Science-Heroes-com : But some humanitarians were upset. They claimed the ban was a death sentence to millions of people. And they had statistics. In Sri Lanka, the country’s malaria burden shrunk from 2.8 million cases in the 1940s to just 17 in 1965, due to the use of D.D.T. Five years after the country stopped using D.D.T., the number of cases had risen to 500,000. In the 1980’s Madagascar stopped using D.D.T. and immediately had an epidemic of malaria, resulting in the death of more than 100,000 people. The humanitarians’ rage over the ban was summed up by Michael Crichton, author of “Jurassic Park.”) One of his characters in the novel “State of Fear” says that banning D.D.T. was “arguably the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century” and that the ban “killed more than ******.”