Mosquito Holocaust

While the wealthy West has wiped out malaria, it remains deadly to millions in the developing world, particularly in Africa; the annual global death toll from the disease is 1 million. Now activists working to control malaria have won a partial victory over environmentalists who want to ban DDT, the pesticide that's the cheapest, most efficient means of killing the mosquitoes that spread the disease.

Greens have targeted DDT ever since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) testified to its possible role in thinning bird egg shells. DDT was one of 10 chemicals marked for banning in the United Nations Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), signed in May by 93 governments. But because of lobbying on the part of anti-malaria organizations, DDT wasn't banned entirely. Rather, it was put in a "restriction" category, as opposed to being targeted for outright "elimination," as were the other nine substances.

The Convention spells out that "disease vector control" -- killing mosquitos, that is -- is a permissible use for DDT. Those who wish to continue to produce and use the insecticide can only do so with the express permission of the U.N. secretariat enforcing the agreement, and will become part of a public DDT registry.

This is undoubtedly a victory for anti-malaria forces, who feared the U.N. would completely ban their best weapon. But a recent monograph, Malaria and the DDT Story, by Roger Bate and Richard Tren (published by the Institute for Economic Affairs, a British free-market think tank), argues that the Convention is still an unnecessary burden on malaria-plagued countries. They hold that requiring desperately poor nations to develop new bureaucracies to track and report to the U.N. and the World Health Organization about how, when, where, and why they are using DDT will sap scarce resources that could otherwise be used to fight malaria.

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There are at least 300 million acute cases of malaria each year globally, resulting in more than a million deaths. Around 90% of these deaths occur in Africa, mostly in young children. Malaria is Africa's leading cause of under-five mortality (20%) and constitutes 10% of the continent's overall disease burden. It accounts for 40% of public health expenditure, 30-50% of inpatient admissions, and up to 50% of outpatient visits in areas with high malaria transmission.

There are several reasons why Africa bears an overwhelming proportion of the malaria burden. Most malaria infections in Africa south of the Sahara are caused by Plasmodium falciparum, the most severe and life-threatening form of the disease. This region is also home to the most efficient, and therefore deadly, species of the mosquitoes which transmit the disease. Moreover, many countries in Africa lacked the infrastructures and resources necessary to mount sustainable campaigns against malaria and as a result few benefited from historical efforts to eradicate malaria.

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