Anton
June 22nd, 2005, 04:23 AM
I've become aware that Malaria, once under control and even eradicated in many places in Indonesia (including Java & Bali), is now making a comeback in the last few years. This trend is not just true in Indonesia but many "tropical" countries.
This is largely blamed on the ban of DDT as a pesticide. At school and university I was always taught that when sprayed on crops DDT was an extreme environmental hazard as it accumulated in the food chain causing many problems such as defective bird eggs which endagered certain species. I do not doubt that the direct use of DDT on crops and the large quantities used is indeed highly harmful, but i have sinced learned that it was also the most successful agent used in the fight against malaria (which has been so succssful in much of indonesia). I also understand that when used to control mosquitoes it is not needed in the very strong quantities compared to that used on crops.
Malaria is one wicked illness - it still wipes out millions around the world and those that survive often suffer severly for life, but until recent years wasn't a problem in Java. It is not out of control yet, but it could get worse.
I can't say I know that much about it but want to know more. Is this re-emergence discussed much in Indonesia? Is anything being done about it? What do people here think?
Here's a recent article from the Sydney Morning Herald that explains the "pro-DDT" arguement well. (usually though i don't agree with this particular columnist but in this case she makes some good points I think).
http://smh.com.au/articles/2005/06/18/1119034100717.html
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Millions dying so fish may live
By Miranda Devine
June 19, 2005
The Sun-Herald
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IN A NURSING home where I once used to work during school holidays, there lay a barrel-chested man with a kind face and thick black hair. He was a Vietnam War veteran and had his own room, though he never seemed to have visitors. He was paralysed and I rarely did more than glimpse him through the door, except when called in to help with some gruesome task or other, such as a manual, which required a nurse with gloves to manually, or more accurately digitally, extract fecal matter from the poor man's backside.
He also had malaria - legacy of a Vietnamese mosquito - which would come on him periodically, soaking his sheets with sweat and causing him terrible torments. The door of his room remained closed on those days and the feverish existence inside seemed to be hell on earth.
I have been paranoid about mosquitoes ever since, and the debilitating, often lethal, diseases they carry.
The paranoia is not entirely irrational, even in Australia, far away from the malaria killing fields of the tropics. Mosquitoes, once brought to heel by the much-maligned pesticide DDT, are on the march.
Advertisement
AdvertisementLast month at a health conference in Darwin, researchers warned of a regional epidemic of such mosquito-borne diseases as malaria, Japanese encephalitis and dengue fever. They also warned that malaria in the Asia-Pacific represented a major impediment to economic growth with about 1.4 million people in the region exposed each year. While Australia was declared malaria-free in 1981, the disease kills about one person a year and infects 800 to 1000.
But worldwide the mosquito death toll is staggering. The World Health Organisation says malaria kills 1.2 million to 2.7 million people each year, most of them in Africa - mostly children and pregnant women - and causes brain damage to many more.
That is one dead child every 30 seconds. Only AIDS is a bigger killer of Africans.
All those deaths are the reason Rachel Carson's seminal 1962 book Silent Spring, about the evils of pesticides, was last week voted among the most dangerous books of the past two centuries. Fifteen American scholars enlisted by conservative magazine Human Events awarded Carson the honour along with Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. Silent Spring, with its scary talk of cancer and dead fish and the mantra that man must not interfere with nature, launched the modern environmental movement. It also demonised DDT.
"We should seek not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides," wrote Carson, "but to find instead a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves."
Which is fine as long as it's not your child dying from a mozzie bite.
The US Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT in 1972, and the rest of the world followed suit. Tens of millions of people have died from malaria since. Almost overnight, what has been described as one of the greatest public health tools of the 20th century became one of its biggest bogymen.
It was only thanks to widespread spraying of DDT in the 1950s and 1960s that malaria was eliminated from all developed countries and controlled in tropical Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa. In 1970 the US National Academy of Sciences declared that, in scarcely 20 years, DDT had prevented 500 million deaths. Advertisements of the time, which today seem preposterous, extolled it as a benefactor of all humanity, with slogans such as "DDT is good for me-e-e".
But malaria's mounting death toll in the decades since is finally prompting a rethink on DDT. In the footnotes of his best-selling anti-green novel State Of Fear, Michael Crichton asserted that the ban on the pesticide "has killed more people than Hitler".
An article in Britain's Spectator magazine last month went further, branding the DDT ban as the worst crime of the 20th century, and blaming environmentalist extremists for the deaths of about 50 million people.
Five years ago, South Africa began spraying small amounts of the dreaded pesticide on the inside walls of houses to arrest a malaria plague. Other parts of Africa are following, despite the reported disapproval of the UN, WHO and other agencies.
Another green-centric organisation, the European Union, even threatened Uganda this year with an export ban if it used DDT to restart a malaria control program.
But even environmentalists from Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, while not admitting any guilt, are doing U-turns on their opposition to DDT, says The New York Times, and are beginning to weigh the benefits (live humans) against the risks (dead fish).
Perhaps the pendulum has swung from the knee-jerk eco-hysteria of Silent Spring to a more realistic approach to sparing human suffering.
This is largely blamed on the ban of DDT as a pesticide. At school and university I was always taught that when sprayed on crops DDT was an extreme environmental hazard as it accumulated in the food chain causing many problems such as defective bird eggs which endagered certain species. I do not doubt that the direct use of DDT on crops and the large quantities used is indeed highly harmful, but i have sinced learned that it was also the most successful agent used in the fight against malaria (which has been so succssful in much of indonesia). I also understand that when used to control mosquitoes it is not needed in the very strong quantities compared to that used on crops.
Malaria is one wicked illness - it still wipes out millions around the world and those that survive often suffer severly for life, but until recent years wasn't a problem in Java. It is not out of control yet, but it could get worse.
I can't say I know that much about it but want to know more. Is this re-emergence discussed much in Indonesia? Is anything being done about it? What do people here think?
Here's a recent article from the Sydney Morning Herald that explains the "pro-DDT" arguement well. (usually though i don't agree with this particular columnist but in this case she makes some good points I think).
http://smh.com.au/articles/2005/06/18/1119034100717.html
---------------------------------------
Millions dying so fish may live
By Miranda Devine
June 19, 2005
The Sun-Herald
Page Tools
Email to a friend Printer format
IN A NURSING home where I once used to work during school holidays, there lay a barrel-chested man with a kind face and thick black hair. He was a Vietnam War veteran and had his own room, though he never seemed to have visitors. He was paralysed and I rarely did more than glimpse him through the door, except when called in to help with some gruesome task or other, such as a manual, which required a nurse with gloves to manually, or more accurately digitally, extract fecal matter from the poor man's backside.
He also had malaria - legacy of a Vietnamese mosquito - which would come on him periodically, soaking his sheets with sweat and causing him terrible torments. The door of his room remained closed on those days and the feverish existence inside seemed to be hell on earth.
I have been paranoid about mosquitoes ever since, and the debilitating, often lethal, diseases they carry.
The paranoia is not entirely irrational, even in Australia, far away from the malaria killing fields of the tropics. Mosquitoes, once brought to heel by the much-maligned pesticide DDT, are on the march.
Advertisement
AdvertisementLast month at a health conference in Darwin, researchers warned of a regional epidemic of such mosquito-borne diseases as malaria, Japanese encephalitis and dengue fever. They also warned that malaria in the Asia-Pacific represented a major impediment to economic growth with about 1.4 million people in the region exposed each year. While Australia was declared malaria-free in 1981, the disease kills about one person a year and infects 800 to 1000.
But worldwide the mosquito death toll is staggering. The World Health Organisation says malaria kills 1.2 million to 2.7 million people each year, most of them in Africa - mostly children and pregnant women - and causes brain damage to many more.
That is one dead child every 30 seconds. Only AIDS is a bigger killer of Africans.
All those deaths are the reason Rachel Carson's seminal 1962 book Silent Spring, about the evils of pesticides, was last week voted among the most dangerous books of the past two centuries. Fifteen American scholars enlisted by conservative magazine Human Events awarded Carson the honour along with Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. Silent Spring, with its scary talk of cancer and dead fish and the mantra that man must not interfere with nature, launched the modern environmental movement. It also demonised DDT.
"We should seek not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides," wrote Carson, "but to find instead a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves."
Which is fine as long as it's not your child dying from a mozzie bite.
The US Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT in 1972, and the rest of the world followed suit. Tens of millions of people have died from malaria since. Almost overnight, what has been described as one of the greatest public health tools of the 20th century became one of its biggest bogymen.
It was only thanks to widespread spraying of DDT in the 1950s and 1960s that malaria was eliminated from all developed countries and controlled in tropical Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa. In 1970 the US National Academy of Sciences declared that, in scarcely 20 years, DDT had prevented 500 million deaths. Advertisements of the time, which today seem preposterous, extolled it as a benefactor of all humanity, with slogans such as "DDT is good for me-e-e".
But malaria's mounting death toll in the decades since is finally prompting a rethink on DDT. In the footnotes of his best-selling anti-green novel State Of Fear, Michael Crichton asserted that the ban on the pesticide "has killed more people than Hitler".
An article in Britain's Spectator magazine last month went further, branding the DDT ban as the worst crime of the 20th century, and blaming environmentalist extremists for the deaths of about 50 million people.
Five years ago, South Africa began spraying small amounts of the dreaded pesticide on the inside walls of houses to arrest a malaria plague. Other parts of Africa are following, despite the reported disapproval of the UN, WHO and other agencies.
Another green-centric organisation, the European Union, even threatened Uganda this year with an export ban if it used DDT to restart a malaria control program.
But even environmentalists from Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, while not admitting any guilt, are doing U-turns on their opposition to DDT, says The New York Times, and are beginning to weigh the benefits (live humans) against the risks (dead fish).
Perhaps the pendulum has swung from the knee-jerk eco-hysteria of Silent Spring to a more realistic approach to sparing human suffering.