Word: ddt
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Slowing Malaria. The best news concerned man's No. 1 enemy in the tropics: malaria. Every year, malaria strikes 300,000,000 people, and kills 3,000,000 of them. But with the now common household spray DDT, "it is a safe statement that at least 90% of the malaria of the world can be wiped out in the next ten years, and that's conservative," said Dr. Fred Soper of the Pan American Sanitary Bureau...
What could be done about malarial mosquitoes which escape DDT campaigns? Four war-born drugs help their victims, the conference was told: 1) chloroquine, more active than quinine or atabrine, and much less toxic; 2) pentaquine, which has reduced the relapse rate in the vivax form of malaria from 98% to 25%; 3) iso-pentaquine, a variant of pentaquine, so far tried on only 100 cases; 4) Paludrine, which controls vivax malaria with a single dose...
...campaign got started almost by chance. In the spring of 1945, Venezuela's chief malaria expert, young Arnoldo Gabaldon, was in Washington for a Pan-American health conference. At lunch one day, Dr. James Stevens (now dean of the Harvard School of Public Health) told him what DDT was doing for the Army in the southwest Pacific. Gabaldon was "terribly excited...
...care," says Gabaldón. "They don't even care if you treat them." As a Rockefeller Foundation fellow in protozoology, Gabaldón had learned that the chronic malarial "lose even the desire to procreate." Gabaldón decided to go all out for DDT...
Maracay, a malaria-ridden coffee town, was made the proving ground. DDT squads were recruited, and a fine, white-stone laboratory, office and warehouse were built. Some 100,000 children were examined and more than three million home visits were made. In time Maracay was declared malaria-free and the area of treatment was expanded...