[health-vn] News: Banning DDT, Once More

[Vern Weitzel]

Subject: 	News: Banning DDT, Once More
Date: 	Sun, 10 May 2009 09:11:52 -0700
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http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=09-P13-00019&segmentID=3

*Goodbye DDT
*     Three years after endorsing the use of DDT in poor countries to
control malaria, the World Health Organization is reversing its policy.
The goal is to completely phase out the use of the toxic pesticide by
2020. Brenda Eskenazi, an epidemiologist at UC Berkeley, tells host
Steve Curwood that mounting research on DDT's negative health effects
helped convince public health officials to seek non-chemical
alternatives to counter malaria.

Air Date: Week of May 8, 2009

Illustration Omitted:
          DDT sprayed in a vegetable market in India.

YOUNG: It's Living on Earth, I'm Jeff Young -

CURWOOD: And I'm Steve Curwood.

The pesticide DDT has been banned in the developed world for years now.
But the treaty known as the Stockholm convention does allow its use for
malaria control - and it's still widely applied in parts of Africa and Asia.

Well, that's set to change, because the World Health Organization has
reconsidered its 2006 endorsement of the malaria exception for DDT. The
WHO is joining forces with the UN Environmental Program to completely
phase out DDT worldwide by 2020.

Brenda Eskenazi thinks that's a good idea. She's an epidemiologist at
the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and has just completed a review
of more than 500 studies on the pesticide and human health.

Dr. Eskenazi, what did you find - what health problems are associated
with DDT?

Illustration Omitted:
    A child is tested for malaria in Ruhiira, Uganda. Every year, nearly
a million people die from malaria-- most are children in sub-Saharan
Africa. (Courtesy of the Millennium Promise)

ESKENAZI: The studies that have come out have suggested that there are
associations with breast cancer, there are associations with effects on
the neurobehavioral development of children, there are associations with
spontaneous abortion. And there are quite a number of studies that have
looked at DDT and diabetes and found an association. But the most
interesting work is work out of South Africa in a community where DDT
was being used using indoor residual spraying where they actually spray
the insides of the mud huts to prevent the mosquitoes from lodging on
the walls. And they found that the men that lived there had a dose
related decrease in semen quality. And it was very profound, but there
are also very, very few studies that have been conducted in the
communities where DDT is actively being used in the method its being
used currently.

CURWOOD: And I gather in places where it's used to fight malaria in
buildings that people will have much higher body burdens of DDT than we
typically see in the west.

Illustration Omitted:
    DDT kills mosquitoes that carry malaria.

ESKENAZI: Way out of the range of what we see currently in the west. And
even what we ever saw in terms of when DDT was used in the United
States, partly because DDT is used specifically indoors in the African
communities and so the huts are sprayed, people are not in the homes
when they are sprayed, but their pots and pans and their beds and their
children's toys may still be in the homes. And then the families reenter
the homes soon after the spraying, maybe the children are playing on the
floor, maybe the children will put their hands in their mouths. So the
levels that we're likely to see are going to be so much higher than we
probably would have seen in the way it had been used in the United
States in the 1960s.

CURWOOD: What were the effects on humans here in the United States from
the use of DDT?

ESKENAZI: Well, there's a recent study that has just come out following
up a cohort of women who were pregnant in the 1950s and 60s and they
found that those women who were exposed to DDT before the age of 14 had
something like a five fold increased risk for breast cancer now. And
these are women who were exposed back in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s.

CURWOOD: What does it say for Asian and African women who might be
getting exposed to DDT today?

ESKENAZI: I think that's exactly the concern that we have. The concern
is that we're exposing a population to very, very high levels of DDT
now, and we don't know what's going to happen to these women or these
men in the future. So in the future we may see, maybe twenty years down
the road an increase in breast cancer in these populations, we may see a
decrease in fertility sooner in time, but we have a good potential to
see something based on the literature that we reviewed.

Illustration Omitted:
    Scientists worry about the health risks posed by the indoor spraying
of DDT. (Courtesy of the World Health Organization)

CURWOOD: In 2006, the U.S. was part of an initiative with the World
Health Organization to really increase the use of DDT to fight malaria.
In your view, how appropriate was that?

ESKENAZI: I think that it was not based on good sound science. I think
that maybe DDT was an important way to curtail malaria, but we hadn't
don the research necessary to know whether other adverse effects are
happening from that policy. For example, we have no idea what happens to
the populations that are immunocompromised that are living in Africa.
Where much of the malaria is high is also the same areas where HIV are
high. We have no idea how those people are specifically affected by DDT.

CURWOOD: Why do you think the World Health Organization, the WHO, is
changing its views on this?

ESKENAZI: Well, I think that the World Health Organization now is going
back to the Stockholm Convention as it was intended, which is that DDT
can be used, but it needs to be phased out. And it seems that UNF and
WHO are endorsing and funding efforts that would allow replacement of
DDT in the communities that couldn't afford to do anything else, and
that's why DDT was in part being used, it was relatively cheap and it
was easy. But there are better ways, for example, draining pools of
standing water, using different kinds of plants to repel mosquito larva
and by clearing vegetation. So there are other things that can be done.
And that is where we have to help these communities so that they can
step away from use of DDT.

CURWOOD: Brenda Eskenazi is a professor at the University of California
Berkeley School of Public Health. Thank you so much, Dr. Eskenazi.

ESKENAZI: Thank you so much.

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