WHO backs DDT to rid malaria

The U.N. World Health Organization (WHO) reversed 30 years of policy yesterday, giving DDT a “clean bill of health” for controlling malaria, and it asked environmental groups to support limited use of the insecticide to save the lives of African babies.

“DDT presents no health risk when used properly indoors,” said Dr. Arata Kochi, director of the WHO’s malaria program. “Well-managed indoor spraying programs using DDT pose no harm to wildlife or humans.”

Malaria rivals AIDS as the leading killer in sub-Saharan Africa. The mosquito-borne parasite kills an estimated 1 million people each year, mostly women and children under age 5.

“Help save African babies as you are helping save the environment,” Dr. Kochi urged environmental groups at the National Press Club yesterday. “African babies … need your help.”

Swiss inventor Paul Hermann Muller won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1948 for discovering DDT, or dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane. The insecticide helped wipe out malaria in the developing world.

With the publication of Rachel Carson’s 1962 anti-pesticide tome, “Silent Spring,” DDT became the world’s most vilified pesticide. It was banned from use in the United States in 1972 and abandoned in much of the world.

Dr. Kochi said WHO stopped promoting DDT in the early 1980s. As its use declined, mosquito populations soared, and malaria deaths in Africa and Asia skyrocketed.

An estimated 500 million become sick from malaria each year, making the disease one of the biggest obstacles to economic development in poor nations.

Yesterday, the WHO revised its recommendations and saidDDT is safe for humans and “remarkably effective” when a small amount of DDT is sprayed in the indoor walls of houses and huts.

The spraying, which lasts about six months, keeps mosquitos from entering a building and kills them if they do..

The WHO said DDT is a powerful weapon and should be used in combination with bed nets, better malaria medicines and other pesticides.

Environmental and anti-pesticide groups said safer and more effective alternatives to DDT were available such as pyrethrum and recent studies suggest DDT is harmful to humans, especially children.

“It is about time the international community focused on combating malaria, but this approach takes us exactly in the wrong direction,” Dr. Paul Saoke, director of Physicians for Social Responsibility in Kenya, said in a statement released by the Pesticide Action Network, which opposes the reinstatement of DDT.

But those who campaigned for years to reinstate the use of DDT in the battle against malaria called yesterday’s announcement a tremendous victory.

“We are finally in a position to provide the maximum amount of protection to poor people in poor countries,” said Dr. Donald Roberts, professor of tropical medicine at Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Bethesda.

Story Continues →