NEW YORK -- A serious debate is raging over the use of DDT to combat malaria. As one of the world's most serious tropical diseases, malaria kills more than a million people a year -- most of them young children. To a great extent, success in controlling malaria is owed to the use of DDT in spraying houses and thus repelling the mosquito carrier of the parasite responsible for the disease.
Insistence on the part of some industrialized countries and environmentalist organizations not to fund those projects that fight malaria using DDT will do more harm than good. Unless this policy is reversed and projects using DDT continue to be funded, malaria will cause thousands of deaths that could have been prevented.
Most deaths by malaria occur in sub-Saharan Africa, where the disease is responsible for one in five of all children's deaths. Malaria is also responsible for between 300 million and 500 million cases of acute illness in Africa, Asia and the Americas.