The commentary in the Kenyan paper The Daily Nation reads like a call to battle. Headlines such as "Attack the Mosquitoes on All Fronts" shout out the dire situation on the African continent.

With the onset of the rainy season in October, tropical malaria has roared back and is beginning to take its toll. Even worse, because treatments are becoming increasingly ineffective against malaria, there are likely to be more deaths than ever this year.

Up to three million people die of malaria each year, and 90 percent of deaths occur in Africa. Each year, 270 to 480 million Africans are infected by the pathogen transmitted by the Anopheles mosquito. The World Health Organization estimates that one child dies of malaria every 30 seconds.

The situation is especially serious in Uganda, where up to 100,000 people die of malaria each year. In 1997, an estimated 2,317,000 people were infected. This year, doctors expect more than twelve million cases. "Mal' aria" (bad air), as the fever was named by Italian Franceso Torti, is second only to AIDS as the biggest killer in the jungle-covered country on the banks of Lake Victoria. The malaria pathogen, plasmodium falciparum, is responsible for one-in-five deaths.

Doctors are more helpless than ever before. In many places, the development of resistance to anti-malaria medication has rendered the standard treatment, chloroquine, ineffective. Now Uganda plans to resort to a weapon that is radical, feared, but nonetheless effective: dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, better known as DDT.

A doctor's dream, an environmental nightmare

In Europe and North America, the toxin was once used successfully to combat the Anopheles mosquito plague. The chemical has also been used effectively in tropical countries such as Sri Lanka and India. In 1946, 2.8 million Ceylonese contracted malaria. By 1963, the number had dropped to a total of 17 cases. In India, use of the insecticide resulted in a decline in malaria cases from 100 million in 1935 to 300,000 in 1969, and Bangladesh has been declared malaria-free. Although resistant strains of carrier mosquitoes soon appeared, this was mainly attributable to farmers in many places spraying the pesticide onto their fields by the ton.

Environmentalists have long treated DDT as the stuff of the devil. In her 1962 environmental shocker Silent Spring, author Rachel Carson reported that, in addition to wiping out mosquitoes, the chemical is harmful to birds and has decimated populations of the bald eagle and migratory thrushes.

Although there is no conclusive evidence that DDT is directly harmful to human beings, Carson's warning was heeded. The poison was soon outlawed in almost all European countries and the environmental lobby pressured many Third World countries to abandon their use of the pesticide.

Problem is, malaria returned with a vengeance. Ceylon stopped distributing DDT in 1963 and within five years about half a million islanders had once again contracted the disease. The Foundation for Economic Education branded the development "a disaster."

The preliminary outcome of what German daily Die Welt's environmental critic Dirk Maxeiner calls "irrational chemophobia" is this: Under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, which came into effect in May of this year, DDT was added to the list of the so-called dirty dozen of hazardous chemicals, making it an international pariah.

Reconsidering DDT

"With DDT, we can control malaria within a very short period of time," says environmental chemist Jude Tiwangye of Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. In his view, Europe's concerns about the pesticide are the height of cynicism: "You eradicated malaria with DDT, and now you want to prohibit us from using it."

Developing countries plagued by malaria are allowed to use DDT to a limited extent, a practice that is even approved by environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund. However, fears that the West could stop importing African food products or cancel foreign aid have prompted many to refrain from using DDT.

Chemist Desta Mebratu of the United Nations Environment Program in Nairobi is also torn. On the one hand, he believes that the popular view, held in parts of Africa, that DDT is harmless, is incorrect: "The substance is long-lasting and extremely mobile -- traces have even been detected in the Antarctic." On the other hand, he knows that the pesticide is the most effective tool in combating malaria.