The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  Dachau was home to the Nazi tropical medicine program, and Jewish prisoners were used as human subjects for malaria research. According to the unit histories of Rex’s 157th Regiment, there “were ‘patients’ undergoing experiments of unspeakably inhumane nature. Others were infected with diseases so that effectiveness of various treatments could be tested. . . . A Professor Schilling caused prisoners to be infected with various diseases, such as malaria.” At Dachau, Rex contracted his second dose of wartime malaria from an experimental Nazi mosquito. “This second round of malaria was far worse. As much as I wanted to stay with my unit, Doc told me I had to go home,” Rex reminisced with regret. “The Germans couldn’t get me, but this malaria sure knocked me flat. I thought I was a goner.” His war, after 511 days of combat, was over. Rex spent eleven days in hospital in and out of malarial consciousness and delirium before being invalided home. Sergeant Major Rex Raney peacefully passed away at his home in western Colorado in 2018 shortly before his ninety-seventh birthday and was buried with full military honors.

  While Nazi doctor Claus Schilling, the chief resident of the Nazi tropical medicine program at Dachau, was performing chilling malaria research on involuntary test subjects, American physicians of the Malaria Project were conducting experimental clinical trials of their own.* Malaria was such a vexing concern for American military strategists and operational planners that normal codes of ethics and scientific protocols were shelved during this time of total war. Beginning in late 1943, the US Division of Tropical Medicine authorized the use of incarcerated and syphilitic Americans as voluntary human test subjects (in exchange for a reduced sentence or a cure for syphilis) within the larger Malaria Project. American experimentation mirrored the Nazi procedures being carried out on Jewish prisoners at Dachau, “where Claus Schilling went to work every day,” relays Karen Masterson in her exquisitely detailed book The Malaria Project. “He arrived in early 1942 with a mission not unlike the American Malaria Project’s mission—to find a cure for malaria.” The only difference was that Schilling forced his sadistic trials and tests upon involuntary subjects and, following his capture, was tried by an American tribunal for war crimes.*

  Schilling’s feeble defense for his ineffably evil and malignant transgressions—that he was ordered to conduct experimental malaria research by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler—didn’t cut it. His legal counsel then asked the court to explain the difference between Schilling’s work and that undertaken by American wartime researchers on inmates at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary and the notorious Stateville Correctional Center near Chicago, or at numerous psychiatric hospitals. Schilling’s defense team also alluded to Australian malaria experimentation on volunteers, including wounded soldiers and Jewish refugees. This line of twisted reasoning didn’t cut it either. While Schilling was hanged for crimes against humanity in 1946, American malarial experiments on inmates continued into the 1960s. This multinational research, however, also served a darker purpose—biological weapons.

  In 1941, the America-Britain-Canada Conference (ABC-1) established the joint coordination of wartime resources and strategies with a mission to “cooperate in broad defense.” By 1943, ABC biological weapons researchers were working in harmony at Fort Detrick, Maryland, home to the US Army Biological Warfare Laboratories. The international team conducted various projects (some with human subjects, including conscientious objectors such as Seventh-day Adventists) with numerous toxins such as the usual suspects of plague, smallpox, anthrax, botulism, and yellow fever, and the two newcomers, mosquito-borne Venezuelan equine and Japanese encephalitis. “There were innovative efforts to weaponize a number of viruses,” reports Donald Avery in his tour of ABC biological weapons, Pathogens for War, “yellow fever being considered the most promising.” Researchers brainstormed ideas for delivery systems for yellow fever, including the two possible candidates. One was to infect millions of Aedes mosquitoes with yellow fever and then unleash mosquito hordes on Japan. Another was to infect German POWs with disease, possibly yellow fever, and parachute them back into the Reich as instigators for epidemics.

  The ABC team was not flying solo in the shadowy world of biological weapons research. The Japanese biological warfare research center in China, dubbed Unit 731, used thousands of Chinese, Koreans, and Allied POWs as test subjects. Unit 731 conducted trials with multiple agents, including yellow fever, plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism, anthrax, and various venereal diseases, among others. Human experimentation and frequent aerial tests on cities, most notably with cholera flies and plague, killed upwards of 580,000 Chinese civilians. This deliberate biological infection was finally acknowledged by Japan in 2002. The culmination of the tests was to be a biological attack on California, using plague bombs carried by one-way flights or by timed balloons delivered on target by prevailing wind currents. Japan surrendered in the face of nuclear annihilation before the biological menace of “Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night” could be put into effect.

  Nazi Germany’s Blitzableiter (Lightning Rod) biological weapons program, operating primarily out of the Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, and Dachau concentration and death camps, conducted human trials on Jewish and Soviet prisoners. German researchers, who shared information and results with their Japanese counterparts from Unit 731, developed similar ideas for yellow fever transmission to those of the ABC alliance. Discounting, but not diminishing, the Japanese biological trials on Chinese villages, the only known purposeful deployment of a biological weapon during the war was the premeditated 1944 Nazi proliferation of malarial mosquitoes to the Pontine Marshes. By 1948, DDT and the restoration of Mussolini’s prewar reclamation infrastructure had shored up the damage. Anzio and the Pontine Marshes, or Italy in its entirety for that matter, serve as an excellent statistical example of the mosquito-eradicating magic of DDT.

  The Battle of Anzio left the region in a quagmire. Nearly everything Mussolini had accomplished was sabotaged. The cities were in ruin, the steppes depopulated, mosquitoes were frolicking in the marshes, and malaria punched a hole through the Italian population. Malarial deaths in the marshes rose exponentially from 33 in 1939 to 55,000 in 1944. By the end of the war, malaria rates had quadrupled across the country, reaching half a million by 1945. And yet, the fate of the marshes was reversed again. Within a few years, as DDT rained down on Italy, the water diversion and eradication infrastructure of the marshes was restored. The insecticide was so effective it was reported that gleeful Italians “are now throwing DDT at brides instead of rice.” The last of Italian malaria was conquered in 1948, with the aid of DDT and the new antimalarial drug chloroquine, which supplanted the now ineffective quinine, to which malaria had become resistant.

  The Second World War and its technological terrors and scientific advances opened up a brave, if not scary, new world. “DDT was just one of a multitude of postwar technologies that characterized the modern world,” maintains David Kinkela in his book DDT and the American Century: Global Health, Environmental Politics, and the Pesticide That Changed the World, tracing the evolution of the insecticide. Within this modern world, for the first time, humanity was unshackling itself from mosquito-borne disease. These innovations, including atomic energy and DDT, could be used to benefit humanity by powering the planet and condemning the mosquito to the ash heap of history.

  By 1945, DDT was made commercially available to farmers in the US, and was being used, in combination with cheap and effective chloroquine, by international aid organizations and individual nations alike, to eradicate mosquito-borne diseases. The American wartime Army School of Malariology and Office of Malaria Control in War Areas were expanded and rebranded in 1946 as the Communicable Disease Center (now known as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC) and continued the blitz on the mosquito. Situated at the heart of the southern zone of endemic malarial infection, Atlanta was strategically positioned to headquarter this new branch of the US Public Health Service. With a
n initial annual budget hovering around $1 million, 60% of the 370 original CDC employees (schematically arranged on a personnel flow chart in the shape of a mosquito) were assigned to mosquito and malaria eradication. By 1949, the agency initiated programs designed to counter biological warfare, which officially converged in 1951 into the Epidemic Intelligence Service branch of the CDC. During its first few foundational years, CDC mosquito control crews, determined to assassinate the deadly vehicle for malaria, sprayed 6.5 million American homes with DDT.

  Two years after the establishment of the CDC, the World Health Organization (WHO) was founded in 1948 by the freshly painted and optimistic United Nations. The continuation of the wartime success of mosquito eradication was a top priority. In 1955, with financial backing from the United States, WHO launched its Global Malaria Eradication Programme. Armed with DDT and chloroquine, the war against mosquitoes would be the next world war. Implemented successfully across large areas of the developing world, this effort soon cut the malaria rates in numerous countries in Latin America and Asia by 90% or better. Even for Africa, hope that this age-old scourge would be brought to an end seemed to be in sight. By 1970, it appeared that we had finally turned the tide of battle against our dreaded mosquito foe and were achieving global victory.

  Between 1947 and 1970, the year that sales peaked at more than $2 billion, DDT production, primarily based in the US, rose more than 900%. In 1963, for example, fifteen American companies, among them Dow, DuPont, Merck, Monsanto (now a division of Bayer), Ciba (now Novartis), Pennwalt/Pennsalt, Montrose, and Velsicol pumped out 82,000 tons of DDT worth $1.04 billion. Our planet has been bathed in roughly 1.8 million tons (4 billion pounds) of DDT, with more than 600,000 tons (1.32 billion pounds) blanketed across the United States alone.

  In 1945, insects caused the destruction of $360 million ($4 billion today) worth of American crops. Between 1945 and 1980, global agriculture was annually spreading 40,000 tons of DDT on ingestible crops, increasing yields and producing bountiful harvests free from the predation of pestering insects. In India, not only did the widespread use of DDT engulf mosquitoes and rout endemic malaria, but during the 1950s, agricultural and industrial productivity increased by an annual average of over $1 billion. Around the planet, harvests increased and consumer costs on staple foods such as wheat, rice, potatoes, cabbage, and corn dropped by as much as 60% in certain regions of Africa, India, and Asia. DDT was a universal success and was lauded as a lifesaving chemical. This compound was the mosquito’s Kryptonite, and provided a future for millions of people throughout the world.

  “DDT Is Good for Me!”: A 1947 Time magazine advertisement for Pennsalt DDT products. By 1945, DDT was made commercially available to farmers in the US and was being used, in combination with cheap and effective chloroquine, by international aid organizations and individual nations alike to eradicate mosquito-borne diseases. During the immediate postwar years, it appeared that DDT was our war-winning weapon against our deadliest predator. (Science History Institute)

  Wherever DDT was used in significant quantities, the incidence of malaria declined precipitously. In South America, for example, malaria cases fell by 35% between 1942 and 1946. By 1948, there was not a single malaria-related death in all of Italy. The United States was declared malaria-free in 1951. In India, the number of malaria cases fell from 75 million that same year to just 50,000 a decade later. In Sri Lanka, where the average annual malaria rate hovered around 3 million, DDT spraying was initiated in 1946. By 1964, a mere 29 Sri Lankans contracted malaria. By 1975, malaria had been banished from Europe. Globally, between 1930 and 1970, mosquito-borne diseases were reduced by an astounding 90% (in a population that nearly doubled).

  Not only had totalitarian regimes been defeated, we were also finally and authoritatively overpowering our deadliest enemy—the mosquito. “This is the DDT era of malariology,” declared Dr. Paul Russell, the wartime mosquito crusader, in Man’s Mastery of Malaria. “For the first time,” he announced in 1955, it was possible “to banish malaria completely.” The mosquito-killing chemical of DDT, synthetic antimalaria drugs, and yellow fever vaccinations appeared to be unstoppable. We had turned the tide of battle, and the mosquito and her army of diseases were in full retreat. For the first time in our epic and bloody war with our most persistent predator, we were winning on all fronts. As it turned out, that war was far from over. For the mosquito and her malaria parasite, in their struggle for survival against DDT, chloroquine, and our other weapons of extermination, resistance was not futile.

  CHAPTER 18

  Silent Springs and Superbugs: The Mosquito Renaissance

  In 2012, environmentalists around the world celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Rachel Carson’s seminal treatise Silent Spring. The villain of Carson’s story was of course the “elixirs of death,” or DDT. “Few books published in the United States have enjoyed the influence of Silent Spring,” acknowledges James McWilliams in American Pests: The Losing War on Insects from Colonial Times to DDT. “Rachel Carson’s attack on DDT and related insecticidal compounds had an impact that has been compared with that of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin . . . and sparked the modern environmental movement.” McWilliams asserts that “Silent Spring, much like Common Sense and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, tapped an emotion deeply embedded in the American psyche, a belief ineradicable and genuine.” Following the release of Silent Spring, Judy Hansen, former president of the American Mosquito Control Association, remembers that “suddenly, it was fashionable to be an environmentalist.” The book remained atop the New York Times bestseller list for an astounding 31 weeks. In 1964, only 18 months after publication, Carson died tragically of cancer during her fifty-sixth spring, knowing that she had made a heroic difference.

  During the tumultuous protest decade of the 1960s, the seed of the environmental revolution was planted by Carson’s 1962 ecofriendly worldview, fertilized by the use of the defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam, and watered by Joni Mitchell’s 1970 hit song “Big Yellow Taxi.” As academic findings and field research confirmed Carson’s fatalistic philosophy, the Canadian folksinger begged farmers to shelve their DDT in favor of birds, bees, and the beloved spotted apples and fruit trees of DDT’s pioneering chemist Paul Müller. With the benefit of looking back at the bygone DDT clouds from both sides now, Mitchell was right to reprimand farmers for paving paradise with the insecticide. It was the widespread, carpeting agricultural application of DDT that created environmental degradation and mosquito defiance, not its relatively limited and surgical use solely as a mosquito killer.

  While the toxic and damaging environmental ramifications of the blanketing agricultural use of DDT are well known and generally undisputed, not all recent commentators support Carson’s prophecy of gilded paradise cities with estranged DDT spray guns and welcoming jungles of organic roses. “Of note,” reported the American Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in 2004, “when used indoors in limited quantities, DDT’s entry into the global food chain is minimal.” While the current squabble over Carson’s scientific evidence and methodology and the reinstatement of DDT as an agent against mosquito-borne disease persists, the reality for most mosquito-infested regions of our planet is that DDT simply doesn’t work anymore. The rancorous venom between environmentalists and those ripping on Rachel for her role in the demise of DDT, and the ensuing resurgence of mosquito-borne disease, are spinning their wheels in an endless, futile circle game. Rachel is innocent.

  If it is somehow pacifying or soothing to assign blame to anyone or anything, we can point the mollifying finger squarely at the mosquito’s evolutionary survival instincts. During her last stand on the final frontiers of the war of attrition between man and mosquito, she withstood the initial shock and awe of our insecticidal onslaught. Borrowing time as an ally, the mighty mosquito gained biological strength and eventually outsmarted and resisted science by genetically counterattacking and defeat
ing DDT. Amid the rallying cries of the fomenting counterculture marches and social revolutions of the turbulent sixties, the mosquito and malaria led their own defiant movements by rejecting the established order of DDT and antimalarial drugs.

  In 1972, a decade after Silent Spring went viral and America slapped a domestic agricultural ban on DDT, it didn’t matter much anyway. The death knell of DDT as the frontline defense against mosquitoes had already been sounded. DDT had overstayed its welcome. The mosquito had outlasted her enemy’s effectiveness and utility and no longer feared it. In the face of extermination, the mosquito and her empire of disease struck back and adapted and evolved during the silent springs of the 1960s. Malaria parasites snacked on chloroquine between meals of other antimalarials, and mosquitoes built up a luxurious lather of immunity during their showers in DDT.

  In truth, the ban on DDT imposed by the United States in 1972 had more to do with its ineffectiveness against DDT-resistant mosquitoes that were first definitively encountered in 1956 (conceivably as early as 1947) than with some far-reaching environmental political clout or anything Carson wrote. She herself acknowledged in Silent Spring that “the truth, seldom mentioned but there for anyone to see, is that nature is not so easily molded and that the insects are finding ways to circumvent our chemical attacks on them.” Depending on the species of mosquito, DDT resistance took anywhere from two to twenty years. The average mosquito mutiny against DDT occurred within seven years. By the 1960s, the world was crawling with DDT-immune mosquitoes harboring malaria parasites that were resistant to the best drugs we could launch their way.