RSSMalaria and Death or DDT and Life: Pick Just One
Gene Lalor | November 13, 2009
Suppose we could save a million (human) lives a year, 85% of which were children’s lives, or lose the brown pelican forevermore. The vast majority of us would opt for the million humans over a bird, I would hope.
Sub-Saharan Africans don’t have much of a choice between people over birds. There the scourge of malaria kills one child every 30 seconds, according to the African Environmentalist Association: http://bit.ly/WE8DQ
Malaria is sometimes called “Africa’s common cold,” but it’s not quite the equivalent of a mild cough, sniffles, and a sore throat. The debilitating disease causes high fevers, severe headache, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, brain damage, and, often, death.
Chicken soup or Vick’s VapoRub have no salutary effect on its victims.
There is an effective remedy for the deaths and the billions spent on treating malaria in African nations where costs can exceed 40% of health allocations. Those countries can afford the deaths but can ill-afford the billions spent to treat malaria victims.
The catch? The remedy is frowned upon by the UN’s World Health Organization, WHO.
As a mosquito-borne disease, logically, malaria is best prevented by the eradication of ’skeeters but the best preventative, DDT, 
is verbotten by WHO because of its deleterious effects on various animals, including the aforementioned brown pelican.
Thanks be to God, and WHO, according to Newsday the brown pelican has been saved! http://bit.ly/2WxNYJ.
Thanks be to WHO, millions continue to die from malaria in Africa because WHO discouraged the use of DDT, the most effective known weapon against the disease, then flipflopped after 25 years, then flipped back and now advocates for its “total phase out:” http://bit.ly/Ih2cO
The pesticide DDT, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, is hardly harmless. It is toxic to some fish, various animals, and it causes thinning egg shells in populations of avian species such as bald eagles, ospreys, and brown pelicans.
Its toxicity is much less pronounced with mammals, except for cats, which is probably a good thing.
Known as an insecticide for 90 years, it was widely used to prevent malaria and typhus until Rachel Carson’s infamous Silent Spring was published in 1962 and ignited pre-politcally-correctors to campaign for saving the birds.
At the same time, Carson unwittingly condemned perhaps as many as 50,000,000 Africans to painful death, as many needless lives as America has aborted?
Incidences of malaria may be rare in America but should we continue to tolerate the United Nation’s WHO senselessness? It’s time for some perspective: human lives or bird shells.
Contributor's website: http://www.genelalor.com/
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