Malaria In Russia?

Those who have seen Not Evil Just Wrong will remember the references to Malaria in Africa and the US. That reference was simply to show how a majority can be wrong, as with the banning of DDT in Africa and its subsequent re-introduction years later after Malaria rates skyrocketed and millions of people had died.

That section of the movie ended with an African woman telling some US environmentalists how unfair it was that the US had been able to use DDT to rid itself of Malaria, but then wanted to prevent African countries from doing the same. The environmentalists response was that Malaria had never existed in the US and they hadn't used DDT. The movie then cut to scenes of streets, houses, schools and swimming pools being sprayed with DDT in the US in the '20s and '30s.

The following video is slightly different, but along the same lines. During a debate over the recent ClimateGate issue, one interview talks about how the UN should be spending the money its collecting for Climate Change on combating things like Malaria in the third world. The interviewer jumps right in and claims that rising temperatures from Global Warming will cause more Malaria, and the second interviewee joins in, plainly stating: "Malaria never happened in Russia before, now it is."

The first interviewee calls the second on the ridiculousness of that claim, and his only response is to ask him if he's a Medical Doctor, and when he was last in Russia.





Although the entire video is worth watching, this exchange happens from 7:30 onwards.

By the way, I'm not a Medical Doctor and i've never been to Russia, but ten seconds on Google turned up this article from 1921 from the New York Times:

10,000,000 Malaria Cases In Russia