Image above: A community health worker
installs a spatial repellent in a home in Kenya. Credit: David Amollo/Unitaid
The Trump Administration announced its withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) on
Inauguration Day, but CPG firm SC Johnson remains very much involved with the group.
So kudos to SC Johnson for not kowtowing to the Administration’s accusations of WHO mishandling
global health crises.
Malaria, for example, continues as one of the largest global health crises.
On Wednesday, WHO issued a new recommendation that spatial repellents be used in
controlling the disease -- and named two SC Johnson products as its first recommended products in the space.
Spatial repellents -- also known as spatial emanators -- emit active
ingredients into the air to kill mosquitoes, deter them from entering treated spaces, and prevent them from locating and biting human hosts. The active ingredient in the SC Johnson products is
transfluthrin. Mosquito Shield and Guardian, each about the size of a sheet of paper, can be hung in semi-enclosed spaces
Further kudos to SC Johnson for not making any money off this. The
company, well known for its consumer insect repellents Raid and Off!, markets its two spatial repellents – Mosquito Shield and Guardian – as a nonprofit business.
It says
it’s been working towards the WHO recommendation for more than a decade, already distributing millions of its repellents globally, and investing more than $100 million in development,
testing, production and deployment.
The WHO designation “demonstrates further their safety, quality and efficacy,” SC Johnson explains, enabling it to now deploy the products on a
“much larger scale.”
Fisk Johnson, fifth-generation chairman-CEO of the 139-year-old family-owned firm, pointed to the company’s “commitment to combat diseases
that threaten hundreds of millions of people.”
And here’s where things get… shall we say, murky, at least if you want to attribute politics to any part of the picture.
Because, while malaria kills more than 600,000 people annually, with 250 million active cases, Trump Administration cuts in funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development -- which the
U.S. Court of Appeals just approved on Wednesday -- threaten an increase of 107,000 deaths and an additional 15 million cases in just one year, according to recent analysis in the medical journal
The Lancet.
But guess who served on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology during President Trump’s first term?
Yes, Fisk Johnson -- based,
like his company, in the crucial swing state of Wisconsin – who proceeded to personally donate more than $1.5 million to Republicans in last year’s election cycle, per U.S. News &
World Report.
The whole picture seems to lean against making blanket judgments on those who skew red.