expatrocks...do you use another forum... Lonely Planet?
The same original question, word for word, comes up in the Lonely Planet Forum and the information you supplied in the form of that report comes directly from someone elses response to that question.
The report is dated 2004 based on data collected in 1999, so one has to question the validity of the report some 14 years after the event.
The whole question of the banning of DDT is arguable; there is no wholesale worldwide ban in fact, in the USA its use in agriculture was banned in 1972 but thirty years elapsed before its use in agriculture was banned worldwide. It is still in use for disease control; It is still routinely used in some African countries, in India and in parts of Asia.
It has been firmly established that in the case of DDT vs Malaria, DDT is / was the lesser of two evils. Thousands upon thousands of people died from Malaria and, strangely enough, visceral leishmaniasis in regions were it was temporarily banned. Reports that DDT resistant mosquitos evolved have been proven to be untrue.
One has to wonder if the rise in cases of canine visceral leishmaniasis in the Mediterranean areas is due to the discontinued use of DDT... The timescales involved certainly fit... The sandfly, a misnomer if ever there was one, because it's not a fly at all but a mosquito, is thought to be the main carrier of Leishmaniasis, it is in fact a very close relative of the malaria carrying mosquito.
It has never been categorically proven that there is a link between DDT and cancer, the sample figures used in the trials were, by the admission of the W.H.O., too small to be conclusive.
For the tin foil hat conspiracy folks it was even rumoured that the Big Pharma used the ban on DDT as a form of population control in Africa; when it was was withdrawn, as stated earlier thousands of people in the 3rd world died from diseases carried by the mosquito.
When the US ban on DDT was introduced, one major US company, (M******o) producing DDT, switched from producing pesticides to manufacturing herbicides instead; having established itself as the worlds largest manufacturer of herbicides they then started producing genetically modified seeds that were resistant to their herbicidal product. They had to do this... their herbicide killed everything, weeds, grass, and crops and trees.
Guess what... they are now the worlds biggest producer of GM seeds...
The same company also did extremely well out of the Vietnam War as the manufacturer of 'Agent Orange', a radical variation of their leading herbicidal product which has had devastating results on humans.
You don't need to dig very far to find that overall, DDT was and continues to be, beneficial to mankind as a whole, especially in combating Malaria and Leish. DDT residues can be found all over the world, carried on the winds. Not really surprising then that there may be some residual levels in the Canary Islands but there is no current information available; my opinion is that the information carried in the report is long since invalid and does not reflect the current situation.