The Best Chemical To Fight Malaria

By Jake Buckland

The Best Chemical Used To Fight Malaria Is DDT.

The best chemical used to fight malaria is Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, commonly known as DDT. First world countries adopted DDT as the go-to chemical used to fight malaria, typhus, body lice and the bubonic plague. The United States and Europe eradicated malaria after World War II. But today, malaria still infects 300,000,000 people every year in developing countries - more than all the lives in the United States. It kills as many as 2,000,000 people every year - that's the population of Houston, Texas. A father, mother or child dies every 15 seconds because of malaria. Nearly 90 percent of these victims are in sub-Saharan Africa but hundreds of thousands of cases are also reported in India, Brazil, Columbia, Guyana, Peru and the vast majority are children and pregnant women.

If DDT continued to be the chemical used to fight malaria the world would have eradicated this disease and many beautiful lives would have been saved. So why was it banned? The sad truth is people at the time wanted to control the population of the world because they thought it was overcrowded. First world countries were afraid of their own food security so instead of creating efficiencies within our supply chain they decided to eradicate people.

Population Control

Fears of overpopulation and running out of resources popularized opinions to ban DDT as the chemical to fight malaria. After DDT was banned other harmful chemical were used in its place. These new chemicals were proven to injure and kill people. The chairman of the Environmental Defense Fund, Dr. Charles F. Wurster, was quoted saying that these other substances "only kill farm workers and most of them are Mexicans and Negros" and that "people are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them and this is a good way as any" (See Published records on Hearing before the Congressional committee on Agriculture, Serial No. 92-A, 1971, pages 266-267).

The Environmental Defense Fund was one of the primary special interest groups that drove many of the U.S. policies to ban DDT.

U.S. Polices have Killed Millions of People

The U.S. policies to ban DDT started in the 1970s have been responsible for the death of hundreds of millions of people in Africa. In 1986 the Secretary of State George Schultz stated that the US cannot participate in any programs where people use DDT. They threatened to cut funding to all African countries that continued using DDT as a chemical used to fight malaria and other vector borne diseases. That one decision caused the death of hundreds of millions of people in Africa and the world.

There is no more important human right than to live. Without life, all other human rights are irrelevant. Somehow, America's and the world's malaria control agencies often forget this. Somehow, in too many cases, they seem to let politically correct ideologies supersede basic humanitarian goals.

At   Practical Emergency Kits, we are neither survivalists nor mindless followers of government. We believe in family, country and human life. A substantial component of that belief is preparation. Practical Emergency Kits was founded on the principal of providing families with   emergency kits and practical knowledge that's grounded in scientific research. We believe knowledge is the best way of conquering fear.