A Nobel Prize doesn't make you smart

This morning, eating my Raisin Bran, I noticed that Becker and Posner had blogged about the WHO's recent DDT announcement. Becker is a Nobel Prize-winning economist at U Chicago, which is bursting at the seams with smart economists. You may have heard of a certain Steven Leavitt, for example, who wrote a pretty good book called Freakonomics.

Posner is a judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and lectures at the UChicago Law School. He's lately a wackjob, advocating all kinds of torture in the name of national security, and Becker is known to be fairly ruthless in his reasoning (as one of the leaders in economics of population growth and fertility). But I was astounded by the level of ignorance they displayed while writing on this topic. Becker refers to the WTO, not the WHO, for starters, and it gets worse. Thankfully someone's already done my work for me, so you can read the full ass-whuppin' here at Tim Lambert's blog.

I'm all for DDT as part of a balanced approach to malaria control. Combined with long-lasting treated nets (LLINs) and effective treatment, it can reduce malaria to near-undetectable levels. But it's not a magic bullet; it's not effective in all climate zones, it requires an enormous amount of logistical coordination to undertake effectively. The people who think it's the answer to all our malaria woes are underinformed or worse, willfully blind. The WHO knows all this which is why they've been using it for years, and why the ban on DDT never applied to its use in malaria control programs. If you spray it over cotton and tobacco fields, it'll mess up your ecosystem. If you spray it inside houses in small quantities every 6 months, you'll prevent a lot of cases. But when people get sick they still need effective treatment.

Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) with DDT costs about 40 bucks per disability-adjusted life year (DALY) saved. LLINs cost about 20 bucks, and artemisinin combination therapy (ACT), the best medicine we have right now, is around 12 bucks. This is from Morel's 2005 article Cost-Effectiveness of Malaria Interventions. You know, if you want to make an economic argument with some good facts.