Monday, September 18, 2006

DDT's New Friend

Finally the World Health Organization has come around and approved the use of DDT to eradicate malaria in undeveloped countries. The WSJ has a nice editorial outlining my thoughts.
Malaria is the number one killer of pregnant women and children in Africa and among the top killers in Asia and South America. It's long been known that DDT is the cheapest and most effective way to contain the disease, which is spread by infected mosquitoes. But United Nations health agencies and others have for decades resisted employing DDT under pressure from anti-pesticide environmentalists. After tens of millions of preventable malarial deaths in these poor countries, it's nice to see WHO finally come to its senses.

The agency's malaria chief, Arata Kochi, told reporters that "one of the best tools we have against malaria is indoor residual spraying. Of the dozen or so insecticides WHO has approved as safe for house spraying, the most effective is DDT." He also said, "We must take a position based on the science and the data."

Mr. Kochi's intellectual honesty is commendable and all too rare among public health officials in this debate. For decades, the science and empirical data about DDT's effectiveness have been distorted or suppressed. Nevertheless, and Rachel Carson's scare-mongering notwithstanding, there is no evidence that DDT use in the amounts necessary to ward off malarial mosquitoes is harmful to humans, wildlife or the environment. Period.

By contrast, there's plenty of evidence -- from the U.S. and Europe to Australia, India, Sri Lanka and Brazil -- that spraying DDT is the best intervention. According to Pierre Guillet, another WHO official at Friday's press conference, South Africa temporarily stopped using DDT in 1996 because green groups were opposed, not because it wasn't working. Malaria takes a heavy toll on a country's economy by discouraging foreign investment and incapacitating otherwise productive people, so these anti-DDT alarmists have been helping to impoverish those they don't kill. There is something other-worldly, or worse, about well-heeled greens trying to deny the world's poorest people the very tool used by rich nations to eradicate this disease.

Even if WHO's decision won't change those minds, its stamp of approval on pesticide use matters in the public health world. Other organizations, ranging from the World Bank to Aid for International Development to Doctors Without Borders, look to WHO for guidance and will now likely reassess their own guidelines. The U.S. is typically the largest donor to these international agencies, and the recent efforts of Republican Senators Sam Brownback of Kansas and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who have called for DDT intervention and more responsible allocation of aid dollars generally, no doubt played a role in WHO's decision.

One insecticide won't end malaria, and DDT's proponents don't claim it will. But by keeping more people alive and healthy, DDT can help create the conditions for the only lasting solution, which is economic growth and development. It's encouraging that even a U.N. health agency seems to have figured that out.

Emphasis mine on my favorite sentence. Development is the malaria eradicator, not DDT, but DDT supports development.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Democrats Vs. Wal-Mart

I love it when George Will really lays into something.
Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America's political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets, because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots and announce -- yes, announce -- that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by . . . liberals.

Before they went on their bender of indignation about Wal-Mart (customers per week: 127 million), liberals had drummed McDonald's (customers per week: 175 million) out of civilized society because it is making us fat, or something. So, what next? Which preferences of ordinary Americans will liberals, in their role as national scolds, next disapprove? Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet?

No. The current issue of the American Prospect, an impeccably progressive magazine, carries a full-page advertisement denouncing something responsible for "lies, deception, immorality, corruption, and widespread labor, human rights and environmental abuses" and for having brought "great hardship and despair to people and communities throughout the world."

What is this focus of evil in the modern world? North Korea? The Bush administration? Fox News Channel? No, it is Coca-Cola (number of servings to Americans of the company's products each week: 2.5 billion).

Next up is football (too violent), beer (fattening and causes drunkenness) and television (should be exercising or reading).

Friday, September 08, 2006

Consumer Choice in Health Care

I've been reading, for the past 2 days, all the lefty bloggers tut-tutting about the Rand survey that studied medical care that a group of seniors was getting. Now, I admit that the results of the test were pretty damning (the patients rated their care higher than the quality it actually was). But, it still didn't sit right with me. I don't think a third party can determine what I like better than I can. Let's call this the Totino's pizza corollary. I like the $1.50 Totino's frozen pizzas better than I like the $5.99 Digiorno frozen pizza. I'm sure that in a taste test among 250 of the top pizza experts the Digiorno pizza would come out a huge winner. But for me, I like the crisp crust and the ratio of sauce to cheese on the Totino's (for those that haven't had the pleasure, Totinos doesn't have a lot of cheese). Does the fact that the experts would agree that Digiorno is better invalidate my opinion? I would argue, no.

Greg Mankiw takes my Totino's Corollary to new territory today;
What if the quality of the health care were judged not by the consumer but instead by an employee of the postal system? Or, worse, by a random member of Congress, while he was running for reelection and accepting campaign contributions from a variety of health-care providers? Yes, decision making in health care is hard, so mistakes are inevitable. But is there any reason to think that collectivized decision making is usually better than individual decision making?

Granted, my Totino's Corollary certainly makes light of educated health care opinion, but I also believe that a medical treatment that the consumer believes in has a much better chance of succeeding than one which is foisted upon them when they have very little choice in the manner. Especially a treatment that is determined by what would be a gigantic bureaucracy that kowtows to political interests.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Free to Choose in Estonia

Greg Mankiw excerpts John Tierney's column about Estonia, the Baltic Tiger. I wrote a couple of papers in graduate school about the reforms that Estonia undertook and how American businesses can capitalize on those reforms. What I find most interesting is how Laar instituted the flat tax and other Friedman ideas in a formerly Soviet republic.

Earlier today I read this post on Drum's blog.
Nonetheless, we desperately need radically more attention paid to full employment policies; to labor organization in service industries; to the distributional inequities of free trade policies; to national healthcare; and to significantly more progressive taxation.

I read Drum to remember why I am not a Democrat. Everything he is advocating in that sentence is everything that Friedman, Estonia, Ireland and other success stories would strongly stand against. Estonia has a very free market and their distribution inequality is virtually nonexistent in relation to the US. Why is that? Government policies aid in making the poor poorer, not free market economic policies.