Congratulations have to go to gold mining company AngloGold Ashanti for the amazing malaria programme that the company has piloted in West Africa.
The programme, which the company started in Ghana, is now spreading to other African countries.

Malaria is still one of the world’s largest killers – the nasty disease still kills one African child every minute of the day. What is extremely sad is that much of this is quite preventable, but is hindered by extremely selfish policies of extremist green organisations, which claim to be looking after the planet by opposing the use of the highly effective pesticide, DDT.

AngloGold Ashanti undertakes gold mining activities in Ghana. In that country, malaria has long been a problem and the country’s single biggest killer of children under the age of five. Malaria in Ghana also dramatically affects the adult population and leads to such widespread sickness that it is a major cause of workdays lost due to illness.

In 2006, AngloGold Ashanti launched an indoor spraying programme using DDT in houses, hospitals, orphanages and other facilities. The aim was to reduce malaria by 50% in the municipal district of Obuasi, which is the home to one of company’s main gold mining operations. The programme succeeded dramatically and, in just two years, the incidence of malaria dropped by a massive 72%.

Let us look at numbers, which really drive this home. In 2005, at the Edwin Cade hospital, in Obuasi, there were 6 711 reported cases of malaria. By mid-2013, that figure had dropped to 238. Translate that to quality of life and economics, for example – in 2005, there were 6 983 lost working days due to malaria each month; yes, each month. By 2009, that figure had gone down to 282.

So, AngloGold Ashanti went into the area to mine gold but has brought a highly improved quality of life to the population. Clearly, the company wanted to improve its workers’ performance by reducing work days lost to illness, but it must be congratulated on the terrific social responsibility function that it has carried out.

I have written about DDT and malaria a number of times. Prior to the Second World War, and in the years subsequent to the war, DDT was used to great effect to kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Then environmental activists got in on the act and accused DDT of being detrimental to the environment and to human health. False stories about DDT were propagated and distortions were fabricated.

As a result, the use of DDT worldwide was reduced to almost zero. Malaria deaths soared. The anti-DDT activists did not care – after all, they were “saving the planet”.

Some of them even said that the earth had too many people anyway, so it did not matter if large numbers died of malaria.

The activists claimed that DDT use was harming bird populations in the US by thinning their egg shells, and so DDT use in Africa had to be stopped. It has turned out that the bird story is largely false.

Some farmers used much more DDT than necessary in the belief that, if some quantity of DDT killed harmful insects, then twice as much should kill twice as many insects. This logic is not correct. When many insects were killed, which were not the harmful target species, this affected the feeding patterns of birds, which led to stress on the birds and, in turn, led to some of the egg shells thinning. These are findings coming out of later research.

DDT is not harmful to humans. Nobody on the planet has died from DDT, nobody on the planet has got cancer from DDT, nobody on the planet has got sick from DDT. But these facts did not deter the anti-DDT lobbyists, who knowingly let children die by the millions while they pursued their anti-DDT campaign.

I personally interviewed a number of people who had been involved with DDT spraying for years. Not one of them had ever had any DDT-related illness, and they knew of nobody who had. DDT horror stories had been fabricated.

So, congratulations to AngloGold Ashanti on the DDT spraying initiative. My advice is: Do not confine your DDT spraying activities to indoors only – have the courage to carry out well-controlled outdoor spraying as well.

AngloGold Ashanti has already rolled out DDT programmes to Mali, Tanzania and Guinea. Good. Keep going.