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Comment by bolangi | Hacker News Reader

Widespread supply of mosquito nets treated with an insecticide is one of the more successful measures.

The most successful measure was carpet bombing the USA with DDT for years[1]. Most people don't know this now, but malaria used to be endemic in the USA as far north as the border with Canada. DDT's environmental persistence is obviously a double-edged sword, but it made the eradication possible.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...

I don't mean to be crass, but why wouldn't that have worked in Africa? Yes DDT is scary bad, but we seem to be doing ok in the US.

The US is pretty small compared to the parts of Africa that have to deal with malaria. The sheer size of the continent might make it difficult.

Weird as this seems, at the time, you had to be in a country that could _afford_ DDT. It wasn't free.

The environmental impact of widespread DDT use is pretty devastating.

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

Silent Spring isn’t a scientific work[1] and has some serious factual problems. If you want to support banning DDT in an evidence based way you need to look elsewhere. It is on the other hand observably a rhetorical masterwork.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/health/05iht-sntier.1.600...

It wasn't written to be simply and solely a scientific work; and it's hardly surprising that over the intervening 60 years, things haven't followed exactly all the scenarios it suggested.

That doesn't alter the fact that it was a seminal work that helped open many people's eyes to some very real issues; and the devastation of many ecosystems over the past half-century or more surely confirms the importance of its message.

If you ignore the reality of a situation in favor of rhetorical tricks to land a heavier impact - it still doesn’t make it actually true. Even if the heavier impact has some positives.

I had forgotten about that piece of tripe until you mentioned it

DDT has worked perfectly well in some areas of Africa, but you have to do it right. You have to carpet-bomb the place with the stuff properly for years without any let-up. The tradeoff is higher cancer et al rates for those years, in exchange for no more malaria.

The WHO campaign of the late 50s and early 60s very nearly did eradicate malaria globally. Unfortunately, for people living today in those parts of the world where it has resurged, a miss is as good as a mile.

We tried it in Africa. A lot. DDT is great - it's cheap, it's persistent, and there was a heady note of optimism that we might be able to drive malaria to extinction via vector control.

Then DDT-resistance developed in the mosquitos.

Combined with the health and ecological concerns around it, its use was largely halted. It's been reinvigorated recently as malaria incidence has rose, but it's a trade-off that it would be nice to minimize with other approaches.

Isn’t DDT resistance a result of so-called “responsible” usage like DDT coated netting instead of overwhelming application such as in the USA? It’s the same principle as antibiotic resistance: under-dosing selects for resistance.

DDT resistance arose during a time when it was extremely intensively used to try to wipe out malaria-carrying mosquito populations. It's certainly sustained by the more moderate uses of it, but at this point, that ship has sort of sailed.

It's been reintroduced in some countries as well - it's effective, and it's an important tool, but it's not nearly enough. And indoor residual spraying with DDT for malaria control remains fairly controversial - I fall in the camp of "It's probably worth it, but anything we can do to minimize it is a thing worth pursuing."

Also worth point out that DDT is not blankety banned in the US. It's just not allowed as a pesticide. You can still use it to kill mosquitos.

> Although Carson never directly called for an outright ban on the use of DDT, its publication was a seminal event for the environmental movement and resulted in a large public outcry that eventually led, in 1972, to a ban on DDT's agricultural use in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT

Well I have my doubts about that because it would have come right back after the DDT bombing stopped. Mosquitos can breed exponentially with zero issues, so I think that puts a huge hole in your theory.

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