Marvin Olasky - Fighting Malaria

The DDT ban has killed more people than Hitler.

by Marvin Olasky
October 28, 2005

There's an important new coalition in Washington, and it's designed not to stop the Miers nomination, but to stop malarial mosquitoes. It's a coalition that lives by the law of the jungle: Kill them before they kill you. The "Kill Malarial Mosquitoes Now" coalition insists, "We will fight furiously for every human life now hanging in the balance as a function of current, myopic, errant and unconscionable U.S. malaria control policies."

The KMMN coalition's story begins with big numbers, a little climatology and a bit of entomology. The numbers: Some 500 million cases of malaria occur worldwide every year, and 1 million people die, nine-tenths of them in Africa. The disease is the leading murderer of Africans under five -- it kills a young child every 30 seconds -- and survivors often suffer brain damage.

The climate fact is simple: Africa is a hot continent. That's relevant here because the process of transmitting malaria begins when a mosquito bites some…