Is DDT Making a Comeback?
By Kim Larsen, OnEarth Magazine.
Only three of the 20-odd beds at Mbita District Hospital are occupied. This surprises me. After all, we are in the heart of an impoverished, malaria-ravaged region, on the shores of Lake Victoria along Kenya's remote western border. When I ask a medical assistant if it's unusual for the ward to be so sparsely populated, he laughs grimly. "In two or three weeks we will have several patients to a bed, with more on the floor," he explains. "We'll be turning people away." Here's why: malaria infections can occur any day of the year, but surge outbreaks are cyclical, the disease blooming lushly in the wake of a rainy season. It's late June now, and the winter rains are just about spent. Roads, fields, and footpaths are strewn with puddles large and small, ideal breeding sites for the Anopheles gambiae mosquito, malaria's endlessly regenerating delivery system.

Just beyond the hospital walls, battalions of Anopheles gambiae larvae were incubating in their warm, clear, sun-drenched baths. Upon maturity each mosquito, weighing in at a strapping 2.25 millionths of a pound, would fly off in search of sugar, the metabolic fuel provided by certain plants; and then, thus fortified, the female would move on to extract her blood meal, the protein feast that primes her to reproduce. In a matter of days, new malaria patients would begin streaming into the hospital, by foot or in wheelbarrows or splayed across the backs of donkeys, but mostly cradled in their mothers' arms. The immature immune systems of babies and toddlers are particularly vulnerable to the disease, and in this region cerebral malaria -- the deadliest variant, marked by seizures and coma -- is endemic.

Silver bullet, anyone? Vaccine, larvicide, insecticide, bed net, hex? Why should this disease, eradicated in the lucky zones of the world, continue to flourish elsewhere, in unlucky places like Mbita?

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