Insecticide barred in US is embraced in African nations

MAPHUNGWANE, Swaziland — Men in blue coveralls and white surgical masks began their annual trek into the countryside here last week. Methodically, they sprayed one home after another with a chemical most Americans probably thought long ago disappeared from use: DDT.

As villagers looked on, the workers used hand pumps to douse inside and outside walls with a fine mist. It is a yearly effort to repel and kill mosquitoes that carry malaria — a disease that kills more than 1 million people a year, mostly children in sub-Saharan Africa.

This small kingdom near South Africa is one of just a handful of countries still using the notorious pesticide, banned in the United States in 1972 because of its toxic effect on wildlife.

But now DDT is poised for a big expansion in the developing world.

The influential World Health Organization plans to promote DDT as an inexpensive and effective tool against malaria. And the US government has boosted its budget twenty-fold for malarial insecticide spraying in Africa , to $20 million next year.
…
Advocates of household spraying say the comparatively minute amounts used in homes pose no known dangers. Any potential risk, they say, is far outweighed by DDT’s potency against malaria, as was seen in the late 1940s and ’50s when it helped eradicate the disease in the United States and other industrialized nations.
…