When I was a child in Havana, Cuba in the early ’50s, I couldn’t wait for the noisy Jeep. It would move slowly, spewing a thick yellowish-white cloud.

Me and my friends would follow the Jeep, hiding inside the cloud and couldn’t see each other or even our own hands. It didn’t smell too bad.

It was DDT.

Malaria was eliminated from most parts of the world through the use of DDT. It was so successful that it was being used here in great quantities to dust crops.

In 1962, Rachel Carlson wrote “Silent Spring.” Some people call this the beginning of the modern environmental movement. In it, Carlson wrote how DDT was destroying birds because there was some disputed evidence that DDT was thinning eagle egg shells. The book was so successful that DDT was banned––not just for crop dusting, but for any use. Aggressive use of DDT would have eradicated malaria from Africa in short order, but this was lost in the celebration.

Since then maybe 50 million Africans, most of them children, have died of malaria.

Compare this to 30 million people who died during World War II, including 6 million in the Holocaust. Or to 2,300 of our soldiers who have died in Iraq in almost three years.

But more than 2,300 children will die of malaria in Africa tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that. . . .

Environmentalists are still opposed to the use of DDT to combat malaria. Instead, expensive and ineffective bed nets should be used.

The president in his State of the Union speech mentioned malaria twice, but only in general terms. A government official recently called the malaria/DDT problem “a delicate situation.”

I call it horror. Fifty million children and counting sacrificed in the altar of environmental correctness. Diego Cruz Newbury Park