abstract: “High levels of serum p,p′-DDT predicted a statistically significant 5-fold increased risk of breast cancer among women who were born after 1931. These women were under 14 years of age in 1945, when DDT came into widespread use, and mostly under 20 years as DDT use peaked. Women who were not exposed to p,p′-DDT before 14 years of age showed no association between p,p′-DDT and breast cancer (p = 0.02 for difference by age).”
That doesn’t exactly mean that IRS gives cancer, since these women lived during the time whn it was used in agriculture, but it does say that there is a link between DDT and cancer.
@Daniel
thanks for highlighting this paper - You might be interested in reading the response to this research by RE Tarone of the International Epidemiology Institute. He finds that there is in fact no evidence of rising breast cancer rates among women born between 1930 and 1945. He concludes that “If, as suggested by Cohn et al. (2007), the public health significance of DDT exposure early in life is large, then this would provide additional evidence that the factor or factors responsible for the paradoxical decrease in birth cohort risk of breast cancer observed among U.S. baby boomers must have a very powerful impact on breast cancer etiology, large enough to turn an expected increasing trend in breast cancer rates among baby boomers into a decreasing trend.” Check it out here - http://tinyurl.com/243br3a
Do you see that th military dustings of children in foreign lands could have anything to do with the negative perceptions of the use of DDT?
@Steven Leitz - could you elaborate please? What dusting of children by the military? Do you mean during WWII? Are you referring to the use of DDT in controlling lice-borne typhus? I am not aware that this led to negative perceptions. Consider the following quote made by a survivor of Belsen concentration camp following dusting with DDT:
“… in front of our eyes, something close to a miracle starts to happen! Slowly, the incessant itching, so painful on our puss infected, ulcerated skin, starts to vanish, and this great relief finally convinces us that we have really been liberated. O Great, Powerful Benefactor, Inventor of the White Powder!” (Baumslag, N, 2005 “Murderous medicine: Nazi doctors, human experimentation and typhus.” (Praeger publishers, Westport CT) p. 27
Yes (although I was uninformed of that), and later. I was nearly too young to remember, but I recall about three bannings of farm chemicals in my youth; although one was a regional or state ban that spread. DDT, 2-4D (T?) (drift problems?) and (if it is not 2-4D) a plant growth hormone (also a weed killer) that also did some fauna hormone regulation. Wasn’t DDT used in VietNam, also? Negative perceptions formed after the banning, most probably? The DDT dustings of children were used in a “good” PR campaign.
Thanks for the link, Richard!
Daniel,
Anti-insecticide campaigns in free societies brought changes and many insecticides and insecticide uses just disappeared. Now, if I understand you correctly, you assume that the “professionals” were the cause of insecticide abuses and that environmentalists were responsible for stopping those abuses. I agree that certain chemicals were overused and misused. But from a historical perspective, the years of those abuses were times of experimentation, trial and error, and learning about the use of insecticides. There are many examples showing that users of insecticides were thoughtful and caring people. The “professionals,” as you refer to them, were not dogmatic and unthinking. They were busy doing experiments to detect potential harms and develop policies to protect human health and the environment. As one small example, the U.S. department of agriculture acted against the use of DDT on animal feeds in the late 1940s. Beyond this, registrations for chemical uses were continually being tightened and DDT uses had declined enormously by the late 1960s. Indeed, huge changes had already occurred in regard to which, when, how, and where insecticides were to be used. My point is that any perception that it took the environmentalists to bring about changes in DDT use is flat wrong. It did, however, take the anti-insecticide’s ruthless disregard for truth and accuracy in their claims of insecticidal harms to completely stop uses of some insecticides, to put some farmers into bankruptcy, and to dismantle disease control programs around the world. Did you know that parathion was recommended by our Environmental Protection Agency as the primary substitute for agricultural uses of DDT in the 1972 delisting of DDT in agriculture? Think about the implications of that decision!
It has now been almost 40 years since the DDT ban in the U.S. I suggest that the anti-insecticide movement has now evolved to be a far more ominous threat to human health and welfare than was ever posed by any uses of insecticides during the 1950s and 1960s. If you check a chapter I wrote in “Vector biology, ecology and control,” edited by Peter W. Atkinson and published in 2010, you will see how greatly the environmental organizations have grown and proliferated (and I did not perform an exhaustive compilation of organizations). If you read our book, “The excellent powder,” you will learn how negotiations for the Stockholm Convention were overwhelmingly dominated by environmental organizations (mostly NGOs). Today, environmental organizations have great influence over international policies for use of public health insecticides; but they have no responsibility for the harm of their policies. This is exemplified by the plan of the Stockholm Convention Secretariat to eliminate DDT by 2020. Ask yourself, what is the Secretariat’s plan for dealing with the consequences of that action? I think that if you really critically examine their plans for a replacement for DDT, they fall far short of what is required and there really is no credible plan to deal with the consequences of their actions.
My last comment is this: We are writing on a topic that has great meaning for people at risk of malaria. The basis of our debate is whether developing countries should be allowed to use DDT for malaria control. What is not in question is the effectiveness of DDT in control of malaria and prevention of deaths. Given this fundamental truth, I don’t think developed countries and UN organizations should have the authority to deny countries a fundamental right to use DDT in the protection of their own people.
Regarding the environmentalists and teh Stockholm convention. I looked at the loist of partner NGO’s. As you say there are environmentalists, and business representatives like the us semiconductor industry association, the Russian chamber of commerce etc. Did AFM apply for accreditation, or do you think that you were excluded? It is quite obvious why teh environmentalists want to be there, don’t you think? If I understand matter right, the NGO’s have no formal decision making right. I presume you lobbied the US government instead, which probably would be a better strategy
- I can see that the US has not ratified the convention.
There is no doubt that there were many well-meaning, skillful and innovative professionals working with these matters. What I talk about is the political perception. A lot of people in the early 60’s had a sense that society was being run not by the people, but by a faceless and emotionally cold bureaucracy. The environmentalist movement was only one of many anti-movements that fundamentally changed the way we think about authority in the west.
When people had this perception - and they saw dead fishes in rivers next to them or on TV, the DDT and pesticides issue must have seemed like an abuse of power. Also remember that ther was a lot of insiecurity about the New Deal heritage, and strong currents in american society that would be against professionals and authorities on rather ideological reasons. You find a lot of such anti-establishment-ism in Carsons book, for example.
You get my point? I am not saying that the professionals did mistakes, but that people where afraid of what these professsionals would do to their lifestyle.
As you say DDT and pesticides were widely discussed, aand there were laws restricting its usage, reasearch about connections to cancer etc. basically from day one. And I am one of those who would not see the beginning of environmentalism in the 60’s, albeit if the movement grew in the 60’s.
“Given this fundamental truth, I don’t think developed countries and UN organizations should have the authority to deny countries a fundamental right to use DDT in the protection of their own people.”
- that is a big discusion, which is very relevant for this blog. What you are calling for is a different way to handle things like these, outside the UN. I think that developing countries if anything are weaker to defend their rights outside the UN. Think about it - at the moment developing countires have guidlines from the WHO saying that they should use DDT against malaria. Of course the UN is far from efficient, but the alternative for aid-receiving countries would be to depend fully on volatile opinions in the west. Which politician do you think would be the most popular in Sweden, one who says thet Swden will help fund DDT campaings, or one who promises to fund resarch on alternative methods to fight malaria? Which politician do you think would gain most popular support in the EU?
How interesting to find Roger Bate as an author of this book. I know him for taking wild liberty with the truth in the field of HIV, and now he shows up in the field of Malari…
see my blog post about him here:
http://www.peripheries.org/2008/11/17/the-lobbyist-versus-the-people/
How interesting to find Roger Bate as an author of this book. I know him for taking wild liberties with the truth in the field of HIV and compulsory licensing, and now he shows up in the field of Malaria…
See my blog post about him in the link above.
A person with the name Roger Tatoud left the following comment on my LinkedIn page:
Roger TATOUD has just left a comment on your network update:
“One of the author of this book has little credibility in my view (Bate). I leave the Malaria science to you but would be cautious about their interpretation. If you ask why me they would write such book the answer is very simple, as you guess it: Money.”
It is funny to notice that people seek answers regarding ‘The excellent powder’ from the perspective of the authors. They simply conclude that arguing in favour of a chemical must mean that the authors have commercial interests.
This has been refuted by Donald and Richard in this blog, and I have no doubts that this is true. There is no major business in DDT, so why would the authors write a book about it?
Next, by attacking Bate without sticking to the main argument that focuses on DDT, it again shows how fighting for a cause quickly turns into personalised attacks. I hoped that this discussion here would get us beyond that point, but alas, it is hard to change the world…
Today I received the following information by email from South Africa:
DDT –
This company (Regent laboratories) works closely with government agencies on the ground across southern Africa on a day to day basis. Here are some of the findings.
Is there too much talk about the rights and wrongs of the use of DDT? Also, is there too much hype as to its harmful use and future health issues without the overall picture as today’s challenges looked at in detail?
Some facts which are not readily spoken about……..
The end cost factor of DDT is very high, in US$, psychological, residue disposal, when compared to many numerous Pyethroids, why?
Firstly it takes ten times the amount of DDT to cover 1 square metre surface area as a pyrethroid such as Lambda Cyhalothrin.
So if a pyrethroid costs per single sachet 62,5g and a 675g of DDT sold at a similar price, which they now are, what is then not taken into account is as follows:-
100,000 non palletised 62,5g pyrethroid sachets fit into one 20foot container. If DDT is to cover the same sq metres it states clearly that ten containers are required to transport enough DDT to do the same job.
The price comparison is product price divided by application rate i.e. DDT price $3.98 per dose in 10 lt water at 2 gms per square mt will cover 40 sq mt = US$ 0.995 cent per square mt
Lambda Cyhalothrin @3.98 per dose in 10 lt water @25milligrams per square mt will cover 400 square mt
So 1 ton of Lambda Cyhalothrin. = 10 tons DDT in application rate
The DDT carbon footprint alone is huge when one considers countries such as Mozambique ordering up to 23 containers of a pyrethroid a year and if DDT, 230 containers.
That means in countries which have very poor infrastructure or smaller transport way with all with which to distribute; they are given a distribution headache of massive proportions. In areas where motor bikes are used to get to inaccessible areas, they would need to make hundreds of unnecessary trips because DDT was the preferred insecticide option, ½ tonne pickups would need to be 5 tonne trucks and so the mounting costs carry on. Fuel, large vehicle fleets, additional manpower; all on roads which are most of the time problematic.
The argument that DDT lasts twice as long is probably quite accurate, but unnecessary in most parts of sub-Sahara Africa as the dry seasons are invariably cold and relatively mosquito free. Even so the use of many good alternatives to DDT still makes for financial and environmentally / ecologically friendly sense. The Stockholm Convention makes it clear the disposal of the residue must be undertaken in a particular manner.
Most of the countries receiving DDT do not have the correct incinerator in place. Are these poor countries actually disposing of the waste in the manner proscribed in the Stockholm Convention or recklessly burning / burying? Another high cost factor against DDT. So who pays the transport costs to ship it to a country that has the correct disposal means? Another DDT hidden cost?
The health issue is not a clinical “It does harm, yes” or “No it does not”. The facts on the ground are as follows.
Much delivered DDT has not been used in IRS use. It lies for years for reasons as follows:- The operators refuse to handle it. They are aware of the claim that their manhood in the sperm count may be impaired. That DDT is generally regarded in the West as a serious health issue and still banned more or less universally.
Local chiefs often refuse to let their villages be sprayed with any product let alone DDT. This because of the past bad publicity concerning large scale DDT spraying often resulting in persuasion on the ground in the use of a perfectly safe pyrethroid often takes weeks, which shows the scale of the DDT “fear factor”.
It has become more and more prevalent for governments / NGO’s USaid etc, in Africa to force upon the local population DDT without consideration of the personal concerns of their rural people, which brings up the subject of “Human Rights”.
Is there a case for DDT to be forced upon a population that does not want it in their living space? Is the DDT case diminished if there are perfectly good and numerous alternatives? Is it not the right of every human being to go to bed at night without anxiety and worry, whether DDTs poor publicity is ill founded or not?
Is it not the case that a pregnant woman carrying her child for nine months has the given human right to carry that child without fear and anxiety in worrying whether the child will be deformed or have any health risks due to the enforced use in her village of spraying DDT. In this case: The concern is not DDT but of mental health over such a prolonged period of time maybe impacting on the baby, or worse if it created a miscarriage.
Nigel Frazer-Evans
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Thanks Bart for posting this. I have spoken with Prof. Roberts and we have the following points to make in response (in two parts) to Nigel Frazer-Evans.
No matter how one wants to justify an anti-DDT position (as expressed by Nigel), it still comes down to anti-insecticide groups wanting to deprive countries their right to use one of our few tools against malaria. We have always maintained that national malaria control programs should develop their control strategies based on their own requirements, budgets etc etc. We support strategies that work and that are based on evidence. Nigel is creating a convenient straw man argument about pyrethroids and is missing the main point.
There is no lack of information or propaganda for promoting the use of pyrethroids. There is no lack of information or propaganda about DDT disposal. There is no lack of information or propaganda about amounts of chemical used, transport or logistics of DDT. Nigel ignores the anti-insecticide pressure against use of carbamates and OPs. He ignores the growing issue of pyrethroid resistance. He ignores the issue of how chemicals actually work to control malaria. He ignores the fact that DDT is the only approved insecticide that functions as a repellent.
Nigel is repeating the fearful claims that have shut down malaria programs around the world. The increased costs of DDT can be attributed to the fear mongering of the anti-insecticide movement. That fear mongering has shut down control programs, shut down factories, increased costs of accounting and tracking DDT use. Conveniently and neatly the increased costs thanks to fear campaigns has provided those campaigners with an added argument against DDT. These campaigns have made the whole question of DDT use highly polemic. In the meantime, the anti-DDT advocates cannot prove that DDT causes any public health harm whatsoever.
There are countries that seek to use DDT, have the infrastructure to use it and are able to dispose of it in line with the ever more burdensome and costly regulations. We have made the argument that we have very limited options in disease vector control with only 12 chemicals from four classes. We need to ensure that public health professionals have options available and the argument against DDT based on volume of product and carbon footprint falls flat though in the face of pyrethroid resistance. Resistance to insecticides is a very real and very pressing problem in many parts of Africa. How does it help that pyrethroids are transported in smaller volumes if the insecticide itself doesn’t function to protect people from malaria? (Don’t get us wrong – we are NOT advocating against pyrethroids – we are simply making the point that when resistance arises, we need strategies and alternative insecticides to deal with it). To stress our argument again - we wish to see malaria control programs empowered so that should they seek to use DDT, they are able to do so.
As an aside, the argument about carbon footprint is really very trivial. Is it not appropriate to point out that the industrial production of CO2 in most malaria endemic countries is miniscule compared to the production in China, India, the US and Europe? To argue against DDT based on a few more vehicle trips that produce a globally insignificant and meaningless (meaningless when compared to the truly huge CO2 production in industrialised and rapidly developing countries) amount of CO2 is surely absurd. And it is even more absurd when you consider the reason for those vehicle trips - to protect people right now from a deadly disease. Should we really compare the immediate risks of death and disease with the long-term risks associated with increased CO2 production? If yes, on what possible basis?
Nigel mentions psychological issues and no doubt is right that in some areas spraymen/women and those living in sprayed houses are concerned about the insecticides used. Here again we find a reason that we wrote the book and much of the basis for our advocacy work. Take the example cited earlier about a paper by Barnhoorn and others. Much has been made about DDT residues in fish, possibly associated with endocrine disruption and other health effects. In the media in South Africa great claims have been made about harm to human health spreading great fear. Yet the actual levels of DDT found in fish are between 45,000 and 90,000 times lower than levels in experimental studies, which form the basis of the fears.
Again and again we see great fear being spread in vulnerable communities. Where do the fears and anxieties he talks about come from? Those fears come from the claims of anti-insecticide advocates. If a country chooses to use DDT, then one can be certain that there are reasons behind that decision. Is Nigel willing to deny governments the right to use DDT if it is, in their opinion, the best option? What will Nigel think when the anti-insecticide groups begin to target the pyrethroids for elimination from malaria control programs? Make no mistake, the use of OPs is on its way out. The use of carbamates will follow close behind. The anti-insecticide contingent is already beginning to focus its attention on the pyrethroids. Nigel, be careful what you wish for!
Lastly Nigel mentions human rights – yet he seeks as a foundation of those human rights the false fears about DDT. Nigel worries about the fear and anxiety that a mother faces based on anti-insecticide campaigns – is he really arguing that we should accept false and biased fears about insecticides and use that as an argument to follow policies that increase the actual risks that a mother and her unborn child face from malaria? Surely not!
Richard: I have somehow defended the traditional arguments agaist DDT from environmentalist. I think it is fair to sum them up as follows:
1. DDT is a major threat to biodiversity
2. DDT is a threat to human health
3. Mosquitos develop resistance against DDT, and this is the reason that DDT use dropped in the seventies
4. Mosquitos will eventually develop resistance against any pesticide, so pesticides can be no solution.
I know you don’t agree with this, so let us not discuss them. What I want to say is something different.
Nigel mentions a range of other arguments like:
1. DDT is inefficient, and expensive
2. Countries do not have the infrastructure to make good use of DDT
3. DDT is politically controversial
These arguments are fundamentally different - as you hint at yourself I don’t think that any environmentalist would see pyrethroids as the solution.
But it seems to me you pretty much deal with Nigel’s answer as you would deal with an environmentalist’s answert: “No matter how one wants to justify an anti-DDT position (as expressed by Nigel), it still comes down to anti-insecticide groups wanting to deprive countries their right to use one of our few tools against malaria.”
I can not find where you answer to Nigels statements. For example you write: “Resistance to insecticides is a very real and very pressing problem in many parts of Africa. How does it help that pyrethroids are transported in smaller volumes if the insecticide itself doesn’t function to protect people from malaria?” To say that pyrethroids won’t work is not an answer to Nigels statement that many countries in Africa lack the infrastructure to make us of DDT.
Unfortunately irrespective of which insecticide is used, few countries in sub Saharan Africa have the infrastructure and sufficient trained manpower to regulate the use and carry out IRS correctly.
Secondly in contrasting the bulk of DDT with a pyrethroid insecticide, due consideration should also be given to the cost of transporting insecticide treated bed nets - quite a problem on poor wet and very muddy rural roads!
Time to sum up the issue raised by Nigel.
He argues that more is needed when using DDT (this cannot be doubted, it’s a fact). Based on this he argues that shipping costs will be higher (true, hard to argue against), then he adds the carbon footprint issue (in essence true also).
Beyond the counter statements made by Richard, I would argue that most IRS programmes in place today are outsourced to specialised agencies or contractors that will take good care of transportation and waste disposal. A good example is RTI International, which on contract from USAID executes the IRS campaigns in all the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) countries. The grant money made available through PMI and also other large donor agencies covers all these costs, so I don’t see the issue here (and must agree with Richard that the carbon footprint argument is over the top. If this becomes an argument, than what about global trade of agricultural produce etc.?)
Richard’s argument ref pyrethroid resistance is based on the published facts that resistance is present on a large scale, notably but not exclusively in West Africa, so the argument indeed becomes simple: why ship something that doesn’t work but at lower shipping costs? That doesn’t make sense.
That there is house-owner resistance to spraying (not only against DDT but in general) is well-known, but is not an issue specific for DDT. This is a generic issue that needs to be addressed but does not fit in a discussion on the pros and cons of DDT I would say.
@Daniel - your summing up of your opinion is very interesting. Some 75 comments under this blog still makes you persist with your original opinions. I had hoped that the discussion here would have at least raised some doubt on your end that the ideas you had before might not be 100% correct. This shows how difficult the DDT issue really is: there is a pro and a con camp, and it is very hard for people to change opinions.
Based on ‘The excellent powder’ and the discussion here I must confess that my earlier understanding of DDT was completely blurred by the stories I got at college, that I was not fully informed about this matter, and that my opinion ‘No to DDT’ was not based on the science behind this chemical. Although (like Don and Richard) I am a strong advocate to seek alternatives for DDT, I also believe (now) that the chemical will have to play a (major) role until the time that we have such alternatives.
@Graham. Thanks (also for sending me your review of Robert’s book). Waste disposal of insecticides may be one issue, but pyrethroids on nets that are torn and discarded is another major issue. WHO actually put out a tender earlier this year for people to come up with good ideas to dispose of old nets. With millions of nets finding their way into Africa, huge amounts of pyrethroids can end up in the environment, which is particularly disastrous for fish and crustaceans…
A small correction
I didn’t want to sum up my personal opinion, but the opinion prevailing among environmentalists and DDT sceptics.
@Daniel - OK, thanks, sorry for my misinterpretation of your comment.
But now that you have read all this, seen all the arguments, what is your personal opinion? Has it changed? Which arguments still hold, which ones have changed? I’m curious…
I have to read the book to answer that
But well, I don’t think of DDT as a poison any more. There are obviosly certain risks coming with its use, but in a situation where you must choose between malaria and DDT, you have to take some risks maybe. But very much of it depends on the issues of repellancy and resistant mosquitos - after a given time the downsides must outweigh the upsides, as with any medicine.
Moreover, I think this discussion shows that there is too much focus on DDT, as compared to other substances and other methods of fighting malaria.
@Daniel - true, have a go at the book first.
Indeed, the repellency issue is a very important one. The fact that Roberts et al list 12 pages of studies to demonstrate that the prime mode of action of DDT is repellency, is a critical issue.
There is not too much focus on DDT - perhaps that has been the impression you got here. In other forums (for instance on MalariaWorld) we have people questioning the use of pyrethroids for IRS, or the sense of sending pyrethroid-treated nets to areas where we know resistance to pyrethroids is rampant. Such discussions are good, like the one here…
I am sure that people on MalariaWorld are very aware about variuos methods to deal wiht malaria. But I think that the discussion in minstream media is still very much for or against DDT.
Whereas a goggle search for malaria and DDT gives 246 000 hits, from all kinds of sources, malaria and pyrethroids give 51 700 hits, that seem to be from more focused sources like malariajournal, malaria.org etc.
I think also, that if you assk people in the stret what chemicals can be used against malaria, very few will come up with a name different than DDT.
@Daniel - it is true that such issues are discussed amongst professionals, which is a good thing. They are the ones advising policy-making entities about the pros and cons of chemicals for malaria control.
Google hits: this shows again how politicised the whole DDT issue really is. Journalists prefer arguing for or against DDT, and don’t often know the alternatives.
Asking people in the street normally yields nothing, not even DDT… most people in ‘developed’ countries don’t even seem to know what malaria is… see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtUNdfMZFsk
“The three phases are: 1) Preparation of a global business plan and partnership on developing alternatives to DDT and establishing the national capacities to deploy these alternatives (2007-2010); 2) Deployment of selected alternatives to DDT, resulting in a termination of DDT production (2009 – 2017); and 3) Destruction of all remaining stocks and stockpiles of DDT by
the year 2020.” http://www.ciel.org/Publications/IPEN_QuickViewsCOP4_18Apr09.pdf
• Richard Tren on 15th July 2010:
Tren…No matter how one wants to justify an anti-DDT position (as expressed by Nigel),
NFE – This is not true – my house would be sprayed with DDT if needs arose
Tren…it still comes down to anti-insecticide groups wanting to deprive countries their right to use one of our few tools against malaria.
Tren.. deprive
NFE..Not true where I am concerned
Tren… argument about pyrethroids and is missing the main point.
NFE – My main point as stated is not the use of DDT but the use of it where other methods are working and readily acceptable. If the case is the only way out and to save life, which should be the paramount concern, then DDT is a must…..
Tren.. He ignores the growing issue of pyrethroid resistance.
NFE..I don’t, but we know from hands on experience the issue of use of DDT is well overstated and 100% fantastic results are achieved without resorting to DDT.
Tren…He ignores the issue of how chemicals actually work to control malaria. He ignores the fact that DDT is the only approved insecticide that functions as a repellent.
NFE – A repellent – it reads as though you advocate sending the mosquito on its way to get some food elsewhere and be alive to breed, not arrive settle and be killed – settle being the operative word,not repellent - My note was not the issue of right or wrong or to be ‘clever’. You have injected these points not I. You appear to use these words as a backdoor way of getting your continuous and laboured point across.
Tren..Nigel is repeating the fearful claims that have shut down malaria programs around the world.
NFE..I know of no areas 100% where any “free comment” shut down any malaria control it is Mr Tren’s submission much as it is other’s re DDT.
Tren… advocates cannot prove that DDT causes any public health harm whatsoever.
NFE..The last sentence I agree with proof as you see it is not 100% readily available….but as to the rest…. We can quite easily produce DDT; it is produced in RSA but conveniently globally not made available for profit reasons (The factories can sell at a higher price if those who wish to use it have to buy direct and with so few options of purchase, a nice cosy situation) However very clever professors / scientist and the like not long ago advocated injecting human beings in battlefield conditions with chemical concoctions only to have shocking aftermaths and amazingly the similarity of argument augurs these remarks of yours….. and Mr Tren….,,,,, be careful what you wish for!
Tren..There are countries that seek to use DDT, have the infrastructure to use it
NFE - Please name them ………. The only country we have found that has the way with all to dispose of the DDT residue in the manner prescribed in obtaining a licence (Stockholm) in southern Africa is RSA………
Tren…How does it help that pyrethroids are transported in smaller volumes if the insecticide itself doesn’t function to protect people from malaria?
NFE..We transport small volume all over southern Africa and they DO work …….. This point is made as though no pyrethroid works anywhere on this continent when they do work in most areas by volume.
Tren.. we need strategies and alternative insecticides to deal with it –).
NFE..Yes anyone with half a brain would agree that is correct – but this argument we keep reading about is not about the areas where no pyrethroid works anymore. It is about wholesale use of a product, no matter what name, as though there is no other way of dealing with the mosquito.
Tren..empowered so that should they seek to use DDT, they are able to do so.
NFE..Who are they? If you mean dictatorships that can be done easily: If you mean genuine democracies it cannot as the people decide who enters their village and who goes inside their homes. In a free society that is…… We have seen the refusal of village elders, chiefs, and even whole local provinces refusing DDT be used…. The Sovereign authority decided to go elsewhere and resorted to Pyethroids and guess what, they worked!!!!!!!!!!! This in more than one country………. The DDT having been foisted, NOT requested as a first choice, on the governments concerned; even when their own internal malaria control staff warned it would cause strife to force the use of DDT on people….
• Richard Tren on 15th July 2010:
Tren..As an aside, the argument about carbon footprint is really very trivial.
NFE..This is a spurious injection as all vested interests globally state their carbon footprint does not matter as it is so small in the overall scheme of things – well the figure two is small until it is multiplied by 200,000 million……. It is stated so a mind with an eye to all aspects of life on earth can see if there are malaria control alternatives that work and have little weight to carry. Why use a product by such huge volume when a malaria area is NOT in dire straits? That is unnecessary waste and expense, which can be better spent on more nets / fogging / larvicides / IRS or whatever the locals believe necessary. It is called good husbandry when huge sums of money can be saved and all Western governments are looking for huge savings in the present economic climate.
Tren..To argue against DDT based on a few more
NFE..In RSA we are told 90 tonnes of DDT was used last year alone, that equates on the roads to dozens of large vehicles well over five tonnes each – when a product like Deltamethrin granules at 20g would have been 3 tonne to disperse in light small ½ tonne 1,400 cc vans to do the exact same job – for the record we have been using Pyethroids deliberately to see if the propaganda of DDT being the only product that works in the RSA – guess what; they work just as well – then try Mozambique with the equivalent of 30+ containers this year alone, if palletized of a pyrethroid turning into 300+ plus if DDT and then the onward distribution – I don’t think the word “trivial” comes into play across the global combined figure and is slightly arrogant to those of us who care deeply about this planet and what our Grandchildren will inherit – just as we should care that DDT is only used where no other way is left to safeguard African and other children)
Tren… If yes, on what possible basis?
NFE..This point was brought about because there are other ways than costly DDT to tackle the problem of mosquitoes…. Where there is no alternative then the DDT argument may have merit otherwise not….. Should It not be the product of last resort NOT a “be all and end all”? LOOK AT THE FULL CIRCLE APPROACH TO MOSQUITO CONTROL AND STATE WHERE IT HAS FAILED ANYWHERE WITHOUT THE USE OF DDT……………..
• Richard Tren on 15th July 2010: Reply NFE
Tren..Here again we find a reason that we wrote the book and much of the basis for our advocacy work.
NFE..Write all the books you wish for likeminded academics or noteworthy scholars but they don’t get asked to spray villages or subject themselves to DDT residue too often in Africa without proper protection……Most can’t afford the daily newspaper let along a book……so how do they become less anxious?
Tren..Yet the actual levels of DDT found in fish are between…..fears.
NFE..Fish and animals at large do not get human beings rights and once again you use this reply not to make comment against some remark I have made, right or wrong or ill-founded, but just to labour a point you seem not to get through to many eminent people? I don’t agree or disagree I only care about what is seen on the ground on a day to day basis and that is if a person is made to be in fear because of your, almost, maniacal demand that DDT be forced on them. It is very wrong, very wrong indeed. And many have asked who are you to play God putting people under duress often without - in many countries - respect for their dignity and human rights. An issue you did not touch on but perhaps in the quiet times think on if you value the Human Rights issue for all, which most of us adhere to and want globally.
Tren..Is Nigel willing to deny governments the right to use DDT if it is, in their opinion, the best option?
NFE..No Nigel is not – but only when DDT is the ONLY option left maybe then it is right to take them down that road….
Tren..target pyrethroids for elimination from malaria control programs?
NFE..If there is 100% good intent and lives are saved Nigel is 100% for it tomorrow; because having retired and out of the main stream tread mill. I can afford to be my own master…….
Tren..Nigel, be careful what you wish for!
NFE..My wish is for all people to have respite from unnecessary anxiety, peace, free from the malaria scourge and living in harmony in their hearts giving them a smile…. If DDT can achieve this in areas where all else fails, so be it but not have those same people lose the same rights as enjoyed in the large democracies. In other words: Bullies barging their way into homes and villages under the guise of government knowing what’s right for them. When we know on the ground too often the product being use – no matter the name / type – is there because of corruption, not care of the people….
Tren..Lastly Nigel mentions human rights – yet he seeks as a foundation of those human rights the false fears about DDT. Nigel worries about the fear and anxiety that a mother faces based on anti-insecticide campaigns
NFE..Is it not extremely arrogant and disrespectful to state what a person you do not know or see is thinking in “his” mind - to make such a sweeping statement - good manners and respect for another’s point of view cost nothing no matter whether one leans towards a point of view or not)
Tren..is he really arguing that we should accept false and biased fears about insecticides and use that as an argument to follow policies that increase the actual risks that a mother and her unborn child face from malaria? Surely not!
NFE..Nigel is NOT interested in anti-insecticide campaigns he is, in the above context, interested in the rights of the individual / government employees being respected. He is interested in the person being given the same precedent as would be afforded that person if they lived in an English castle or the large condominiums in New York or wherever. Not have arrogance of using DDT, or any other type of product, forced down their throats and lungs if they don’t wish it. More especially if there are alternatives that still work in their given living areas… even then this should be an education as the Zimbabwe Health and Child Welfare - government undertake in the large rural areas long prior to an IRS programme being undertaken a Q&A session, leaflets, and wall posters etc., that’s the right way I would hope?
Nigel,
I am confused by many of your arguments and I am not sure your facts are as factual as you want us to believe. For example, what is your proof that South Africa produces DDT? In your commentary, the idea that South Africa produces DDT seems to stimulate comments about government corruption. Honestly, I just don’t see how the idea of corruption fits into this debate.
I think comments about carbon footprint in reference to DDT is nonsense. The crux of this issue is cost-effectiveness of methods to prevent human disease and that entails a lot more than just amount of chemical to transport. It also relates to duration of chemical activity, which in turn involves frequency of routine spray operations, and most important of all, it relates to performance in preventing malaria transmission.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, country after country was forced to stop using DDT in malaria control programs. This may be a bit repetitive of past comments, but please bear with me because I want to make a point. As you may or may not know, the countries of the Americas have largely stopped using DDT (and their malaria rates increased greatly as a result). The countries didn’t stop its use because of DDT resistant malaria vectors, or because DDT was ineffective, or because DDT was harming people. They stopped because of environmentalist anti-DDT pressures. So, today the countries are mostly spraying pyrethroids. In the last 2-3 years, with greatly improved financing, they are finally having some success with combined efforts of improved drug treatments and use of pyrethroids. To date, their successes do not equal what was quickly achieved with DDT. This is not opinion, it is fact. Additionally, my statement does not reflect anti-pyrethroid sentiments—I personally think pyrethroids are excellent and I am grateful we have them for malaria control. Now to the real point of my comments about malaria control in the Americas. The latest comprehensive malaria report of the Pan American Health Organization points out that an important shortfall of using pyrethroids has proven to be the short residual life of the chemical. In other words, they need to be applied with greater frequency than DDT, and this is a big problem.
You present your opposition to DDT in highly charged emotional terms about individual rights. I have talked to people who felt abandoned by their government when spray programs were stopped and malaria returned. The protections from malaria, dengue, and urban yellow fever were stripped away from hundreds of millions of people by the anti-DDT campaigners? Malaria rates increased in countries of the Americas to record levels, as did dengue fever and the threat of urban yellow fever when spray programs were stopped. Do you realize DDT freed most countries of the Americas from dengue and risk of urban yellow fever? Additionally, freedom from those diseases was maintained for many years. Now millions of dengue cases are occurring in countries that were once dengue free.
What do you mean when you say DDT should be used as a last resort?, Who do you think should make that decision? Do you think you should make the decision for the countries? Some people think officials of the UNEP, GEF, and the Stockholm Convention Secretariat should be making the decisions about DDT. Personally, I think the decisions to use DDT or not use it should be made by the people who actually do the hard work of malaria control. We have seen and documented what happens when DDT is forcibly removed from malaria control programs. The result has been a colossal public health disaster.
Nigel, does your position of “DDT only as a last resort” reflect an assumption that DDT is the cause of some great public health harm? If so, what harm do you think it causes and what is the cause-effect evidence?
I think all reasonable people can agree that harm should be definable and quantifiable. Harm should be viewed as something substantial and real, not just some assay result for some biomarker. In this regard, there is a location in the U.S. where DDT was formulated and distributed. The town became a site of high DDT contamination. As a consequence it has a long history of lawsuits, endless environmental surveys, very expensive remediation efforts (mostly at public expense), and epidemiological study after epidemiological study. Town residents went from a period of many years of very high DDT exposures, and now, almost no DDT exposure. The conditions of low DDT exposures now span more than two decades. Numerous epidemiological studies, over time, have documented no public health harm to those very high DDT exposures. Additionally, the studies have documented no improvements in public health as a consequence of having eliminated DDT exposures. For the exposed people, compared to control populations without histories of high DDT exposures, there were no changes in fertility rates, cancer rates or any other anomalies suggestive of harm from DDT exposures. I understand that a single case study does not prove a lot; but what should be persuasive is the findings are consistent across a great many studies.
So, back to your belief that DDT should be used only as last resort. What is wrong with using DDT to control malaria and simultaneously experimenting with alternative approaches to malaria control? If alternative methods work as well, then stop using DDT. No one will object to DDT not being used if an alternative chemical truly gives an equally cost-effective result. However, all reasonable people should be furious that countries were forced to stop effective programs when there were no equally affordable and efficacious alternatives. Likewise, all reasonable people should be furious that elitists within the Stockholm Convention Secretariat are now planning to stop all countries from using DDT in malaria programs. Their plan is real and their date for completing it is 2020. Do you realize they cannot possibly achieve their goals without using regulatory controls, or politics, or finances, or all of these, to force malaria endemic governments to do what they want?
Nigel, I read your comments in response to Tren’s statement about one of the reasons for writing the book. Frankly, what you have written is not logical. Tren cannot force any country to use DDT. Neither Tren, the book we have written, nor I have authority over malaria programs. We do, however, have a responsibility to verify and report information as honestly and accurately as possible, and that is what we have tried to do. If that information helps program managers make informed decisions, then we have provided a public service.
Your anger against Tren’s comments suggests you think malaria control program managers have been pressured to use DDT. In reality, managers of malaria programs are under enormous pressure, internationally and nationally, from anti-DDT campaigners to not use DDT or any other insecticide. If you want to see what real pressure is, check out DDT propaganda on the Stockholm Convention website, or go to the Pesticide Action Network’s website! Check out their propaganda, their plans, their political links and their enormous levels of funding, only then will you understand the idea of reverse pressure for governments to use DDT is absurd. I believe the ultimate truth is that when program managers decide to use DDT, there are technical reasons behind their decisions. Their decisions are courageous and deserving of our respect.
@Nigel - I’m lost with your statement ‘LOOK AT THE FULL CIRCLE APPROACH TO MOSQUITO CONTROL AND STATE WHERE IT HAS FAILED ANYWHERE WITHOUT THE USE OF DDT…’.
After all, in your own South Africa it was the shift from DDT to pyrethroids and the resistance (in Anopheles funestus) that followed (to pyrethroids) that led to the epidemic in 1999. Only after DDT was used again did numbers of cases drop to very low levels again.
So mosquito control in this case clearly failed because of resistance and only became successful when DDT came back in - in South Africa…
I really have enjoyed reading this article and the input from everyone. Not sure if any of you have heard of http://www.3billionandcounting.com where a doctor investigated the ban on DDT and what he found will shock you back to sanity! Why? Because once you have the truth about something .. you can start acting from facts! We supported the ban on DDT because we were lied to and the insanity began. Now that we have the truth that DDT is safe for humans and birds alike, lets bring it back. The documentary 3 Billion and Counting was just viewed in New York and L.A. with many saying it changed them forever. It was junk science that banned it .. it will be serious scientists and doctors that will bring it back.
I too have enjoyed the lively discussion here on this timely issue - DDT. I recently saw the documentary, 3 BILLION AND COUNTING, by Dr. Rutledge Taylor. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND for All interested in this issue! IT IS A MUST SEE; A REAL EYE-OPENER. This film actually SHOCKS one back INTO SANITY and makes you face The Truth. DR. Taylor explores the myths, lies, and coverups surrounding the banning of DDT by the EPA in the ‘70s. Thousands of pages of EPA hearings’ testimony reveal DDT was found to be Safe for humans and the environment, but was banned anyway by the EPA. DDT is the Safest, Cheapest, and most Effective way TO ERADICATE BLOODSUCKERS.
@Klight, @Bev. Thanks for keeping the debate on DDT alive. I have not seen the documentary, where do I get it?
I am intrigued by this debate and wonder if someone could answer a few questions for me….
Is there currently an effective, cheap, alternative to DDT?
If the answer is no, then surely DDT should be used to save lives now, until an alternative comes on the scene.
If the answer is yes, then what is this wonder chemical and why hasn’t it basically had a major impact on wiping out malaria by now?
I contacted Dr. Taylor and he expects the documentary to be available in 4 to 6 weeks.
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@Commonsense - the only class of insecticides currently available for indoor residual spraying or bednet treatment are the synthetic pyrethroids. These are more costly than DDT though. The problem with pyrethroids is that in many places resistance is popping up.
Having said that, pyrethroid-treated nets are having a big impact on malaria at the moment. It was recently estimated that over the last decade some 750,000 lives were saved as a result of using interventions like this, so the impact is there. However, it is not enough to eliminate malaria altogether… so we’re stuck and in need of additional tools (like larviciding).
@Donald- thanks, looking forward to it.
@Bart - thanks for responding. I can see bed nets being of value in cities where the standards of housing/screens etc might be higher than in rural areas. However in rurla areas, I can’t see how it could be more effective to provide a bed net, which tears and which protects one member of a household (while under the net), against the advantages of indoor spraying once or twice a year to protect the entire household with a proven, effective chemical like DDT. I’ve been reading quite a bit around the efficacy of DDT and its safety (I was very surprised to find iit is safe) and I suppose I am really puzzled as to why such an effective, safe chemical is not being used right now to stop these unnecessary deaths.
For example, I came across the following from the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works Hearing Statements in 2005. Its from a Professor of Tropical Public Health:
“I conducted malaria research in the Amazon Basin in the 1970s. My Brazilian colleague—who is now the Secretary of Health for Amazonas State—and I worked out of Manaus, the capitol of Amazonas State. From Manaus we traveled two days to a study site where we had sufficient numbers of cases for epidemiological studies. There were no cases in Manaus, or anywhere near Manaus. For years before my time there and for years thereafter, there were essentially no cases of malaria in Manaus. However in the late 1980s, environmentalists and international guidelines forced Brazilians to reduce and then stop spraying small amounts of DDT inside houses for malaria control. As a result, in 2002 and 2003 there were over 100,000 malaria cases in Manaus alone”.
The removal of DDT in this case appears to have precipitated untold devastation on this population. Why would anyone who was concerned about people actually allow this genocide to happen? That’s what I am having great difficulty with - why the risk assessment, if there was one, didn’t seem to take into account what would happen if DDT was withdrawn.
@Commonsense - well, your statement ‘why such an effective, safe chemical is not being used right now to stop..’ is not correct. DDT is firmly back on the agenda of malaria control programmes in at least 17 African countries. It is estimated that between 4-5 million kg are sprayed annually.
The Brazil example you give is telling, though care should be taken not to exclusively attribute these events to the withdrawal of DDT. This may have played a major role, but not the only one…
@Bart - thank you. I was interested in the numbers of countries where malaria is problematic and found the following (source - http://www.rbm.who.int/worldmalariaday/):
Africa 50 malarious countries
Asia-Pacific 20 malarious countries
Americas 22 malarious countries
Middle East and Eurasia 17 malarious countries
Giving a total of 109 malarious countries in 4 regions. I don’t know how many of these are using DDT,nor do I know how accurate these figures might be, but it seems to me that the case is sufficiently strong for a greater intervention with DDT on a worldwide basis.
@Bart. Thank you for continuing this discussion Bart, I think that it is helpful in getting wider and deeper understanding on vector control, insecticides and disease transmission.
Let me respond to your last comment about countries using DDT. It seems to me that you are a little too sanguine about the state of DDT use today. I’m not sure that there are as many as 17 countries using DDT. Certainly some countries in southern Africa - such as South Africa, Swaziland, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe are using it, but not that many more. Not long ago Uganda tried to use DDT and did so in one area once - but that program was shut down after some agricultural exporters and environmental groups took the government to court. At issue here was whether or not the indoor spraying of DDT would threaten agricultural exports (including cotton, coffee and fresh produce) to the EU. EU trade rules are extremely rigid when it comes to maximum residue levels - As we have discussed above, the health effects to European consumers from the miniscule residues that may find their way on produce will be zero - the naturally occurring cancer causing chemicals in coffee would be many times more harmful than any DDT residues. Yet we live in an absurd world and a successful IRS campaign was halted because of imaginary fears. One might ask why there were no demonstrations against the EU policies as would have happened if equally absurd rules had, for instance, shut down an HIV/AIDS treatment project? Well the answer may be because defending insecticides is unpopular, unlike defending access to medicines - yet public health insecticides save lives just as medicines and vaccines do.
Not only do we have oppressive global trade rules acting against DDT, but several UN and World Bank bodies are as well. The Secretariat of the UNEP Stockholm Convention is very clear that it intends to shut down DDT production by 2017 and halt all use by 2020. The Secretariat is joined by the UNEP and even the environmental groups within WHO in wanting to achieve this goal. Note that the only manufacturer of DDT is Hindustan Insecticides Limited in India - and that the price of DDT has been increasing.
We are not aware that any other company or country is planning to manufacture DDT and as the pressure against use of DDT from activist groups and from within the UN system increases, how sure are we that Hindustan will continue to produce?
The World Bank’s Global Environment Facility is funding various projects to find alternatives to DDT as part of the obligations under the Stockholm Convention. Note that the Stockholm Convention calls for both chemical and non-chemical alternatives to DDT. Have a look at the GEF projects though - have you seen any that actually put any real funding into a chemical alternative? Add to this the growing number of investigations in pyrethroids, carbamates and organophosphates and the malaria control community could soon find itself without any effective chemicals with which to fight the disease. What might we have instead? The World Health Organization’s own press release from May 2009 gives us a clue - namely “eliminating potential mosquito breeding sites and securing homes with mesh screens ... deploying mosquito-repellent trees and fish that eat mosquito larvae.”
In summary - not only are there fewer countries using DDT than you suggest, but there is growing pressure against its use AND against other insecticides. When an organization as important as WHO puts its imprimatur on a press release that seriously proposes trees and fish as alternatives to insecticides, I think we have a serious problem on our hands.
My point is that the breadth and scope of barriers to use of DDT and other insecticides in disease control programs are growing. Years ago this growth went to another level when the Stockholm Convention empowered the GEF to begin gathering large sums of funds under auspices of malaria control. In reality, the goal of the GEF is to further the ideological agenda against insecticides, not control malaria.