Bad Air

One of the more disingenuous arguments in the litany of calamities predicted by global warming enthusiasts is that malaria will advance into regions where winters are now too harsh for the parasite to survive. It is a frightening prospect because today the disease kills more than a million people every year, most of them children under five. It is also a false alarm. The truth is malaria isn’t a disease of the tropics. It is a disease of poverty. It is prevalent today in Equatorial Africa not because it is warm there. It is prevalent because so many people there are too poor to protect themselves.

That was true of the United States as late as the 1940s, though it was as much from ignorance as poverty. It wasn’t until 1890 that we even knew what caused malaria or how it spread. It got its name from Romans who thought it was brought on by swampy fumes. English colonists brought it to Jamestown in 1607 at the height of the Little Ice Age. It quickly spread across the continent. By the 19th century it could be found from Florida to Massachusetts and west through the Dakotas. Malaria doesn’t need warm winters. It needs mosquitoes and unprotected people. As Americans grew more prosperous they installed screens in their windows and doors and the disease began to abate. It persisted in many areas though, particularly in the lower Mississippi Valley where the ground was swampy, mosquitoes everywhere, houses too loosely constructed to provide tight seals, and people often couldn’t afford the screens.

Health officials understood all this and in the late 1940s launched an eradication campaign. Local, state and federal agencies drained swamps and wiped out other mosquito breeding grounds. They also sprayed DDT inside every southern home. The DDT killed other insects as well and people loved it. It was one of the great public health successes of the 20th century.

Then we banned DDT, though it is not an environmental hazard when used inside. It is harmless to humans unless they ingest it. But the ban stopped its use in some areas where it could have done a lot of good. Some mosquitoes developed resistance to the insecticide. Also, we sprayed it on the walls. Many of the homes in today’s most vulnerable areas don’t have walls. New eradication efforts will require some ingenuity. They will also require some common sense. Some environmentalists have belatedly dropped their objections to the responsible use of insecticides; some but not all.

The point is malaria will not return to northern climes unless we lower our defenses. It wasn’t cold that drove it out. It was man. We can drive it out of the rest of the world too, if we just will. There is no need for all those children to be dying. We tried once, but when it was no longer a problem in the developed world, rich nations lost interest. In the 1960s WHO gave it up as a lost cause. It’s getting some renewed attention now. A number of research programs into anti-malarial drugs and vaccines have been funded. International organizations are distributing treated bed nets and currently available drugs in some of the world’s most impoverished areas. President Bush pledged over a billion dollars to the effort. The biggest thing we could do though is to adopt economic and trade practices to help eradicate poverty. A lot of 3rd world swamps still need to be drained. Environmental lobbying will likely prevent 1st world money going into very much of that but once they have the wherewithal people will do it themselves. As long as we keep our own swamps drained, and our air conditioners running, we have nothing to fear from malaria.