Monday, October 10, 2005

Real Science Versus Environmentalism, With Real Humans in the Balance

Over at the Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby sends up a timely and contrarian word on the safety and value of DDT, the world's most unfairly maligned chemical. As Mallaby notes, DDT has been treated as the pestilential pesticide since the hyped publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Meanwhile, people in Africa are dying of malaria, when the spraying of their homes with the inexpensive chemical almost certainly would save most of them.

Mallaby wants to frame the issue as the Europeans being even less interested in science than the Bush administration, as the EU, against all evidence and informed opinion, is threatening Uganda with sanctions if it allows DDT spraying. SWNID, tired of all the Bush bashing and Europe mongering, wants to frame it differently. Life is not all politics, you know.

Here goes. The Western world chooses carefully what to hate. Among diseases, it hates STDs, especially those associated with gay Westerners. So it hates AIDS. It spends bazillions on a cure. To observe a modicum of global consistency, it insists that AIDS be eradicated even among sub-Saharan African heterosexuals.

However, the Western world doesn't care much about diseases that more or less exclusively affect people of color in far-away places, especially if they are transmitted by parasites. So malaria, which is rampant in Africa, kills many more than AIDS. But nobody is investing in a cure, and nobody is willing to sacrifice their sacred anti-DDT dogma from St. Rachel of the Bird's Nest in order to get close to a cheap, practical and immediate near-cure.

Sorry, Ms. Carson, but besides inflicting your mediocre prose on two generations of high school students, you've also left a legacy of miserably unempirical and inhumane thinking. A lot of prematurely dead Africans would have preferred a bit of unproved risk with the local avian population over what you've left us.

Let's hope that we can get some sense on this issue. But in light of the near-universal environmental sentimentalism evinced in the way that we all reflexively put out our recycling bins every week despite the demonstrably negative impact of curbside recycling on the environment (it takes more energy and creates more pollution to recycle than to mine and mill, and we recycle materials that are renewable [paper] or in plentiful supply [glass, made from sand, and aluminum, one of the most abundant of metals, and plastic, made from petroleum residues left over in refining], and the idea that landfills are full is nonsense, and even if we started to run out of these things, we could always mine the landfills, so there's no good reason at all to have curbside recycling except to make people feel good about their environmental stewardship), SWNID (who confesses to recycling each week, to our shame) doubts that the sense will come soon.

[N.B. that the previous sentence is by far the longest in SWNID history.]

DDT is demonstrably more effective against malaria than condoms are against AIDS, and likely just about as harmless in purely physical terms. But there's no pro-DDT lobby. And now you know why.

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