Lessons from Silent Spring for Controlling Disease | Rachel Carson

This is one of the nation's best-sellers. Up to now, 500, 000 copies have been sold, and "Silent Spring" has been called the most controversial book of the year. 

Rachel Carson's push to limit the use of powerful pesticides like DDT, helped spark the American environmental movement. 

Rachel Carson is one of those rare individuals who brought about change in all of our lives. 

But the seeming loss of this pesticide in the fight against malaria also turned her into a poster child for environmental regulation gone too far. 

DDT was eliminated and malaria made a comeback and millions of children in the Third World have died because of this nonsense. 

Although environmentalists worship her, I say she's a mass murderer! 

If you discredit Rachel Carson, you discredit the founding principle of the EPA. 

The idea that Carson gave DDT such a bad name that it was banned in much of the world is a gross over-simplification. 

As the world continues its fight against malaria, what lesson does "Silent Spring" hold? 

She was a very soft-spoken soul who loved nothing better than going down to the tide pools of the rocky Atlantic shores and studying creatures in their habitats, and their relationship to each other. 

The naturalist and science writer Rachel Carson spent decades urging Americans to see the beauty around them. But in 1962, Carson published "Silent Spring" and her message took on a markedly different tone. 

Man is part of nature, and his war against nature is, inevitably, a war against himself. 

To Carson, that war was exemplified by the growing use of DDT, a potent synthetic insecticide that was so revered for its ability to kill malaria-carrying mosquitos during WWII, that its discovery led to a Nobel prize. 

This diabolic weapon of modern science saved millions of humans but killed billions of insects. Man, with this newly discovered force, has at long last gained the upper hand in our age-old struggle. 

DDT was soon billed as the solution to every insect pest. And in time, upwards of 80 million pounds was being sprayed annually in the U. S.  alone. Applied to everything from vast forests and crop land, to spreading tracts of suburban American homes. 

This was the advent of better living through chemistry. And DDT was the wonder child. 

Once a bug comes in contact with DDT, he's lost. The effect is disastrous. 

It's basically like a chemical holocaust against these insects, it drove lots of insect populations down. It was enormously effective. 

But Carson's research showed the massive spraying of DDT and other insecticides was causing a hidden harm. 

Carson forced us to consider an invisible threat, something that we might not smell, you might not see, but which had all kinds of unintended consequences. 

We poison the caddis flies in a stream, and the salmon runs dwindle and die. We poison the gnats in a lake, and the poison travels from link to link of the food chain. We spray our elms, and the following springs are silent of robin's song. 

She alerted us to the possibility that in trying to improve on nature we were actually poisoning ourselves. But to have a woman question the authority of science, and of scientific men was something that created a great deal of discomfort in some quarters, and downright hostility in others. 

Time Magazine called Miss Carson's book an emotional and inaccurate outburst. 

The major claims in Miss Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring, " are gross distortions of the actual facts. If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages. And the insects, and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth. 

But as evidence mounted that DDT was a persistent and damaging environmental toxin, its pervasive spraying raised increasing political and scientific alarm. 

A government-backed scientific panel today reported that pesticides may indeed represent a grave threat to mankind. 

The average American already has more DDT in his body than is permitted in the meat and fish that we eat. It does not go away, it accumulates, and it passes to babies through their mother's milk. 

By the 1970s, Carson was being hailed as an environmental hero, while DDT was in retreat, with a host of developed countries, including the U. S., severely limiting its use. 

"Silent Spring" forced us to reconsider a fundamental faith in science and technology. 

But as the decades passed, the disaster some critics had predicted seemed only too near. 

In Africa and Asia, the mosquito is a mass killer. More than two million people die every year from malaria, which mosquitos transmit. 

The Centers for Disease Control estimates that a child in Africa dies from malaria every 30 seconds. 

And the critics knew just whom to blame. 

By the 1960s, DDT had all but eradicated malaria. Then came Rachel Carlson's Silent Spring book. 

Her misleading best-seller got the pesticide DDT banned. 

But the progressive nutballs had it wrong, as usual. 

And what is the result of DDT being banned? Malaria out of control in Third World countries where before it had been nearly eliminated. 

But places like Burkina Faso tell a different story. Even though DDT was never banned in the fight against insect-borne disease here, the tiny country has become an epicenter of the world's malaria epidemic. 

When I woke up this morning, I touched him and noticed that my son had a fever. My son is not the only one. All around the village, children are suffering from Malaria.

During the rainy season, health clinics like this one in the village of Soumousso, are packed with patients suffering from malaria. Nearly forty percent of the country's residents end up contracting the disease every year. 

Go to any single health care, you will see for yourself, you will see a lot of people with kids there, just laying down on the floor, suffering and then waiting for the treatment. 

The problem is that the mosquitos here have become resistant to the pesticides used against them, including DDT. 

Insects are very good at out-evolving constraints, and so all over the world, lots of different insect species developed resistance against DDT. 

Mosquitos that had a genetic propensity to metabolize DDT survived the spraying, and every year, those survivors reproduced and multiplied. In many African countries, that resistance, combined with decades of government neglect, poor infrastructure, and abysmal healthcare systems to turn malaria into a perfect storm. 

In West Africa, we can't really use DDT because the resistance is  extremely high pretty much everywhere. 

DDT didn't work. Which has nothing to do with "Silent Spring."

In fact, Carson had warned of this very problem. Inevitably, it follows that intensive spraying with powerful chemicals only makes worse the problem it is designed to solve. 

Rely on a single insecticide, you'll get immune insects. 

Over the last decade, malaria rates have come down through a combination of new anti-malarial drugs and insecticide-treated bed nets. But these results are endangered by the same mistakes. Over-reliance on a small set of tools, including pyrethroid insecticides. 

It used to be that you could kill a mosquito with pyrethroid insecticide in minutes. Now, ten hours exposure kills about twenty-five percent of them. Unless we get new technologies to box-in the mosquito, very quickly, then we're probably going to lose all the gains we've got from the last ten years. 

That's because the mosquito continues to adapt, evolving not only new defenses to insecticides, but new feeding habits as well. 

Some mosquito populations can actually recognize the silhouette of a door, and they go for people when they come in and out of doorways. That's how sophisticated evolution can be in changing behavior. 

Here, in this cluster of research sites, set among Burkina Faso's rice fields and villages, promising new strategies are put through their paces --including one developed in Raymond St.  Leger's Maryland lab. 

Most insects don't die of old age or because they get snapped up by a passing bird, they actually get killed by disease. And more insects die from fungal disease than any other kind of disease agent. 

St.  Leger decided this fungus could be improved upon, so he genetically altered it to produce a spider venom, turning the fungi into a mosquito terminator of sorts. 

So basically it's a vehicle which makes its own insecticide, and then functions like a hypodermic. The fungus injects the insecticide straight into the blood of the insect. 

Since mosquitos must first be infected by the malaria parasite before they can pass it on to humans, Johns Hopkins University immunologist George Dimopoulos genetically supercharged the mosquito's natural defenses against contracting the disease. He has also used bacteria found in mosquitos' intestines to help block the development of the parasite before it can multiply. 

It's like giving the mosquito a probiotic that protects them against malaria. So you can put all of these different innovative approaches together, they all dovetail with each other, and that's going to be the solution. The solution isn't going to be relying on any single technology as the silver bullet. 

These scientists stress the need for a more holistic view of pest control, which is exactly what Rachel Carson was advocating for in "Silent Spring." Despite claims by some modern-day critics, Carson understood that there was still a need for pesticides. 

We must go on to think in terms of other methods of control, of much more scientific, much more accurate and precise methods. You can't just step in with some brute force, and change one thing without changing a good many others. 

We are learning that lesson, we're doing our best to learn that lesson. 

The mosquito, meanwhile, continues to evolve, an ever-adaptable animal, carrying not just malaria, but Dengue, Yellow Fever, Zika, and a host of other diseases, as it pursues its ancient hunt for human prey. 

A recent study estimated that vector-borne diseases -- mostly mosquito-borne diseases --have killed half of all the humans who ever lived. They are by far and away the most dangerous animal. They're even more dangerous to us than other people are. So, ideally, we want to develop an evolution-proof system for controlling them.