Investor's Business Daily, July 23rd, 2007
Disease Control: The Los Angeles Times hypes an alleged link between global warming and a rise in malaria in parts of Africa. It so happens those areas don't use a cure that the Times doesn't mention -- DDT.
Last time we checked, mosquitoes -- not sports utility vehicles -- spread malaria. But Times staff writer Edmund Sanders made that linkage last Saturday, when rising malaria rates in parts of Kenya were attributed to higher temperatures and those temperatures to the carbon emissions of the U.S., among other countries.
In Kenya's western highlands, Sanders wrote, "maximum annual temperatures over the last 20 years are up about 1.8 degrees." This has caused the "emergence of malaria" in towns like Thangathi, which Sanders calls "one of the new fronts in the global struggle with a changing climate."
Industrialized nations, "including the United States," account for "the vast majority of carbon emissions," we are told, while "poorer countries, particularly in Africa, are the most vulnerable to its effects."
Get it? Every time you drive your SUV to Wal-Mart, you're spreading malaria in Kenya.
Sanders isn't alone. At the U.N.'s global warming summit last November in Nairobi, the Associated Press cited Kenya as an example of how "a warmer world tends to be a sicker world." The article said warming was disrupting Kenya's climate and that "malaria epidemics have occurred in highland areas where cooler weather historically has kept down populations of the disease-bearing mosquitoes."
Sanders echoes that thesis but doesn't even mention DDT, a proven and effective weapon against mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria. But in an article he wrote on May 29, 2006, he noted opposition by Kenyan officials to its renewed use.
"Bringing back DDT would be a disaster," Ahmed Hassanli, a department head at Kenya's International Center of Insect Pathology and Ecology, was quoted as saying. And Jane Ngige, head of the Kenya Flower Council, worried that DDT use would put the nation's $400-million horticultural industry at risk.
In 1990, in fact, Kenya joined the worldwide hysteria against DDT and outlawed the insecticide's use. That ban, not global warming, has spawned the resurgence of malaria in Kenya's cooler regions.
As John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institutes notes, a 1999 WHO report said that "malaria among (Kenya's) highland populations is better described as a re-emerging problem rather than a new, unprecedented phenomena."
According to the report, written by scientists at the Kenya Medical Research Institute, malaria "(e)pidemics in highland Kenya, varying in magnitude, location and effect, were to recur throughout the 1940s."
Nairobi experienced malaria outbreaks all through the '20s, '30s and '40s. So what stopped malaria in the Kenya highlands? Authorities in Kenya began using DDT in the late 1940s, around the time Al Gore was born.
In 2005, the Centers for Disease Control issued a report that concluded: "Doubts exist as to the plausibility of climate change as proximate cause of epidemic malaria, because global warming cannot explain the World War II epidemics. Dramatic increases in malaria in the 1990s are not mirrored by prospectively collected climate data."
Last year, faced with a body count that rivals AIDS as the leading killer in sub-Saharan Africa, the World Health Organization announced it was giving DDT a "clean bill of health." DDT is safe for humans and "remarkably effective" when a small amount of DDT is sprayed in the indoor walls of houses and huts, it said.
"DDT presents no health risk when used properly indoors," Dr. Arata Kochi, director of the WHO's malaria program told environmental groups at the National Press Club in Washington. "Well-managed indoor spraying programs using DDT pose no harm to wildlife or humans."
South Africa used DDT to fight malaria from 1946 to 1996, when it was replaced by other insecticides. What followed was one of the worst malaria epidemics in that country's history. Cases rose from around 6,000 in 1995 to more than 60,000 in 2000, and deaths went from the dozens to the hundreds. When South Africa reintroduced indoor spraying in 2003, it saw its malaria rates plummet 80%.
The WHO says it is safe. And the best part is it works in virtually any temperature.
