In today’s Washington Post, Sebastian Mallaby examines the costs that are incurred when politics gets injected into science. The crux of the story revolves around the European Union’s resistance to allowing nations like Uganda use DDT to combat the mosquitos that spread malaria, resulting in countless unneceessary deaths:
Why does Europe impede Uganda’s fight against malaria? The standard answer starts with “Silent Spring,” the book that helped launch the environmental movement in the 1960s and that painted a scary picture of DDT’s potential impact on the food chain. But this is only half right. The book’s overblown claims led to the banning of DDT in the United States in 1972 and its disappearance from aid-funded programs thereafter. But “Silent Spring” was really about the dangers of large-scale agricultural use of DDT, not the limited spraying of houses. Today mainstream environmental groups concede that in the context of malarial countries, the certain health benefits of anti-malarial spraying may outweigh the speculative environmental risks.
So the sin of the environmental movement — at least of its more responsible exponents — is not that it’s flat wrong on this issue. Instead, it is more subtle. Environmentalists think it’s their responsibility to campaign against the damage done by toxic substances, but not to campaign against the damage done by the over-regulation of substances that actually aren’t very toxic. Of course, the environmentalists’ credibility in calling for necessary regulation would be enhanced if they were willing to denounce unnecessary regulation. But you don’t hear them yelling about the European Union’s absurd position on Uganda.
In other words, the science of fighting disease has, in this case, become infected with the politics of environmentalism. The result is thousands, if not millions, of people dying from malaria that didn’t need to. Sinful. Truly sinful.
