Part One
by Dr. J. Gordon Edwards
Malaria - man’s worst disease
Numbers of people have needlessly died of insect-transmitted diseases, starvation, malnutrition and associated maladies. These human beings would and should have lived longer had they not been unnecessarily deprived of the benefits of chemicals such as insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, nematocides, rodenticides and bactericides.
Let us first ponder the insect-borne diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, typhus, plague (black death), sleeping sickness and encephalitis, ignoring the dis- figurement and suffering caused by elephantiasis, leishmaniasis, and onchocerciasis (river blindness).
A leading British scientist once said that “If the various pressure groups had succeeded, if there had been a world ban on DDT as many sought, then Rachel Carson and her book Silent Spring would now be killing more people every single year than Hitler killed in his whole holocaust.” There is no denying that assessment, but the most frightening thing about it is that the pressure is even greater now than ever before to actually bring about a world-wide ban on the use of not just DDT but every other chemical pesticide!
The worst disease of mankind has been malaria, even though at various times in the past typhus killed millions of people (before DDT put a halt to it), and the plague eradicated half the population of Europe and nearly two-thirds of the people in the British Isles. Malaria was, and is, the number one killer of people and it threatens to be even more lethal in the future as the capricious antipest-icide propaganda of the pseudo-envir-onmentalist continues to accelerate.
Things were going well in the 1950’s and there was justifiable hope that malaria could be almost eradicated in the large areas of the world. By 1970, of 2,000 million (2 billion) people living in formerly-Malarious regions, 79% were safe because the disease had either been eradicated from their homeland or was under effective control there. By 1972, The Environmental Protection Agency had over-ruled the scientists and health experts, and banned most uses of DDT in the United States. The great anti-DDT campaign and the subsequent political action by the EPA lead to world-wide concerns about DDT, even in countries were malaria was prevalent. Six years later, there were 800 million cases annually and at least 8.2 million deaths every year.
Leaders in many other countries, seeing the EPA’s concern about DDT, concluded that they, too, should no longer use it. Unfortunately, when “poor” countries stop using essential life-saving chemicals, their ancient pestilences quickly return. In Central Africa, more than a million children under two years of age are now dying of malaria every year. In Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the DDT programmed reduced the number of malaria cases from nearly 3 million down to just 17 cases in the entire country after 10 years. The number of deaths from the disease dropped from over 12,000 a year down to zero.
Concern over Rachel Carson’s remarks about DDT, aided by political and financial difficulties, halted the effective malaria program at that critical time, and there resulted a resurgence of malaria. A few years later there were again more than 2 million cases of malaria in Sri Lanka. Fortunately, many countries did not halt their program, so malaria actually was eradicated in great areas of the world!
Dr. Edwards, a Counselor of the National Council for Environmental Balance, is a professor of entomology at San Jose State University, San Jose, CA. A ranger, naturalist-botanist, he has written for many publications on bio-logy, ecology, entomology, mountain climbing, ornithology and zoology.
Reprint permission given by AgAir Update, P.O. Box 850, Perry, GA 31069 - an international agricultural aviation publication.
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