The AP eloquently states the case for the decriminalization of DDT.

The same fools who have killed millions of innocents by banning DDT now blame those deaths on the world's free economies.

How many more millions must die for the sins of Rachel Carson before we wake up? (Also here, here, and here.)

Worcester Telegram & Gazette: Malaria advances steadily thanks to 'global warming'
Karatina, Kenya— The soft cries of children broke the morning stillness as parents brought them in to the hillside hospital one by one — feverish, racked by chills, drained by a disease once unknown in the high country of Kenya.

Just outside town later this day, scientist James Mutunga scooped water from an irrigation ditch, poured it into a plastic basin, and leaned down with a practiced eye.

“See, here, there’s a larva. This one’s about a day old,” he said, scanning the murk for tiny, newly hatched “anopheles arabiensis,” a malaria-bearing mosquito rarely found in Kenya’s uplands.

Last year Mutunga’s team detected them nearby at an altitude of 6,243 feet. “That’s the highest ever in Kenya,” the young entomologist said.

Painstaking work remains to be done before conclusions can be reached. But Kenyan and international researchers are moving closer to showing that climate change — rising temperatures — is tied to malaria’s spread into African highlands that long were largely free of the ancient plague.

People here already seem to know it.

“It’s because the temperatures are going up,” farmer Patrick Kabugu, 49, said as he watched Mutunga hunt for larvae in his lush green field of corn and cassava. “There’s more and more malaria — even in 1-year-old children.”

The gentle bite of a female anopheles, transmitting the malaria parasite to the human bloodstream, leads to the death of more than 1 million people worldwide each year, an estimated 75 percent of them African children, international health authorities report. Tens of millions more suffer chronically from the debilitating disease.

Here in Karatina, amid coffee plantations on the slopes of Mount Kenya, 50 miles north of Nairobi, people a decade ago began noticing an upsurge in malaria, beyond the usual cases of travelers from the warmer lowlands.

“It’s increased a lot — I’d say five times as much as just a couple of years ago,” nurse Gladys Wachira told a visitor to the hospital’s pediatrics ward, a sparsely equipped, unheated building where mothers in coats lay atop beds with their ailing children, undergoing treatment with antimalarial drugs.

Bernard Mwenje and his wife, Priscilla, waited on a bench to have 5-year-old Denis admitted. She said the boy first contracted malaria at 4 months, and has suffered repeated attacks since.

“I think it was about five years ago that we began to notice more mosquitoes around,” the father said.

The hospital’s medical superintendent, Dr. Roseline Atienu, estimated 60 percent of child patients today have malaria. “This is not supposed to be a malarial area. Now it’s our No. 2 problem, behind pneumonia,” she said.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. network of climate scientists, has long projected that mosquito-borne tropical diseases would spread to new areas that grew warmer. The malaria parasite needs temperatures above 64 degrees Fahrenheit to develop.

“There is a known climate envelope for this disease that requires warm temperatures,” said Dr. Jonathan Patz, a University of Wisconsin expert on climate-disease links. Of malaria’s predicted spread, he said, “In some ways it is common sense.”

The pattern seems to be unfolding in east Africa, where researchers report malaria epidemics in recent years in the highlands of six countries. In one west Kenyan district between 1986 and 1998, cases rose to 120 per 1,000 population per year from 16 per 1,000.

As conference delegates met in the mile-high, “malaria-free” Kenyan capital, the impact may have been closer than they knew.

“Mosquitoes don’t like urban environments,” said larva hunter Mutunga. “But we found some in a slum area in Nairobi recently. It’s quite alarming. We’re asking for data from the local clinic.”