Every year, 250 million women and 125 million little girls are stricken by acute malaria. At least 750,000 of them die. That’s more victims than there are people in the
Fevers, chills, vomiting, diarrhea, delirium and unconsciousness leave victims unable to work, cultivate fields, attend school or care for their families, for weeks on end. Many are permanently brain damaged. Eight out of ten are in sub-Saharan Africa, where this terrible disease is one more nail in the coffin of hope for eventual economic prosperity. There can be no better way to recall International Women’s Day than by resolving to control this disease – and confront those who help prolong the misery and early death of women and girls in so many poor countries.
One major global battle involves the fundamental right to life itself – and to obtain and use technologies that safeguard human life from the ravages of disease. Without life, it is impossible to enjoy liberty, pursue happiness or benefit from the other rights with which we have been endowed by our Creator.
I have a dream – of a day when parents and children everywhere can live without fear of being struck down by malaria.
The disease once killed thousands of Americans annually, from
Many factors and aggressive interventions finally ended its debilitating, deadly grip. The
In short, on both continents, we took whatever measures were necessary to eradicate this killer. Once we became malaria-free, we began to impose restrictions that perpetuate malaria elsewhere, especially in Africa.
We essentially banned DDT but promoted bed nets and education – while awaiting a vaccine that’s still a decade away, and hoping mud-and-thatch huts will miraculously be transformed into modern homes with doors and window screens. With few exceptions, aid agencies refused to supply, fund or even allow the use of insecticides, especially DDT. Even worse, when countries like
Simply put, we emphasized fears about speculative risks from trace amounts of insecticides – and ignored the real, immediate, life-or-death risks that those insecticides could prevent. Not surprisingly, the result has been another Holocaust of African mothers, fathers and children every few years, a death toll since the 1972 DDT ban that surpasses World War II’s – over 50 million people. It is a travesty worse than colonialism ever was, a human rights violation of monstrous proportions.
No other insecticide, and no bed net – at any price – works as well as DDT. Sprayed in small quantities, just once or twice a year on the walls and eaves of mud-and-thatch or cinder-block homes, keeps 90% of mosquitoes from entering. It irritates any that do enter, so they rarely bite, and kills those that land on walls. Used this way, virtually no DDT even enters the environment, and the results are astounding.
Within two years of starting DDT programs,
My dream of a malaria-free Africa is coming closer to reality. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Greenpeace co-founder, and hundreds of physicians, clergy, human rights advocates and other people of conscience have signed the Kill Malarial Mosquitoes NOW declaration, demanding that DDT be put back into the malaria control arsenal. (See www.FightingMalaria.org) The US Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, now support indoor DDT spraying. The U.S. Agency for International Development has begun to purchase this and other insecticides, and initiate spraying programs in several countries.
Europe must do its part. Individual countries and the EU Parliament must issue an unequivocal declaration, supporting DDT for disease control, affirming the right of every country’s health minister to decide which weapons to use in combating disease, agreeing to support and finance insecticide spraying programs and pledging to penalize any country, organization or individual who threatens to impose trade or other sanctions on nations that use DDT or other insecticides, to save lives.
For too long, the European Union, World Health Organization, World Bank and other agencies let well-intended, but horribly misguided policies perpetuate malaria’s global reign of terror. They have it within their power to change these policies, save millions of lives, and improve health and economic conditions for billions.
If they would find the moral clarity and political willpower to do so, equality, justice, health and prosperity will come to Africa and other malaria epidemic regions. Millions of mothers and daughters, fathers and sons will be alive to thank them. And we could celebrate, rather than merely commemorate, the next International Women’s Day.
By Roy Innis
National chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, one of the