“In effect, then, this effort to eliminate DDT pays Ethiopia about $10 for each dead Ethiopian.”

Commentor anonymous disagrees with me on many things, and calls me a "pathological liar".

:-/

Moi, your humble blogger, a compulsive perfidious scamp? How so?

Anonymous:

Egnor asserted that there was a worldwide DDT ban. There wasn't. Egnor asserted that U.S. relief agencies wouldn't provide aid to countries that used DDT, that was a lie. Egnor's lies concerning science and policy are so common that it is harder to find the true statements than the lies.

Now of course DDT isn't banned by statute in every country on earth. Yet an effective ban for much of the developing world need not be statuatory. DDT is legally banned in much of the developed West, of course. Note that environmentalists only banned DDT in their own countries after malaria eradication.

There is intense Western pressure on Third World nations suffering from endemic malaria to ban DDT use, in some cases involving statutory bans enacted via environmentalist lobbying, in some cases imposed by funding agencies, in some cases involving heavy political and ideological pressure, and in some cases involving-- well-- blackmail ('You're still using DDT? That's a nice children's anti-hunger program ya' got there. Shame if something happened to it').

The DDT ban in some nations is de jure and in some nations is de facto. The ban has been remarkably effective, as the sharp rise in malaria mortality worldwide since 1970 will attest.

Malaria death rates worldwide in the 20th century. The top line includes sub-Saharan Africa. The bottom line excludes it.  Note that the sub-Saharan death rate alone is even higher than the top (worldwide) graph. DDT was first widely used in the 1940's. The highly successful campaign to ban DDT worldwide began in 1970.

Discover the Networks helps clear up any misunderstanding:

This is a story of triumph and tragedy. The triumph occurred in the middle part of the 20th century, when the larger part of mankind finally succeeded in overcoming the ravages of malaria, the deadly infectious disease that had afflicted the human race since the dawn of time (and which, by one estimate, had killed approximately half the people who had ever lived on earth). But within three decades, the triumph would give way to tragedy when leftist ideologues, professing concern for the integrity of the natural environment, collaborated to ban the use of the pesticide best known by the acronym DDT—the very substance that had made it possible to vanquish malaria from vast portions of the globe. By means of that ban, environmentalists effectively ensured that, over the course of the ensuing 30+ years, more than 50 million people would die needlessly of a disease that was entirely preventable...

Wherever DDT was used in significant quantities, the incidence of malaria declined precipitously. In South America, for example, malaria cases fell by 33 percent between 1942 and 1946. In 1948, there was not a single malaria-related death in all of Italy. After DDT was sprayed widely in India’s Kanara district (where some 50,000 people had typically contracted malaria in any given year during the pre-DDT era), the number of newly diagnosed malaria cases dwindled to about 1,500 per year by the late 1940s—a 97 percent decrease. Throughout the entire Indian nation, the number of malaria cases fell from about 75 million in 1951 to 50,000 in 1961. In Sri Lanka, DDT spraying was initiated in 1946, at which time approximately 3 million new cases of malaria were being diagnosed each year. By 1956, that figure had fallen to 7,300; eight years after that, in 1964, a mere 29 Sri Lankans contracted malaria.

Encouraged by DDT’s unmatched success in killing the carriers of infectious disease, in May 1955 the World Health Organization, at its Eighth World Health Assembly, initiated a Global Malaria Eradication Campaign (GMEC). Funded mostly by the U.S. government, the GMEC focused heavily on the use of DDT as a means of combating malaria in North America, southern Europe, the Caribbean, and much of eastern and southern Asia. By 1961, malaria had been nearly eliminated from each of those regions. In South Africa, malaria rates plummeted by 80 percent in just 18 months as a result of spraying small amounts of DDT on the walls and eaves of traditional mud and thatch huts twice a year. Similarly, the incidence of malaria declined by 60 percent in Ecuador and by 90 percent in Madagascar.

DDT use reached its zenith in 1962, when a total of 80 million kilograms of the pesticide were used around the world. The National Academy of Sciences summarized the efficacy of DDT as follows: 

“To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. It is estimated that, in little more than two decades DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that would otherwise have been inevitable.”...

Tragically, however, this confidence would be derailed by a series of events that were triggered initially by the September 1962 publication of biologist/zoologist Rachel Carson’s bestselling book, Silent Spring, which warned of the dangers that DDT allegedly posed to all manner of plant, animal, and human life. These threats were so great, said Carson, that on balance they more than negated whatever benefits were to be gained from using the pesticide to prevent malaria...

Also echoing Carson’s nightmarish prognostications was the biologist Paul Ehrlich, who wrote:

“The Department of Health, Education and Welfare announced studies which showed unequivocally that increasing death rates from hypertension, cirrhosis of the liver, liver cancer, and a series of other diseases has resulted from the chlorinated hydrocarbon load. They estimated that Americans born since 1946 [when DDT usage was becoming widespread] now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and predicted that if current patterns continued, this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out.”...

Notwithstanding... DDT’s unparalleled effectiveness in combating malaria, the Green lobby—led by such stalwarts as the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Physicians for Social Responsibility—waged a tireless campaign aimed at banning the pesticide not only in the U.S. but everywhere on earth, all in the professed interest of protecting the natural environment.

The World Wildlife Fund, for instance, identified DDT as part of a “cocktail of highly toxic chemicals” by which animals and people could become “contaminated.” Greenpeace warned that “measurable quantities” of DDT and its metabolite DDE “are present” in human fatty tissue, blood and breast milk, and that “[r]esearchers think DDE could be inhibiting lactation because of its estrogen-like effects and may therefore be contributing to lactation failure throughout the world”. Physicians for Social Responsibility, urging “holistic” alternatives to DDT, announced that studies “suggest that DDE and possibly other organochlorines can weaken the immune systems of children, increasing their risk of developing asthma and certain infections.

Insisting that DDT could be replaced by alternative pesticides and by procedures such as “integrated vector management” (treating, with “environmentally sensitive” pesticides, the water sources where mosquitoes breed), environmentalists pressured countries around the globe to discontinue their use of DDT and to cut off government funding for DDT projects.

The environmentalists were joined in this effort by such entities as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the European Union, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Environment Program, and UNICEF. These aid bureaucrats warned impoverished countries whose populations were at high risk of contracting malaria, that if they continued to use DDT as the lynchpin of their anti-malaria programs, grants to their governments would be withheld.

Additional support for the environmentalist crusade against DDT came from a coterie of powerful and immensely wealthy leftist foundations, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Turner Foundation, and the Heinz family philanthropies. Like the aid bureaucrats listed in the preceding paragraph, these foundations threatened to withdraw their grants to impoverished nations if their governments were unwilling to forego the use of DDT.

Only a few nations—among them Ecuador, Mexico, and South Africa—possessed the financial resources necessary to fund their own DDT programs without the help of the aforementioned foundations and organizations. And for as long as they continued to use DDT, they remained malaria-free.

Eventually, however, a number of these nations bowed to pressures from the environmental lobby. In the 1990s, for instance, the Clinton Administration stipulated that the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement would be contingent upon Mexico’s willingness to stop its production of DDT. When Mexico ultimately agreed to abandon its DDT programs, its malaria rates increased exponentially.

South Africa, like Mexico, was able to resist the mounting pressures of the environmental lobby until 1996, at which time its Department of Health (DOH) finally relented; this DOH decision to comply with environmentalist demands was greatly influenced by the United Nations, which was threatening to cut off funding for the country’s public-health programs.

Shortly after South Africa had discontinued its use of DDT and replaced it with synthetic pyrethroid insecticides, a highly efficient malaria vector, Anopheles funestus (which had been completely eradicated from the country in the 1970s), reappeared. Within just a few years, the incidence of malaria nationwide increased more than tenfold (from 6,000 cases in 1995, to 62,000 cases in 2000). Desperate to scale back this re-emerging crisis, the South African government resumed its use of DDT in 2001 (disregarding UN warnings against such a course of action), and within months the malaria rate dropped by four-fifths.

In other nations, too, mosquitoes that previously had been vanquished by DDT quickly developed resistance to alternative pesticides; vector-management efforts failed dismally wherever they were tried. When Bolivia, for instance, yielded to international pressure and banned the use of DDT in favor of bed nets and other measures, its infection rate soared by 80 percent between 1993 and 2005. Zanzibar, Sri Lanka and other countries had similar experiences. 

Notwithstanding the mountains of evidence demonstrating that there were no effective alternatives to DDT for controlling the spread of malaria, the environmental lobby continued to call for the pesticide to be outlawed everywhere in the world. UNICEF and USAID, for instance, made their loans to Eritrea—where malaria was responsible for 50 percent of all deaths—contingent upon that nation's pledge to use the money not for DDT projects but rather for insecticide-treated bed nets, “environmental assessments,” and other “effective alternative[s]” to DDT that “could be used safely” under strict World Health Organization protocols.

Supporting this approach, the World Bank likewise demanded that Eritrea discontinue its use of DDT entirely, in favor of “chemicals or techniques that are safer for the environment and human health.” As a result of these restrictions, malaria retained its status as Eritrea's leading cause of death.

Similarly, the Canadian government gave Ethiopia (where nearly 150,000 people were dying of malaria each year) $1.5 million to fund a “national implementation plan” compliant with the International Stockholm Convention resolution to eliminate “persistent organic pollutants” such as DDT. But this plan proved to be entirely ineffective, and Ethiopians continued to die of malaria in enormous numbers. As journalist Paul Driessen aptly put it: “In effect, then, this effort to eliminate DDT pays Ethiopia about $10 for each dead Ethiopian.”

In February 2005 the European Union (EU) warned Uganda (where up to 100,000 people were dying of malaria each year) that EU member nations would stop importing Ugandan fish, flowers and cereals if that African country were to implement a DDT program to combat the disease.

Citing environmental concerns, USAID announced that it would only promote DDT as a “measure of last resort”—a position that, according to Roger Bate (co-founder of Africa Fighting Malaria), gave the agency “carte blanche never to support” the pesticide, since it could “always claim that other methods of malaria control [had] not yet been tried.” Bate elaborated:

“While some misplaced concern for the environment and human health may be part of USAID’s reasons for refusal to fund IRS, the more significant reason is likely to be the vested interests that influence its spending plans. In 2004, USAID’s budget for malaria control stood at around ... $80 million. However, the agency provides no documentation that it spends a single cent buying either insecticides or effective artemsinin drugs for malaria control. The vast majority of the agency’s budget is directed towards US-based consultants who ‘advise’ malaria control programs and conduct nebulous projects that have no clear deliverables. USAID, like most other donor agencies, is far more comfortable directing its funding to its own consultants, rather than the departments of health in the countries they are supposed to be assisting.”

The history of the fanatical environmentalist campaign to ban DDT reads like a criminal indictment.

The DDT ban--- de jure and de facto-- is the holy grail of the environmental movement. Yet when environmentalists who have been legislating, bullying, bribing, coercing, deceiving, threatening and blackmailing any poor country that dares use DDT to protect its citizens from insect-borne diseases are called out on their remarkably successful half-century crusade to ban DDT-- a ban they feverishly continue to pursue...

(Reuters) - The United Nations announced a plan Wednesday to rid the world by around 2020 of DDT, an outlawed toxic crop pesticide still used to spray homes to fight malaria-spreading mosquitoes.

 ... environmentalists scream 'Ban? What ban? You're a pathological liar!'


Decide for yourself who is the liar.