DDT

On friday, D'Kar was sprayed for mosquitoes. It reminded me of an article I read a long time ago, for my American Environmental Movement writing seminar - “The Mosquito-Killer.” I forget the name of the guy, but there was a man who tried to eradicate malaria world-wide by the strategic use of DDT. There had never been such a cheap, effective, and long-lasting insecticide before, and he saw it as a golden opportunity. Basically, his idea was as follows: when DDT is sprayed on the walls of a house, the effects last for six months. When a mosquito feeds on a human, it flies to a wall to rest immediately after its blood meal. The lifespan of a mosquito is less than six months, so within six months, every mosquito that carries malaria will be dead – any surviving mosquitoes have not bitten a human, and thus do not carry the disease. Any mosquitoes that were carrying malaria before the DDT spraying have either died naturally, or have bitten another human and died from the DDT when they went to rest on the wall. This man's idea was that if he could spray the walls of every house in a given area, malaria would be essentially eradicated from that area – and if applied on a large enough scale, in a short enough time, he could eliminate malaria from the entire world. (Clearly some mosquitoes bite humans who are not in their houses, but since mosquitoes are generally active at night, most bites occur in the house.)

This was his crusade. And for awhile, it looked as though he might succeed – he had a lot of government support, his plans and methods were seemingly foolproof – but before he could finish, he began to lose his support. The harmful side effects of DDT were discovered, and there was backlash against his procedure of simply storming into a village, providing minimal levels of explanation, with varying degrees of success in translation, that all of their houses were going to be sprayed with a dangerous chemical. It was necessary to his plan that everywhere be sprayed quickly, so he didn't waste time getting permission from villagers who didn't understand what was going on – he just marched in and sprayed the hell out of their homes.

It's an interesting question – yes, there were obvious problems with his methods, and there are obvious problems with spraying DDT into the houses of people that don't understand what the chemical is, and what it can do. But to eliminate, or at least extremely reduce, the prevalence of malaria in the world? Isn't that a price worth paying?

I ask both as a rhetorical question – which is the lesser of two evils? - but also as a literal question. Is that price worth paying? With a question like this, is there any way to tally it up – any way to quantify the harm that would befall the people as a result of DDT spraying, as opposed to malaria? For myself, I'm tempted to say that the DDT would have been more than worth it. As far as I understand, most of the really problematic aspects of DDT, for humans, animals, and the ecosystem at large, come as a result of DDT spraying on crops – the plants are covered in it, and it is absorbed and further concentrated into any animals that eat the plants. The effect is further concentrated in any carnivores that eat the herbivores, and it is this increasing concentration that really does the damage. By spraying the walls of houses, not only do we spray far less than we would to cover huge fields of crops, but we also don't face the problems of concentration – there are no animals eating off of the walls and leaving, no animals coming into my house to hoover up the dead bugs and move the DDT through the food chain. The DDT stops in the house. It sits on the walls for 6 months, killing thousands of other insects along with the mosquitoes, and then its job is done. It is not passed on through the food chain, reaching deadly concentrations as it reaches the top.

So, on Friday, my house was sprayed. The Botswana government arranged for all of the malarial risk areas in the country to be sprayed during this month – in most of Botswana, aside from the Okavango Delta area, it is too dry for there to be much malaria, and the risk is there only during the rainy season. So, by spraying in mid-October, just before the rains fall on most of the country, the government is hoping to protect itself against malaria. A smaller-scaled mission, particularly because they don't do every house – they try to, but if people aren't home, or don't want them to spray, they won't. As the pick-up truck full of cannisters of DDT and men wearing thick coveralls, goggles, and surgical masks approached my house, I felt torn – on the one hand, I'm a liberal environmentalist, and just the word “DDT” sends shivers down my spine. Rachel Carson, what would you have to say about this?! On the other hand, I know what a toll malaria can take on the developing world, I personally don't want malaria, and I'm fascinated by the story of the would-be mosquito-killer.

So, I took all the pictures off of my walls, put all of my food and cooking implements into my cupboards, covered my belongings with sheets, and waited outside while they sprayed my walls and ceiling with DDT. “I'm protecting myself, and I'm helping protect the town of D'Kar,” I reasoned.

I didn't know what it would do, really. I didn't know if it would kill all bugs – if they would absorb it and then leave the house, later, to die (like in the advertisements for RAID), or if they would die right away – I didn't know how many bugs, really, there were in my house. The window-screens in my living room work, thankfully, but I often leave the front door open a bit, so that Melissa can come and go. Let me tell you, a lot of insects come through that crack in the door, and let me tell you – DDT WORKS. The first night after my house was sprayed, my floor was speckled with a grim snowfall of dead insects – large, small, all different kinds. The litter of insects was thickest right beneath the light, of course. Poor things. They flock to the light, rest on the ceiling, and the DDT kills them. There is an ant colony that discovered my sink before I even moved into this house, and now every morning I see the carcasses of the ants that bravely tried to return to their former cornucopia, and were poisoned as they marched from their entry-point at the top of the window frame, down the deadly wall towards the sink. Some of them made it as far as the faucet – others died on the wall and fell to the floor.

“Don't touch the walls,” the spraying supervisor warned me. “Don't lean on them. It will make you itchy.”

So, my house has become a morgue for all kinds of foolhardy insects. I'll admit it's disturbing to know that my house is a poison-box for bugs, and will be for the next six months. (Does the effectiveness decline over the six months? I have no idea. Is it used up? Will the area around the lights become less effective more quickly because so many insects die there?) But on the other hand, I won't get malaria, and the overall prevalence of mosquito-borne diseases will go down.
And the ants are gone. Possibly this is a bad thing – I now feel less motivated to do my dishes, because I am no longer worried about finding my peanut butter-smeared knife swarming with hungry ants. Ah well.

The maize-cricket has appeared as well, a horrendous new visitor to my house – they are enormous, and won't be killed by DDT because they don't sit on the walls. Apparently they wreck havoc on corn crops. They remind me of the biblical plague of locusts – when they come to my house at night, they just leap and batter themselves against the windows, too stupid to find a way in. If they do blunder in, I smash them with a book. Apologies if that sounds cruel, but some of them are as long as my hand, and there isn't really a way for me to shoo them back out. They're too big for Melissa to tackle, either. Besides, lately I have been feeding her so much catfood that she hasn't been eating many bugs.

This afternoon I'm heading off to the Dqãe Qare game reserve for a workshop with the Media and Research program – they're conducting the workshop with representative elders from the communities, to bring together information about traditionally used medicinal and food plants. I'm very interested in the project, but I'm not sure how much I'm going to get out of the workshop, due to the fact that everyone will be speaking in Naro, or other Bushman languages, if their Naro isn't adequate... Anyhow, we'll see how it goes. Just the chance to see Dqãe Qare again is good, as it stands as an example of a successful community-run campsite/game reserve, and can hopefully provide me with some inspiration of what to do with Komku's similar projects. Simply to be be in the bush will be nice as well.

Adios till Thursday....

p.s. - have just realized – what if concentration of DDT in the bugs starts to harm Melissa, who does, after all, eat a lot of those bugs? (Though not as many as before.) Furthermore, cannot decide if she is pregnant or just fat.