8. DDT to Fight Dengue
- 21st Century Science and Tech: With DDT Spraying, Malaysia Can Show the World How to Control Dengue
- Slideshow: Fogging in Dengue Control. Is it a Waste ? (45 Slides)
- With DDT Perifocal Outdor Spraying, Malaysia Can Show the World How to Control Dengue
- Fogging in Dengue Control: Is It a Waste ? (45 Slides)
- Reported Dengue Cases in Malaysia 1994-2009
- NST Online: Support for the Usage of DDT to Fight Dengue
- NST Online: Use DDT Against Mosquitoes
- DDT Indoor Spraying for Malaysia
- Use of DDT: It's Still the Best Way to Fight Dengue
Published articles in the 21st Century Science and Technology magazine, Washington D.C. for Summer 2009 issue
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/
Please move your mouse over the picture below to control the slideshow. The slides should appear with a black background behind it. If it fails to appear, please refresh the page. Thank you.
Accepted for publication March 2009, revised July 2009
With DDT Perifocal Outdoor Spraying,
Malaysia Can Show the World How to Control Dengue
by Mohd Peter Davis
Universiti Putra Malaysia
Like the bold Australian compulsory car seat belt experiment in the 1970s which dramatically saved lives and injuries, Malaysia’s adoption of perifocal spraying with 0.3ppm DDT to protect the population could show the world, brainwashed for 47 years against DDT, the way forward in the control of dengue.
Support for the Usage of DDT to Fight Dengue
http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/NST/Thursday/Columns/2585175/Article/index_html
__________________________________________________________________________________
18th June 2009
EDITORIAL: Something new, something old
But now that DDT is back in favour, a few say we should use it against the Aedes. Given that fogging has not worked, as controversial as these views may be, a proper hearing should not be too much to ask.
FED up that his reminder to private clinics and hospitals to immediately report all cases of dengue fever has not had the desired effect, Health Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai has delivered a final warning to them to act, or else face the penalty of a compound fine of RM5,000. Given that the law requires medical practitioners to notify suspected cases to the health authorities, there is no question that these should be reported right away. Furthermore, just as early medical treatment is vital to fighting the infection, so is timely information in public-health intervention. The irony, of course, is that when the targeted 85 per cent instead of the present nine per cent of private doctors do so, the result is likely to be a sharp rise in the reported number of cases, most of which will not be confirmed positive. Still, when it comes to preventing the outbreak of disease, such over-cautious over-reporting is to be preferred to any under-reporting.
As far as control measures are concerned, Director-General of Health Tan Sri Dr Ismail Merican has reiterated during the NST Live session on Tuesday that, together with destroying the breeding sites, fogging is still the "best way" to get rid of the mosquitoes. But the fact that there has been no reduction in the number of cases shows that something is not quite right. This was not the case when DDT was sprayed with great effect everywhere to combat malaria. DDT was certainly not solely responsible. Neither did its use last long, though it had staying power, killing and repelling the mosquitoes for months with one application. But now that DDT is back in favour, a few say we should use it against the Aedes. Given that fogging has not worked, as controversial as these views may be, a proper hearing should not be too much to ask.
http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/NST/Thursday/Letters/2584782/Article/pppull_index_html
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DDT USE: Use it with caution
By ZAKIR BASREE ABDUL RAHMAN, Petaling Jaya
2009/06/18
I AGREE with Mohd Peter Davis on the reintroduction of DDT to eradicate dengue ("Use DDT against mosquitoes" -- NST, June 15). Nevertheless, careful control is needed to avoid over-use that may result in the chemical contaminating our drinking water.
The effectiveness of DDT led to over-usage in the past and the subsequent ban on DDT usage as a commercial insecticide.
Unless a more efficient anti-mosquito agent can be found, the merits of using DDT must be revisited.
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DENGUE: Use DDT against Mosquitoes
http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/NST/Monday/Letters/2582050/Article/pppull_index_html
DENGUE: Use DDT against mosquitoes
By MOHD PETER DAVIS, Bandar Baru Bangi
2009/06/15
I REFER to your report "Losing the war against dengue -- Health Ministry blames private hospitals and clinics" (NST, June 11). The dengue blame game must stop and the Ministry of Health should instead change its failed fogging strategy to win the war against dengue.
The World Health Organisation Dengue Fact Sheet (No. 117, March 2009) provides the best world situation report. Dengue has spread alarmingly in recent decades to 50 million cases per year, subjecting about two-fifths of the world's population to risk of infection, particularly in urban and semi-urban areas in the tropics and sub-tropics.
The fact sheet also states that dengue haemorrhagic fever is a complication of dengue, affecting 500,000 people per year. It can have a 20 per cent death rate without skilled hospital treatment, especially among children.
It is clear that dengue is not solely a Malaysian problem. Yet
At long last, the world is returning to scientific reason. The official announcement on Sept 15, 2006 reverses the scientifically unjustified and politically motivated 30-year ban on DDT. This recommendation applies equally well to dengue, which is also transmitted by mosquitoes.
The bold decision by WHO came in the face of an unrelenting campaign against DDT by the green environmental movement -- which began in 1962 with the book Silent Spring by sensationalist environmental journalist Rachel Carson. This led to the unnecessary deaths of 40-50 million people from malaria, mainly African children, and left infected adults too weak for agricultural work.
A seven-month international investigation conducted in 1972 by the US Environmental Protection Agency ruled, after reviewing 9,000 pages of scientific testimony, that "DDT is not carcinogenic, mutagenic, or teratogenic to man (and) the uses of DDT do not have deleterious effect on fish, birds, wildlife or estuarine organisms".
The time has come for the Malaysian Ministry of Health, in collaboration with the WHO, to conduct proper DDT indoor spraying of all houses and public buildings in selected dengue hotspots and scientifically compare the number of dengue cases with similar epidemic areas subjected to standard outdoor fogging.
Like the bold Australian compulsory car seat-belt experiment in the 1970s, which showed the world how to save lives and injuries on the roads, Malaysia's adoption of indoor DDT spraying to protect the population would show the world the way forward for the eradication of dengue.
The generation of Malay-sians now making the decisions has been brainwashed against DDT, while their parents' generation successfully controlled mosquito-transmitted diseases for decades using simple DDT mechanical spray pumps available for a few ringgit from sundry shops in rural areas.
As a biochemist lecturer and researcher with UPM, I have been campaigning for the last six years for the reintroduction of DDT. It has fallen on prejudiced ears, while dengue cases have increased seven-fold.
I have written a scientific paper especially for the younger generation who must now take the intellectual lead in the war against dengue. It has the title: "With DDT indoor spraying,
The paper has been accepted for publication by 21st Century Science and Technology (
21st Century Science & Technology (
Accepted for Summer 2009 issue
With DDT Indoor Spraying,
by
Mohd Peter Davis
Institute of Advanced Technology, Universiti Putra
mohd_peter@hotmail.com
Summary
“World Health Organization gives indoor use of DDT a clean bill of health for controlling malaria” This official September 2006 announcement reverses a 30 year ban on DDT. At long last the world is returning to scientific reason and the landmark decision offers a highly promising way forward for also controlling the spread of dengue fever. Malaysia, in collaboration with the World Health Organisation, has the ability to conduct the proper DDT indoor spraying of all houses and public buildings in selected dengue hot spot areas and compare the number of dengue cases with similar epidemic areas treated with convention outdoor fogging against mosquitoes. Like the bold Australian compulsory car seat belt experiment in the 1970s which dramatically saved lives and injuries on the roads, Malaysia’s adoption of indoor DDT spraying to protect the population could show the world, brainwashed for 47 years against DDT, the way forward in the control and hopeful elimination of dengue altogether.
Introduction
A severe form of the disease, dengue hemorrhagic fever, is a leading cause of illness and death among children in some Asian countries. Malaysia is a typical example, with dengue now rampant. Dengue virus usually causes an incapacitating flu-like illness with sudden onset and high fever, severe headache, pain behind the eyes, muscle and joint pains, and rash. Dengue hemorrhagic fever, the WHO reports, affects 500,000 people per year and can have a 20 percent death rate, without skilled hospital treatment especially among children.
Unfortunately, there is no vaccine to protect against dengue. Although progress is under way, developing a vaccine against the disease--either in its mild or severe form--is challenging. The only way to prevent dengue virus transmission is to combat the disease-carrying mosquitoes.
A Proposed Malaysian DDT Experiment
Malaysia, a small nation that has developed well in 51 years of independence, with a population of 27 million and 65 percent urbanization, is in an excellent position to test the effectiveness of spraying the indoor walls of houses with DDT, as recommended by WHO. If the Malaysian government, via the Ministry of Health, were to give its full support, Malaysia under the watchful eye of WHO, could test and scientifically evaluate the effectiveness of indoor spraying of DDT as a safe mosquito repellent to control the spread of dengue. This could be a world-class national experiment, with leading dengue and DDT experts as advisors, for the benefit of 40 percent of the world's population now at risk from this disease.
A similar national experiment concerning the general welfare occurred in 1970 in Australia. While the rest of the world agonized over the compulsory wearing of front seatbelts in automobiles, Australia boldly cut through all the individual rights objections and made it compulsory, to address the slaughter on the roads. By 1974, Australia's decrease of 37 percent in deaths and 41 percent in injuries convinced the rest of the world to quickly adopt similar mandatory seatbelt legislation.
Now that WHO has underlined the efficacy of the indoorspraying of DDT, Malaysia can conduct a national scientific experiment that hopefully will convince a world that has forgotten how the use of DDT in the 1950s and 1960s was successfully combating malaria and dengue. We must not miss this golden opportunity to again control these diseases, especially as the world economy disintegrates. The lesson of history is that economic collapse and rapid increase in diseases go hand in hand. Recall the Black Death following the 14th Century disintegration of the European financial system, or more recently the 50 million deaths from the 1918 influenza pandemic following the social and economic breakdown unleashed by the First World War.
The Malaysian Dengue Situation
The reported number of cases of Dengue Fever in Malaysia continues to go from bad to worse, rising each year--from 7,103 cases in 2000 to 49,335 in 2008, an increase of nearly 700 percent. This increase occurred despite energetic outdoor insecticide fogging campaigns conducted by the Ministry of Health to control the {Aedes} mosquito population in urban areas.
The lack of success with outdoor spraying has been noted worldwide. The Head of Insects and Infectious Diseases Unit at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Professor Paul Reiter (2009), in a letter to the Malaysian New Straits Times sums up the practice: "Fogging with insecticides from road vehicles has little or no impact in urban areas." Reiter goes on to state: "Search-and-destroy missions (against mosquito larvae) can be effective if people are vigilant, but many sites are hard to find, even by professional entomologists."
The limited success of this method is borne out by a large campaign in 2008 to control the spread of dengue in Malaysia, conducted by the Ministry of Health which mobilized 11,892 volunteer residents in 598 suburbs (around 20 residents per suburb) in weekly search-and-destroy activities of {Aedes} breeding sites. The Health Ministry reported considerable success with an 84 percent reduction in dengue cases in these suburbs. However, the number of reported cases throughout Malaysia in 2008 still rose by 1 percent. Clearly, it would require the constant mobilization of huge numbers of volunteers in {Aedes} search-and destroy missions in every urban suburb and indeed rural areas throughout the country to effectively
control the spread of dengue.
Faced with this daunting task, the Ministry of Health has instead placed the responsibility on every resident and factory owner to control {Aedes} breeding sites in their compounds by regularly emptying the base of flower pots and other water containers, including cleaning storage water tanks every week. There are heavy fines if the patrolling health teams discover mosquito larvae in a factory or household. Yet dengue cases have increased sevenfold in eight years. The sad truth is that the Ministry of Health has been transformed from a top-down body of highly trained and dedicated disease control professionals protecting the public health to become a low-grade and resented police force, which increasingly blames the public for spreading
dengue.
Again, Professor Reiter hits the nail on the head. There is no country in the world where dengue is under control. We need original ideas to win the battle.
Rethinking the Dengue Problem
We have reached a dead end and need to go back to basics. Trying to exterminate the {Aedes} mosquito in Malaysia or worldwide to control dengue or malaria is "mission impossible," rather like trying to eliminate cockroaches or termites from the biosphere. No matter how sophisticated the technique, from new insecticides to kill larvae, biological control to eat them, or the release of male {Aedes} mosquitoes with transgenic sterility genes, insect extermination is not the answer.
This is because the female {Aedes} mosquito is not the source of the dengue virus but merely the transmitter of the disease: the flying syringe which picks up dengue virus in the blood of infected humans. Although limited reproduction of dengue virus occurs in mosquitoes, they have a short life and die within 50 days, along with the virus. It is human beings and monkeys, not flower pots and dirty drains, that are the main breeding grounds, producers, and reservoirs of the dengue virus.
We really must stop thinking of other species as aliens from another planet, threatening mankind. Killing every species that spreads disease to humans would soon entail the extermination of all life on Earth. Although it is often hard to accept, mosquitoes do serve a useful and necessary purpose in the Earth's biosphere, which contains perhaps 50 million interdependent species. The highly cursed mosquito does not have an evil intent against humans. The only reason female {Aedes} mosquitoes bite humans is for blood meals to complete their reproductive cycle. The wrong public health strategy of trying to exterminate {Aedes} mosquitoes has in fact allowed the pool of humans infected with dengue virus to dramatically increase in recent decades and get dangerously out of control.
The War against DDT
Can we stop mosquitoes biting humans? That would stop the spread of dengue in its tracks. The good news is, yes we can! As the World Health Organization advised in 2006: Go back to when DDT was effectively controlling malaria and other mosquito borne diseases including dengue from the mid 1940s to the early 1970s before it was unjustly banned worldwide. The green environmental movement ran a ten-year fear campaign, remarkably similar to today's global warming hysteria, claiming that the life-saving DDT was a dangerous environmental poison. The fraudulent campaign took off in in 1962, when Rachel Carson, a marine biologist and well-known science writer, claimed that the use of DDT in households and agriculture was killing wildlife, especially birds. Hence the title of her book, {Silent Spring,} which shocked an innocent world into believing that DDT and man-made chemicals were threatening life on Earth. Carson falsely reported many of the results of DDT studies in order to make her case, as U.S. entomologist
Dr. J. Gordon Edwards has documented. Sound familiar? The misinformation against DDT was united with zero population growth, and the imminent exhaustion of resources on spaceship Earth claimed by the Club of Rome, into a giant fear campaign that became the fanatical battle cry of the green environmental movement. The 1968ers from the universities, those anti-Vietnam war, anti-blue collar, drugs/sex/and rock 'n roll white-collar baby boomers, became the shock troopers who turned the optimistic postwar public culture, which supported progress driven by science and technology, into green scientific pessimists.
Many scientists internationally fought back with convincing evidence. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conducted seven months of hearings on DDT in 1972, producing more than 9,000 pages of transcript. At the end, the EPA hearing examiner, Edmund Sweeney, ruled that on the basis of the scientific evidence, DDT should not be banned.
"DDT is not carcinogenic, mutagenic, or teratogenic to man and these uses of DDT do not have a deleterious effect on fish, birds, wildlife, or estuarine organisms." But the EPA administrator, Nixon appointee William Ruckelshaus, ignored these hearings and banned DDT anyway, later admitting that he did so for "political reasons." The U.S. ban on DDT, in effect banned it in the areas of the world that need it most. The U.S. State Department, other governments, and NGOs then refused to fund any aid program that involved the use of DDT. Poor countries could not afford to lose this aid.
The ban on DDT, against all the scientific evidence establishing its human safety, proved over the years to be a crime against humanity. The LaRouche movement, which has championed the reintroduction of DDT for decades, estimates the banning of DDT since 1972 has led to 60 million needless deaths, mainly from malaria in developing countries, especially in Africa. To grasp the magnitude of this crime, in the whole of the 20th Century, road accidents worldwide claimed half this number, 30 million lives. The responsibility for the unjust ban on DDT, lies with Prince Philip and the environmental movement that he launched and controlled through his World Wildlife Fund for Nature, and its poisonous offshoots such as Greenpeace. These share an evil belief, as followers of Malthus and Hitler, that the Earth is grossly overpopulated and needs to be reduced from 6.7 billion to less than 2 billion. They have certainly practiced what they preached. The environmentalists' war against DDT was a war against humanity.
[Put to the test, a team of fresh young lawyers and scientists, armed with the historic record, could today prove that case in any fair court. By natural law, the trial should be held in Africa. Like the Nazi trials in Nuremberg Germany, such trials are held close where the genocide occurred.]
How DDT Works
The beauty of DDT is that it does not actually kill mosquitoes, except in high doses. Instead it is still by far the most effective mosquito repellent ever invented by man and is amazingly cheap to produce. A few grams of DDT in a solution sprayed on the inside walls of a house will keep mosquitoes away, as if by magic, for about 6 months. (The effect is known as excito-repellency.) Then the walls can be re-sprayed with DDT. Imagine a giant mosquito net over the whole house; that is the effect that DDT provides. {Aedes} mosquitoes can fly many kilometers to feed and find their victims by following an increasing gradient of molecules in the air such as carbon dioxide and other products of human and animal metabolism. When the mosquito's antennae also start to pick up the molecules of DDT coming from a house, its effect is repulsive, and the hungry mosquitoes are compelled to go elsewhere for their blood meal. For humans, DDT is almost odorless. It has been found from long practice that spraying the indoor walls of houses just once with DDT gives the inhabitants good protection against mosquito bites for around 6 months. In contrast, mosquito coils, vapor mats, and aerosol sprays have to be used daily and contain insecticide chemicals such as prallethrin and allethrin, which kill rather than repel mosquitoes. So, large amounts of these more expensive insecticide chemicals have to be used, yet are far less effective than a few grams of cheap DDT repellent. Despite 60 years of organic synthesis to find a better mosquito repellent, DDT is still in a class of its own as the world's best and safest mosquito repellent. Although DDT is not 100 percent effective in preventing mosquito bites, it nonetheless has a remarkable effect in reducing the spread of mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and dengue. It is important that the inside of every house and public building in the community is sprayed with DDT. This is a public health measure like chlorinated tap water, rubbish collection, and household sewage, which is carried out to promote the general welfare. Given the irrational fear factor promoted by the greens, any objections must first be overcome with an intensive campaign of public education conducted nationally in the media, and especially in the suburbs, by disease control professionals, to the win the confidence and support of the community. On the appointed days, the same health officials go on to actually spray the inside walls of every dwelling and public and commercial building with DDT. Disease control is a government responsibility handled by professionals and must not be left to volunteers. With the whole community in effect quarantined, in what might be called DDT "safe houses" during much of the {Aedes} mosquito's biting hours around dawn and dusk, the spread of dengue by mosquitoes from a human carrier to other humans is greatly reduced. Indeed, Donald R. Roberts, a retired Professor of Tropical Public Health in the Uniformed Service University Bethesda Maryland, reports that in the 1960s the Malaria outbreaks in the Amazon Basin were usually brought under control by the DDT spraying teams before his scientific team arrived to investigate the disease.
Could Malaysia expect a similar result today if it were to embark on a national experiment to evaluate indoor spraying with DDT to control the spread of dengue? Another example is South Africa, which bravely withstood the international greenie pressure and re-introduced DDT in 2003 to fight an out-of-control malaria epidemic. Within one year of the reintroduction of DDT house spraying, the incidence of malaria in the worse-hit province, KwaZulu Netal, fell by 80 percent. In two years, the number of malaria cases and deaths dropped by 93 percent. As the WHO has stressed, there are no environmental effects when small amounts of DDT are sprayed on the inside walls of houses. Despite these crystal clear benefits and the subsequent reversal of the DDT ban internationally by WHO, the world still does not take action. Malaysia should take the lead and bring the world to its senses. With DDT, mosquito-transmitted diseases such as malaria and dengue can be brought almost completely under control.
The Danger of DEET Insecticides
DDT has been replaced by insecticides that kill rather than repel mosquitoes. The most common chemicals are prallethrin and allethrin, which are used separately or in combination in mosquito coils, vapor maps, and mosquito aerosol spray cans. In Malaysia, these products are readily available in shops, and are used almost daily in virtually all homes in the country. A simple calculation by the present author suggests that the common daily use of these reasonably safe (but not cheap) insecticides could be as high as 95 g of prallethrin and allethrin per household per year or about 20 times more than, say, the 5 grams of very cheap DDT required per year for indoor wall spraying.
The household insecticide presently used as substitutes for the DDT repellent are however very poor substitutes, and for extra protection against mosquito bites there is a danger that families may also resort to personal insect repellents containing DEET (diethyltoluamide), which is directly applied to exposed skin. According to Duke University, every year, approximately one-third of the U.S. population uses insect repellents containing DEET, available in more than 230 products with concentrations up to 100 percent. The mode of action DEET in repelling mosquitoes appears to be similar to DDT. In a rigorous research paper from University of California-Davis, involving human subjects who exposed their arms to mosquitoes under a wide variety of experimental conditions, Syed and Leal settled a long debate by clearly showing that the mosquitoes smell and avoid DEET. But there the similarities with DDT
end. A pharmacologist with Duke University, Dr Mohamed Abou-Dona, has spent the last 30 years researching the effect of pesticides in rats, the laboratory animal closest to humans for metabolic investigations. His numerous studies in rats clearly demonstrate that frequent and prolonged application of DEET causes neurons to die in regions of the brain that control muscle movement, learning, memory, and concentration. Moreover, rats treated with an average human dose of DEET (40mg/kg body weight) performed far worse than control rats when challenged with physical tasks requiring muscle control, strength, and coordination. Such effects are consistent with physical symptoms in human beings reported in the medical literature, especially by Persian Gulf War veterans. American troops in Iraq are issued DEET skin repellent cream to protect them from the biting flies which cause Baghdad boils and also spread Leishmaniasais, a parasitic disease affecting the liver, spleen, and bone marrow. Returning soldiers suffer similar symptoms to experimental chickens treated with DEET. These symptoms in humans include memory loss, headache, weakness, muscle and joint pains, tremors, and shortness of breath, which can occur months or years after exposure to the chemicals. The take-home message, says Dr Mohamed Abou-Dona, is never use [DEET] insect repellents on infants, and be very wary of using them on children in general. Never combine insecticides with each other or use them with other medications. Even so simple a drug as an antihistamine could interact with DEET to cause toxic side effects. These personal insect repellents are intended to be used sparingly and infrequently for outdoor recreational use and are very effective for about 12 hours. However, a dangerous scenario can now be anticipated in urban areas in Malaysia and other countries, where dengue epidemics are creating a climate of fear as the disease spreads to new regions. Those families that can afford to do so may go overboard, combining the whole arsenal of readily available mosquito coils, aerosol insecticide sprays, and now DEET personal repellents--exactly the practice Duke University is trying to avoid with its warning. It seems that in a desperate attempt to protect against dengue, parents could stand a very real possibility of poisoning themselves and their children with a dangerous cocktail of insecticides and repellents. The daily overuse of these inferior and potentially dangerous insecticides can be completely replaced by indoor spraying with a few grams of DDT every 6 months. For outdoor protection from mosquito bites for building and agricultural workers, and even home gardeners and picnickers, a range of innovative DDT-impregnated hats and outer clothing can be developed.
The only valid argument against DDT is that in widespread use in agriculture, it can produce resistance within the targetted insect populations. The introduction of DDT exclusively for control of human diseases, restricting its use for agriculture, and under the strict supervision of the health authorities, may well be able to completely replace the unregulated use of all present household and personal insecticides. Dr Pierre Guillet, a medical entomologist who spent 10 years on malaria control in Africa and now coordinates the WHO Vector Control and Prevention Team in Geneva, acknowledged in an interview: "There is no direct evidence of toxic effects of DDT on human health. If we haven't found any such evidence after 60 years," he said, "It is bloody safe."
Malaysia, in collaboration with the World Health Organization, has the ability to conduct the proper DDT indoor spraying of all houses and public buildings in selected dengue hot spot areas, and compare the number of dengue cases with similar untreated epidemic areas. Like the bold Australian compulsory car seatbelt experiment in the 1970s, which dramatically saved lives and injuries, Malaysia's adoption of indoor DDT spraying to protect the population could show the world, brainwashed for 47 years against DDT, the way forward in the control of dengue.
References
Donald R Roberts (2006) Interview: To combat malaria, we need DDT.
http://www.dukehealth.org/HealthLibrary/News/5500/
Edmund Sweeney (1972). Mentioned in ‘Bring back DDT, and science with it’
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/summ02/DDT.html
Gordon Edwards (1992). The lies of Rachel Carson.
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/summ02/Carson.html
Marjorie Mazel Hecht (2002). Bring bck DDT, and science with it.
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/summ02/DDT.html
Marjorie Mazel Hecht (2006). WHO backs DDT use to stop malaria.
Executive Intelligence Review, September 29.
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2006/3339who_oks_ddt.html
Ministry of Health (2009) Dengue in
www.moh.gov.my/MohPortal/DownloadServlet?id=2425&type=2
Paul Reitter (2009). Fighting Dengue: Good idea but it won’t work.
New Straits Times,
www.nst.com.my/Current_News/NST/Monday/Letters/2467644/Article/pppull_index_html
Syed and Leal (2008) Mosquitoes smell and avoid the insect repellent DEET. PNAS Early Edition
http://entomology.ucdavis.edu/news/deet321.pdf
World Health Organisation (2006) WHO gives indoor use of DDT a clean bill of health for controlling malaria. September 15, 2006
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2006/pr50/en/
World Health Organisation (2009) Dengue and dengue haemorrhagic fever.
Fact Sheet No 117, March 2009.
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Use Of DDT: It's still the best way to fight dengue
2nd February 2009.
http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/NST/Tuesday/Letters/2468677/Article/pppull_index_html
DDT is a polychlorinated pesticide resistant to destruction by light and oxidation and does not form harmful chemical complexes with biological material. Until it was banned, DDT was available for one or two ringgit from sundry shops throughout
DDT is biologically almost inert and does not kill mosquitoes. It gives off a smell repulsive to mosquitoes and acts to protect nearby humans. The perfectly safe chemical is very resistant to breakdown and a single spray on walls and around the compound persists for six months or more.
Meanwhile, year after year during dengue and, now, chikungunya outbreaks, the ministry tries to exterminate mosquitoes using short-lasting fogging chemicals which kill a ridiculously small percentage of adults without affecting the larvae. A few days later when the chemical has dispersed the mosquitoes come back.
It has been six years since the Health Ministry publicly dismissed the evidence I forwarded as a Universiti Putra
Indeed, to prove its complete safety, the
The Washington-based journal 21st Century Science and Technology estimates that the worldwide political banning of DDT since 1972 has led to 60 million needless deaths from mosquito diseases.
Mohd Peter Davis
Bandar Baru Bangi
