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Comment by Junk_Collector | Hacker News Reader

A hundred years ago, Malaria in the United States was bad enough to warrant a dedicated government office (It was folded into the CDC after WW2). This turned into a major eradication program through the use of DDT in the 1940's and by the 1950's Malaria was effectively eliminated from the states through the decimation of the mosquito population. Mosquitoes have of course rebounded over time, but malaria has not.

Mosquito release programs like this are now several decades old and have shown high efficacy with few environmental side effects where they have been tried. It is certainly more environmentally friendly than DDT. Meanwhile, the benefits are enormous and if done successfully in Africa could be directly measured in terms of human suffering.

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Indeed, I just recently learned, this is why the CDC is in Atlanta:

> On July 1, 1946 the Communicable Disease Center (CDC) opened its doors and occupied one floor of a small building in Atlanta. Its primary mission was simple yet highly challenging: prevent malaria from spreading across the nation. Armed with a budget of only $10 million and fewer than 400 employees, the agency’s early challenges included obtaining enough trucks, sprayers, and shovels necessary to wage war on mosquitoes.

https://www.cdc.gov/about/history/index.html

If only the CDC would stick to work on communicable diseases

Their mandate changed. They are not the centre for disease control and prevention and they act in accordance with their mandate as a public health agency

I know this is a typo, but it reverses the meaning so clarifying for future readers in case it's confusing:

They are _now_ the centre for disease control and prevention

Yes, I know. I have friends there who are fantastic, smart, committed civil servants working within their mandate and structure. I have a Master's in Public Policy from the Kennedy School, I'm not anti-government. But mission creep has hurt the CDC more than helped the nation. Public health is far too big a remit for any one agency.

I'm confused I've never heard of it getting involved in anything else.

What do you mean?

Guns: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/firearms/fastfact.htm...

I would tend to agree that they have no place talking about guns.

Collecting gun-related injury and fatality data allows us to make evidence-based informed decisions about what types of legislation are likely to be effective to reduce harm. For example:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-05/the-3-gun...

And that has nothing to do with Disease Control and is a clear demonstration of mission creep. The CDC has recently displayed its incompetence regarding its core function. Maybe it should master that before addressing other issues of society which are, at best, only tenuously in its purview.

Did they ask for this work or was it thrust on them because of political football?

You have many questions. At first it seemed as if you were curious about what other aspects the CDC had delved into. Now it looks like you are pursuing some agenda. The basic questions can be answered with a bit of research. Here are some more to ponder. Or maybe these are what you are getting at.

What was the CDC's original mission?

Did it execute it competently?

Why is it now involved in areas other than communicable diseases?

Do people in organizations seek to increase their power and influence?

Do they do this by enlarging the scope of their organizations' missions?

How is this notionally science-based entity being influenced by other factors?

Not exactly good faith here....

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24293489 - my sibling comment to yours might clarify my opinion for you...

I actually suspect this role was thrust on the CDC because they are generally supported by everyone (everyone sane anyway). I'm not a fan of this having happened because they should be too important to get mixed into politically poisonous debates.

I completely agree. There should be a government agency doing this. That agency should not be the CDC.

Well, don't they do other things that involve health? Like drinking guidelines and dietary guidelines and cancer research/information and things of that sort?

Still well within the realm of health and certainly affects communicable diseases (an unhealthy population is more prone to worse effects of disease).

Why? What do they do that you oppose?

Public health is precariously close to politics in a lot of cases and it casts shade on their mundane and universally appreciated work on topics more directly related to disease.

That said, it'd kind of inevitable that they run a course like that because constantly doing good non-controversial work banks political capital and the politicians are gonna try to harness organizations like that for their own ends.

So, because some folks make it political, we shouldn't get facts about things like the HPV vaccine or the effects of birth control methods?

How, exactly, are folks (who are not versed in medicine) supposed to get this information from a trusted source?

Question, why was DDT never tried in Africa if it was so successful in Florida and also in Italy after WW2? Why don’t we use DDT today? I’m curious to know the answers and have better understanding of the complexity of what makes eradicating malaria in Africa in the 21st century more complex than it was in the 1940’s and 50’s in other parts of the world.

We do. DDT has never been banned for disease control, it was banned for indiscriminate agricultural use and by that time resistance was already developing anyway.

Successful eradication in Florida and Italy was based on aggressive source control (stagnant water), control of re-importation, and use of insecticides (including DDT) for outbreak control.

Airborne spraying of more targeted larvicides continues to be used in Florida and other places.

Malaria rates in rural areas of Africa are much higher than urban areas so urbanisation also plays a role.

> why was DDT never tried in Africa

It was used in Africa, at least in 2016.

http://chm.pops.int/Implementation/DDT/DDTMeetings/DDTEG6201...

> Why don’t we use DDT today?

You mean for agriculture? Because using DDT for disease vector control was never internationally banned (only banned at the national level).

It's banned in agriculture because it kills stuff other than the mosquitoes. In particular, its use is restricted by the "Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants". Persistent Organic Pollutants are pretty much as bad as they sound, and DDT is one.

We don't use DDT today because of a book by Rachel Carson called Silent Spring.

http://www.rachelcarson.org/SilentSpring.aspx

Despite the environmental damage of DDT the Africans wanted to wipe out malaria first but were not able to purchase it in the quantities needed.

As late as 2004 leading newspapers editorialized that eradicating malaria in Africa outweighed the environmental damage

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/magazine/what-the-world-n...

What Wikipedia has to say about this:

> Carson has been targeted by some organizations opposed to the environmental movement, including Roger Bate of the pro-DDT advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria and the libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute; these sources oppose restrictions on DDT, attribute large numbers of deaths to such restrictions, and argue that Carson was responsible for them. These arguments have been dismissed as "outrageous" by former WHO scientist Socrates Litsios. May Berenbaum, University of Illinois entomologist, says, "to blame environmentalists who oppose DDT for more deaths than Hitler is worse than irresponsible." Investigative journalist Adam Sarvana and others characterize this notion as a "myth" promoted principally by Roger Bate of the pro-DDT advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM).

> As late as 2004 leading newspapers editorialized that eradicating malaria in Africa outweighed the environmental damage

This doesn't make sense. Eradicating malaria in Africa is beneficial to the human species. Environmental damage applies to all other species. I don't understand how one could "outweigh" the other. They are just two different objectives.

Environment also includes the crops, the insects that pollinate the crops, the pests which eat the crops, the predators that keep the crop-eating pests under control, the fish…

We’re not (yet) beings of pure thought who can exist independent of our environment, so the damage to the environment does have to be counted before we decide if something is net-positive.

of course they are related. Take a preposterous example: draining the mediterranean sea would be an environmental disaster which we wouldn't do. But if it would forever end world hunger, poverty and disease we would do it. The trade-off changes.

It is devastating chemical, killing not only insects, but all kinds of other creatures. It is one of the reasons for the writing of "Silent Spring". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT

Some of the people promoting DDT drank spoonfuls of it to prove how safe it was, but it turned out to be very toxic to nature.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gtcXXbuR244

> DDT was less effective in tropical regions due to the continuous life cycle of mosquitoes and poor infrastructure. It was not applied at all in sub-Saharan Africa due to these perceived difficulties.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Use_in_the_1940s_and_195...

jsinai asks>* Why don’t we use DDT today?*<

See "DDT":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT

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