Rachel Carson Responsible for the Deaths of Millions of African Children

Rachel Carson’s writings regarding the beauty and significance of the natural world inspired many to pay close attention to environment. Specifically, it encouraged people to be more aware of the negative changes that were occurring as a result of human modification of environmental conditions through the use of natural resources, production of waste, and possible health consequences that could follow. Her last novel The Silent Spring, which was published in 1962, changed the course of history as it triggered an environmental movement that has influenced a whirlwind of controversies over the use environmentally harmful chemicals such as pesticides. Particularly, Carson addressed the dangers that DDT posed on plant, animal, and human life. Ultimately, Carson’s arguments and evidence against the negative environmental and possible health consequences of harmful pesticides such as DDT  were so  significant that they led to EPA banning  DDT in the United States in 1972 (EPA, 2014). Likewise, other nations around the world followed suit over the years, and banned the use of DDT by negotiating a treaty that was signed at the Stockholm Convention on persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in 2011 to promote a global ban on POPs such as DDT. Only 23 countries currently use DDT, and the use of DDT in some of these counties was exempted by the POPs treaty due to the severity of vector transmitted illnesses (Meiners & Morriss, 2001). Unfortunately, banning pesticides such as DDT has led to the death of thousands, especially in the tropical regions of sub-Saharan Africa, from a disease that is entirely preventable and curable, malaria.

Malaria is a life-threatening illness that is caused by a person to person transmission of protozoan parasites via female mosquitoes from Anopheles genus (CDC, 2014). According to the World Health Organization, malaria has caused more than 627,000 deaths and there was an estimated 207 million cases, particularly among African children and pregnant women, in the year 2012 alone (WHO, 2014).  Today, malaria is mainly prevalent in developing nations but this was once not the case.  In the early 1950’s malaria plagued much of Europe and North America, but it was eradicated due the use of DDT (Tren & Bate, 2001). Since DDT was banned in the 1970’s and household use decreased, there has been a rapid up rise of malaria cases worldwide (Roberts’ et al., 2000).  Moreover, no peer viewed scientific studies have been replicated enough to associate DDT with negative health and environmental impacts (Roberts et al., 2000).  

Nonetheless, the efforts to ban DDT have been mainly due to  continuous pressures from environmental support agencies and their active campaign towards the removal of DDT (Roberts et al., 2000).  For example, WHO’s malaria eradication strategy before the 1970’s involved spraying households with DDT to control malaria transmission (Roberts et al., 2000). However, the negative attention that Silent Spring and the environmental movement brought on DDT influenced WHO to switch to other malaria control alternatives such as insecticide-treated mosquito nets, mosquito coils, repellants, malarial drugs, and other materials in their Global Malaria Control Strategy ( GMCS) in 1992 and their current Roll Back on Malaria project(Roberts et al., 2000 & Meiners & Morriss, 2001).  Interesting enough, malaria is currently an issue of developing nations yet many of the current malaria control policies and alternatives were produced by developed nations (Tren & Bate, 2001). Consequently, these policies and alternatives have not been very successful as they are neither suitable for nor applicable to the environmental conditions and way of life in developing nations (Tren & Bate, 2001).  Although Rachel Carson is not directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of children, the evidence she presented in the Silent Spring, however, did lead to an environmental movement whose efforts to ban DDT affects the lives of millions of African children every year. 

Works Cited:

-CDC. (2014). CDC and malaria. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/resources/pdf/fsp/cdc_malaria_program.pdf

-EPA. (2014). DDT - a brief history and status. Retrieved from http://www.epa.gov/pesticides/factsheets/chemicals/ddt-brief-

history-status.htm

-Meiners, R., & Morriss, A. (2001). The legacy of the DDT Ban. Retrieved from http://perc.org/articles/legacy-ddt-ban

-Roberts, D., Manguin, S., & Mouchet, J. (2000). DDT house spraying and re-emerging malaria. Lancet, 356(9226), 330.

-Tren, R., & Bate, R. (2001). Malaria and the ddt story. Retrieved from 

http://www.fightingmalaria.org/pdfs/malaria_and_DDT_story_IEA.pdf

-WHO. (2014). Malaria. Retrieved from http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs094/en/

Pictures:

http://birdnote.org/show/50th-anniversary-silent-spring

http://junksciencearchive.com/malaria_clock.html

http://www.personal.psu.edu/jop5349/Assignment7.html

https://ssl1001.qwestoffice.com/tabibuafrica.org/merchantmanager/index.php?cPath=0_7

http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/malaria_worldwide/impact.html