Malaria and Africa

Like most journalists, I read a lot. Then I think about the stories to tell. For the last two years I've been following the U.S. efforts in Africa regarding health and fighting malaria. Yesterday's 

New York Times article highlights Bush's visit in Eastern countries there. 

I wrote the below as an essay for an international reporting fellowship, which I later learned was canceled for the session I was going to apply. Times are tight for all journalistic budgets, I'm finding. But it's still a good story with a lot of unanswered questions. I'll give you a preview here:

If Rachel Carson were alive, she’d be in Africa. Tanzania, Uganda or possibly Kenya —sub-Saharan countries where prolific malaria missiles from parasites within mosquito bombers explode on a quarter of the continent’s population. She would probably wonder how with 40 years of science and medical innovations behind us, more than million people, mostly babies and children, continue to shake incessantly with the chills and drift into a coma with liver failure from the fever-inducing parasite.

Carson might go to Uganda to revisit her findings from Silent Spring in which she revealed how heavy applications of DDT were “catastrophic” on the coffee bush there during the 1960’s, a practice that devastated local farmers. She might wander if today’s flower growers in nearby Kenya are shunned from European import markets because their government and international health officials decided to once again use the pesticide. She might question the routine DDT spraying inside and outside African family dwellings.

She’d agree it’s a significant health and environmental story: How are the African people dealing with the reintroduction of DDT, a decision funded and supported by the United States, which banned its use stateside more than 30 years ago?

My project seeks to answer these questions posed by this health conundrum through the words of the Tanzanian people whose country receives funding through President Bush’s Malaria Initiative that began in 2005. As DDT again sprinkles across the African landscape, and mostly inside families’ homes, I want to speak with the Tanzanians whose homeland is a U.S. governmental stronghold for malaria control.

Background

Thirty-five years ago the EPA banned DDT – or dichloro-diphenyl-tricholoroethane, a member of the chlorinated hydrocarbon family — which previously helped eradicate malaria stateside and showered farmland throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s. Other countries also forbid its use as pressure spread that spraying could disrupt ecosystem and harm the environment. Scientists continue to question long-term health effects it has to humans. What is known is that the chemical doesn’t biodegrade, or break down in the environment, but passes from soil to waterways to animal and humans.

Although spraying in Africa has been going on off and on for decades, the mosquitoes, and deadly parasites return, perhaps the ancestors of genetically resistant ones.
South African officials initiated the DDT comeback seven years ago when they chose to spray it liberally to kill mosquitoes as an effective and inexpensive way to control malaria. The move proved to be highly beneficial from a heath standpoint, wrote Richard Tren and Roger Bate in their March 24, 2004 Policy Analysis report “South Africa’s War against Malaria: Lessons for the Developing World.” Later that year in April, a week before Earth Day, New York Times editorial writer Tina Rosenburg suggested DDT bans were actually killing African children.

So, could DDT actually save lives? The pendulum, at present, swings in favor of spraying. The World Health Organization stands behind President Bush’s Malaria Initiative began in 2005 in Angola and Tanzania. Then the Bush administration said a year later that United States Agency for International Development was expected to fund projects in Zambia, Mozambique and Ethiopia. Uganda president Yoweri Museveni also announced his country would reintroduce the spraying, despite warnings from the European Union about the risk. Bush called for more malaria funding in 2006 to bring the government's investment to $1.2 billion initiative. The Gates Foundation also donated $83 million to fight the disease in the last year.

So with all of this money and these resources going to Africa, questions loom: Who manufactures this DDT that is sprayed? What about the mosquito net solution? And, back to my original question — what about the people? How is it affecting their daily lives?