DDT Revisited

Way back in January, I promised to try to pull together material on the safety of DDT. My following through got entangled in the difficulty of finding scientific articles that look back over the history of the research and the crush of a really busy semester.

Well, here’s a link to a New York Times article by Tina Rosenberg supporting greater (but careful) use of DDT, particularly in Africa. It’s not really a scientific article, but it’s good enough for me to call it installment one in my fulfilling my old promise.

The article’s not perfect. Although Rosenberg does a fine job of describing how responsible spraying might be possible, she never gives a firm sense of what the tradeoffs between environmental harm and malaria prevention might be. More troubling, she does not seem willing to assume that those African leaders who support the ban might have rational reasons to do so willingly. One that occurs to me is a long term concern both for the environment and the tourism it supports.

Still, it’s well worth reading, and far more careful than the snide Michael Crichton speech that first irritated me last December.