Last week, in response to more repetition of the false claim that environmentalists had killed many millions of people with a ban of DDT. John Quiggin set out the facts of the matter:

DDT has never been banned in antimalarial use. The main reason for declining use of DDT as an antimalarial has been the development of resistance. Antimalarial uses have received specific exemptions from proposals to phase out DDT, until alternatives are developed. Bans on the use of DDT as an agricultural insecticide, promoted by Rachel Carson and others, have helped to slow the development of resistance, and therefore increased the effectiveness of DDT in antimalarial use (links on this here).

Attempts to get some of those responsible for spreading the false claims about environmentalists and DDT to correct them have proved largely unsuccessful.

Rafe Champion did not make even a token correction.

Two weeks after posting an obviously fabricated quote Tim Blair finally made a stealth correction, adding an update after the post had fallen off his front page by about five pages. No apology or correction for posting the outrageously false claim that “In a single crime [the greens] have killed about 50 million people.”

Miranda Devine failed to correct her false claim that DDT had been banned or her false claim that environmentalists had killed 50 million people. The only correction she offered was this:

Last week I inadvertently misquoted Rachel Carson by repeating a mistake from The Age of January 29. In an article by Keith Lockitch of the Ayn Rand Institute, Carson was quoted: “We should seek not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides, but to find instead a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves.”

But in Lockitch’s original, published in FrontPage Magazine, the quote was part paraphrase: “We should seek, Carson wrote, not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides, but to find instead, ‘a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves’.” Apologies.

There are a couple of problems with Devine’s correction. First, if you search the Age’s archive, you’ll find that no article by Lockitch was published in the Age or any other Fairfax paper on January 29 or any other date. Nor has the quote appeared in any article in any Fairfax paper other than Devine’s. Just to be sure, I checked the microfilm version of January 29’s Age. No article on DDT by Lockitch or anyone else. It is wrong for Devine to blame the Age for her mistake. [Update: John Quiggin tracks down the source of the fake quote: it was in the tabloid Herald-Sun on Jan 13.]

Second, Lockitch has not paraphrased Carson at all. Here is the complete paragraph that the quote was drawn from:

Through all these new, imaginative, and creative approaches to the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures there runs a constant theme, the awareness that we are dealing with life — with living populations and all their pressures and counter pressures, their surges and recessions. Only by taking account of such life forces and by cautiously seeking to guide them into channels favorable to ourselves can we hope to achieve a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves

Carson does not mention malarial mosquitoes at all in that paragraph and by no stretch of the imagination can it be interpreted to mean that we should learn to live with malaria. Here’s what Carson actually wrote about malarial mosquitoes in an earlier chapter (my emphasis):

Although insect resistance is a matter of concern in agriculture and forestry, it is in the field of public health that the most serious apprehensions have been felt. The relation between various insects and many diseases of man is an ancient one Mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles may inject into the human bloodstream the single-celled organism of malaria. …

These are important problems and must be met. No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored. The question that has now urgently presented itself is whether it is either wise or responsible to attack the problem by methods that are rapidly making it worse. The world has heard much of the triumphant war against disease through the control of insect vectors of infection, but it has heard little of the other side of the story - the defeats, the short-lived triumphs that now strongly support the alarming view that the insect enemy has been made actually stronger by our efforts. Even worse, we may have destroyed our very means of fighting.

A distinguished Canadian entomologist, Dr A. W. A. Brown, was engaged by the World Health Organization to make a comprehensive survey of the resistance problem. In the resulting monograph, published in 1958, Dr Brown has this to say: Barely a decade after the introduction of the potent synthetic insecticides in public health programmes, the main technical problem is the development of resistance to them by the insects they formerly controlled. In publishing his monograph, the World Health Organization warned that the vigorous offensive now being pursued against arthropod-borne diseases such as malaria, typhus fever, and plague risks a serious setback unless this new problem can be rapidly mastered.

What is the measure of this setback? The list of resistant species now includes practically all of the insect groups of medical importance. … Malaria programmes are threatened by resistance among mosquitoes. …

Probably the first medical use of modem insecticides occurred in Italy in 1943 when the Allied Military Government launched a successful attack on typhus by dusting enormous numbers of people with DDT. This was followed two years later by extensive application of residual sprays for the control of malaria mosquitoes. Only a year later the first signs of trouble appeared. Both houseflies and mosquitoes of the genus Culex began to show resistance to the sprays. In 1948 a new chemical, chlordane, was tried as a supplement to DDT. This time good control was obtained for two years, but by August of 1950 chlordane-resistant flies appeared, and by the end of that year all of the houseflies as well as the Culex mosquitoes seemed to be resistant to chlordane. As rapidly as new chemicals were brought into use, resistance developed. …

The first malaria mosquito to develop resistance to DDT was Anopheles sacharovi in Greece. Extensive spraying was begun in 1946 with early success, by 1949, however, observers noticed that adult mosquitoes were resting in large numbers under road bridges, although they were absent from houses and stables that had been treated. Soon this habit of outside resting was extended to caves, outbuildings, and culverts and to the foliage and trunks of orange trees. Apparently the adult mosquitoes had become sufficiently tolerant of DDT to escape from sprayed buildings and rest and recover in the open. A few months later they were able to remain in houses, where they were found resting on treated walls.

This was a portent of the extremely serious situation that has now developed. Resistance to insecticides by mosquitoes of the anopheline group has surged upwards at an astounding rate, being created by the thoroughness of the very house-spraying programmes designed to eliminate malaria. In 1956, only 5 species of these mosquitoes displayed resistance; by early 1960 the number had risen from 5 to 28! The number includes very dangerous malaria vectors in West Africa, the Middle East, Central America, Indonesia, and the eastern European region. …

The consequences of resistance in terms of malaria and other diseases are indicated by reports from many parts of the world. An outbreak of yellow fever in Trinidad in 1954 followed failure to control the vector mosquito because of resistance. There has been a flare-up of malaria in Indonesia and Iran. …

Some malaria mosquitoes have a habit that so reduces their exposure to DDT as to make them virtually immune. Irritated by the spray, they leave the huts and survive outside. …

It is more sensible in some cases to take a small amount of damage in preference to having none for a time but paying for it in the long run by losing the very means of fighting [is the advice given in Holland by Dr Briejer in his capacity as director of the Plant Protection Service]. Practical advice should be ‘Spray as little as you possibly can’ rather than Spray to the limit of your capacity’…, Pressure on the pest population should always be as slight as possible.

Dr Briejer says:

It is more than clear that we are travelling a dangerous road. We are going to have to do some very energetic research on other control measures, measures that will have to be biological, not chemical. Our aim should be to guide natural processes as cautiously as possible in the desired direction rather than to use brute force….

It’s clear from this that our current policy of reserving DDT for public health use is the sort of DDT use that Carson would have approved. But don’t expect the Miranda Devines of this world to ever admit that.