UN's good intentions threaten to pave fatal road
Business Report, South Africa's Financial Daily

Staff Reporter
November 28 2000

For the past five years, the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) has been negotiating a legal treaty under which a dozen chemicals will be banned by international agreement.

The fifth and final negotiations, where the delegates will decide on the text of the treaty, will take place in the plush surroundings of the Sandton Convention Centre between December 4 and 9.

Unep and the environmentalists who support it feel they are making the world a safer place by eliminating chemicals they consider, not only dangerous and damaging to the environment, but unnecessary.

Some might consider this a well-intentioned and sensible plan. However, for millions of people - mostly the poor and those living in developing countries - these good intentions are an effective death sentence.

The reason: DDT, the pesticide reviled throughout the world, is on the list of the 12 chemicals to be banned.

While the developed countries of the north have no need for DDT and will certainly not miss it, the pesticide is used in many developing countries to fight malaria.

As Andrew Kenny said in the US National Academy of Sciences report to that country's Environment Protection Agency (EPA), DDT saved the lives of 500 million human beings in the 1950s and 1960s.

Restricting its use has caused the deaths of millions of others, almost all in poor countries - yet calls to ban DDT continue.

DDT kills the anopheles mosquito that spreads malaria. Not only is it cheap and easy to use, it is remarkably effective - more so than many of the more expensive alternatives.

The Allies first used DDT during World War 2, to control the problem of typhus spread by lice.

Its value in malaria control was quickly recognised and the World Health Organisation, with the strong support of the US Aid Agency, promoted the use of the pesticide to control disease throughout the world.

The pesticide was also widely used in agriculture during the 1950s and 1960s.

It was this liberal use that raised the concerns of environmentalists like Rachel Carson, the author of the anti-DDT book Silent Spring.

In the face of a wealth of evidence proving that the pesticide was safe and had beneficial uses, DDT became a dirty word, and in 1972 the EPA banned the pesticide to establish its reputation as tough on environmental issues.

Most countries followed the US's lead but many, including South Africa, retained the pesticide for disease control.

Yet environmentalists continued to apply pressure for the use of DDT to be eliminated completely.

In 1995, under such pressure, South Africa removed the pesticide from malaria control use and switched to synthetic pyrethroids, which are not only more expensive but more complicated to use - and far less effective.

Not long after DDT was removed from malaria control in South Africa, malaria rates skyrocketed, particularly in northern KwaZulu Natal. The anopheles mosquito developed resistance to the synthetic pyrethroids, making the switch from DDT an expensive and futile exercise.

In addition, the An. funestus mosquito - an immensely efficient transmitter of malaria, last seen in South Africa more than 40 years ago - returned via Mozambique.

According to Dr Rajendra Maharaj, the head of vector control at the department of health, it is unlikely that An. funestus would have returned had DDT remained in use.

As Maureen Coetzee, the head of medical entomology at the SA Institute for Medical Research, points out, a simple comparison of malaria rates in South Africa, Swaziland and Mozambique demonstrates the effect of abandoning the use of DDT.

Swaziland, which never halted DDT spraying, has infection rates ranging between 2 and 4 percent.

Meanwhile, a short distance over the border in South Africa, the infection rate averages at about 40 percent.

In Mozambique, the infection rate is double that of South Africa, partly because of the collapse of Mozambique's malaria control programme during its recent civil war.

Cash-strapped Maputo, under pressure from donors to prevent the use of DDT, is now trying to control the pestilence with pesticides that cost four times as much as DDT.

DDT is now back in use in KwaZulu Natal.

According to Jotham Mthembu, the head of the malaria control programme at Jozini in KwaZulu Natal, the crisis has improved dramatically. In those houses that have been sprayed, no anopheles mosquitoes are found.

Gerhard Verdoorn of the Endangered Wildlife Trust has given his approval to the use of DDT and has even trained the sprayers.

DDT is used in such tiny quantities that there is simply no prospect of any environmental damage arising from its use.

In the White River-Nelspruit region along the Kruger National Park boundary, many tragic cases of malarial infection among workers were documented earlier this year.

Malaria is not just an annoyance that forces one to take nasty tasting pills when visiting the game reserve - it infects more than 300 million people and kills more than 1 million every year throughout the world.

The disease also halts economic development and places a huge burden on the health resources of many countries.

Not only are people unable to work effectively when ill, causing enormous productivity losses, but the disease actually scares investors away.

After all, the prospect of an ill and disabled workforce is not exactly a draw-card for international investors.

Jeffrey Sachs of the Harvard Centre for International Development estimates that malaria destroys about 1 percent of Africa's wealth every year.

Mozal, the state-of-the-art aluminium smelter near Maputo, encountered tremendous problems with malaria in its early days of production, and has already spent millions of rands protecting its workforce from the disease.

Mozal also contributed greatly to the wider Lubombo Spatial Development Initiative malaria programme, thereby protecting people far outside its operational area.

This initiative is commendable. But since Mozal was legally forced to buy the more expensive alternatives to DDT, a good part of the money it spent could potentially have been used in other ways to uplift local communities.

Many South Africans have been vocal in their support for the provision of free or cheap drugs to HIV/Aids sufferers. It is time for these people to lend their support to the DDT issue.

Bureaucrats in Washington, DC and Geneva could be deciding the fate of many millions of people at risk from malaria in the developing world.

Green groups are gathering support for the banning of a substance that will have no impact on the important market that provides them with their considerable funding.

DDT is needed; it is safe; it is cheap and it saves lives. The fact that movie stars and celebrities don't come out in support of malaria victims, as they do with Aids victims, makes it all the more important that South Africans stand up for our rights and demand what we need to protect our people.

This is why Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM), a locally based nongovernmental organisation that has been researching the political economy of malaria control, will soon publish a research paper titled When Politics Kills: Malaria and the DDT Story.

When Politics Kills is a must-read for government officials, especially those in the departments of health and of environmental affairs and tourism.
________


Richard Tren is a director of AFM and a co-author of When Politics Kills: Malaria and the DDT Story. Themba Sono is Professor Extraordinary of the Graduate School of Management of the University of Pretoria, the president of the South African Institute of Race Relations, and a member of the Gauteng Provincial Legislature .