One passage in a recent news item sent to me by the public health group Africa Fighting Malaria featured a link to a bizarre secondary story:
The Government of Uganda held a Parliamentary hearing to review the evidence in favor of and against using DDT for malaria control. Although there was considerable opposition from a fifty-two-member coalition of businesses led by British American Tobacco, the Ugandan Minister of health recognizes the value of DDT for use with IRS [indoor residential spraying] and is likely to move forward with plans to deploy it in 2007.
The east African news blog, allAfrica.com, linked in the passage, says it's true: the cigarette moguls of British American Tobacco (BAT) were trying to prevent the use of DDT to reduce the toll of malaria in Uganda. And the statement of opposition was read by the BAT executive in charge of "corporate social responsibility."
This Kafkaesque scenario boggles the mind. Picture it: a tobacco company trying to promulgate "environmentalism" by pushing environmentalism's biggest hoax: the claim that DDT, when used for indoor residual spraying, might contribute to adverse health effects in humans or harm wildlife. Science has long known that the opposite is true: DDT used in small amounts can protect against the deadly bite of the anopheles mosquito and thereby reduce the carnage among African malaria sufferers -- over one million dead each year -- especially women and children.
Isn't BAT busy enough addicting, sickening, and killing their own customers without meddling in the struggle of impoverished African public health officials to combat malaria with the most effective agent in that fight, DDT? I would say to BAT, mind your own business -- except that their business is, after all, selling death.
Gilbert Ross, M.D., is Executive and Medical Director of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH.org, HealthFactsAndFears.com).
