In Defense of DDT

In the nine years since Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring first documented DDT's disastrous effects on animal life, environmentalists have carried on a determined campaign against the potent pesticide. The U.S. Government has responded to their efforts by restricting the use of DDT. Several states have gone even further, banning the chemical completely. But DDT still has its defenders. The World Health Organization, admittedly more concerned with public health than conservation, has warned that a ban on DDT spraying could doom worldwide malaria-eradication efforts, which in the past 25 years have freed more than 1 billion people from the debilitating disease.

In sounding the alarm, which should give pause to even the most ardent environmentalists, WHO pointed to the experience of Ceylon, located off the southern tip of India in a tropical climate ideal for the breeding of the malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquito. There, a concentrated campaign of DDT spraying cut the incidence of malaria from 2.8 million cases in 1946 to only 110 cases in 1961. But after Ceylonese authorities, considering the battle won, dropped the spraying program, the disease returned with a vengeance. During 1968 and 1969, it afflicted 2.5 million people.

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