Banned pesticide backed for malaria control
Pastor Dale Morgan
Banned pesticide backed for malaria control*
· World Health Organisation urges DDT's reintroduction
· Environmentalists warn of long-term cancer concerns
Sarah Boseley, health editor
Saturday September 16, 2006
The Guardian
DDT, a pesticide banned in the developed world, should be used to spray
houses in all countries where people suffer from malaria, the World
Health Organisation said yesterday, 30 years after it phased the
practice out.
The new push to use DDT to kill the malaria-transmitting mosquito in
Africa and other parts of the world with severe death tolls from the
disease will dismay many environmentalists. They fear the polluting
effects of the chemical will spread, although the WHO says spraying
should be limited to the insides of houses and their roofs. Arata Kochi,
the new head of the WHO's malaria programme, has made no secret of his
determination to bring back the chemical weapon that helped rid Europe
and the former USSR of malaria decades ago. "We must take a position
based on the science and the data," he said in Washington.
"One of the best tools we have against malaria is indoor residual house
spraying. Of the dozen insecticides WHO has approved as safe for house
spraying, the most effective is DDT."
The WHO called on all development agencies and governments to
incorporate the use of DDT in their malaria control programmes and to
issue statements on where they intended to use it and how they would
manage it. WHO promoted the use of DDT for malaria control until the 1980s.
The Malaria Eradication Programme, endorsed by the WHO's 1950 Kampala
conference, made DDT the cornerstone of malaria control and brought down
the rates of the disease in Asia, Latin America and southern Africa. The
WHO says that, as a result, about 700 million people were no longer at
risk by the end of the programme in 1969.
But most of Africa missed out and, the WHO says, "the burden of malaria
that remains today, much of which is in sub-Saharan Africa and in remote
rural areas of Asia and Latin America or among marginalised populations,
is unacceptably high. Today malaria remains a major cause of poverty and
underdevelopment and it is estimated that 3.2 billion people live at
continuous risk of this disease." There are 350m cases of malaria every
year and a million die, mostly children under five years old, 90% of
whom live in Africa.
The WHO says use of DDT declined because of lack of government money but
also because of "general disapproval" of its use for fear of its effect
on human and animal health. It is one of the persistent organic
pollutants that linger in the body for years and whose long-term impact
is not completely understood.
But the fears, says WHO, are unjustified when it is appropriately used
for indoor residual spraying only. It will not be recommended for use in
forested regions of the Amazon and south-east Asia, where there are no
structures to spray. There is no justification for its use in
agriculture, the WHO said, and regulations will need to be in place to
prevent the contamination of crops.
Barbara Dinham of the Pesticide Action Network said the issue of DDT
spraying was "very emotive at the moment. There is an argument from a
group of public health scientists that environmentalists are more
concerned about the environment than about people dying of malaria in
developing countries."
She and other groups concerned about pesticides would not block the use
of DDT "until it is quite clear that alternatives are available", she
said. "But there are serious chronic health implications of exposure to
DDT. It is a case of acute effects versus long-term effects."
Using DDT, she said, could be "sowing the seeds of endocrine disruption
and cancers, particularly breast cancer".