My first response to your comments was, “Holy crap! Someone read what I wrote?!”

My second response is that you’ve got an excellent point, and I’ve edited the post itself to reflect as much. (I won’t take it down; it seems dishonest to me to make edits to hide my own ignorance.)

Also, it’s useful to know that no nation ever defeated malaria relying on DDT. It takes a lot of other effort, especially improving the delivery of appropriate medical care, to make it work. In the U.S., the CDC counted malaria as defeated in 1939. That’s about seven years before DDT became available for civilian use in the U.S. There’s a moral tale there, too.

2. The ban on spraying crops with DDT came in the U.S. more than a half-decade later.

Consequently, it’s erroneous to claim that a ban on spraying DDT in Texas in 1972 caused Africans to stop spraying DDT in 1965, and its erroneous to claim that stopping the use of DDT in Texas in 1972 caused a modest increase in malaria deaths in Africa and Asia after 1980. Anyone who can read a map and a calendar should be able to figure that out.

3. DDT was determined to ravage wild ecosystems. Spraying mosquitoes also killed all the predators of the mosquitoes, and often killed much of everything else up the food chain in the wild.

4. Predators recover more slowly than the producer species. Unless malaria could be wiped out among humans while the mosquito population was temporarily knocked down by DDT, spraying with DDT would cause a dramatic and epidemic rise in the number of mosquitoes and, consequently, malaria.

Spraying DDT causes an increase in malaria unless you improve the medical care system to diagnose and quickly and properly treat and cure humans with malaria in the period the mosquitoes are knocked down.

Therefore, the consistents are arguing to protect the lives of living people, including especially pregnant women and children under the age of 5 who are most prone to the fatal forms of malaria.

You need to find another analogy.