With the Zika virus it’s the federal government that decides how much risk Americans should take, and the government answer seems to be, more than they should have to. DDT, the insecticide that inspired the formation of the environmentalist movement, has been used effectively in the past to combat mosquito-borne Zika. It could do so again. Indeed, DDT has saved millions from death by malaria.

The threat from Zika is receding in Brazil, where the virus is suspected of having caused more than 3,500 birth defects in less than a year. But summer heat in the United States can spread the danger here.

The United States is not an undeveloped nation of the early-20th century bedeviled by disease, yet a Third World-type health threat is making a mockery of modernity. Why? Because the most effective eradicator of disease-carrying pest, DDT, has been banned since 1972, owing to its concentrating in the food chain when it is sprayed without proper discrimination.

The public might find it unacceptable for health officials to bypass effective methods of saving infants from enormous defects in favor of using inefficient but politically acceptable methods. American health authorities have been using acceptable chemicals that kill larval mosquitoes and adult mosquitoes. “It isn’t working as well as we had hoped,” concedes Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “That could be because some of the mosquitoes are resistant to those insecticides.”

A solution to the scourge of Zika is urgently needed and no remedy, not even DDT, should be beyond careful consideration. More than 40 years after it was banned in the United States DDT is now sprayed on a limited basis to save Africans from malaria. All lives matter, and here at home, too.