When the pesticide was first released for sale, state officials in Missouri issued a formal warning against it, citing unknown hazards to plants, animals, and humans. Minnesota banned its sale, New Jersey restricted it, and California and New York issued decrees requiring that DDT-containing products bear the skull and crossbones indicating a dangerous poison.
If people learned through experience that DDT could be handled with less caution than such bona-fide poisons as strychnine and bichloride of mercury—which it certainly could—they would lose their respect for the skull and crossbones as a signifier of danger.
As states struggled to regulate DDT, journalists struggled to reconcile warnings and promises. In the years just after the war Colson launched a dogged investigation into DDT, writing to state agencies, manufacturers, and organizations far and wide.
The literature she amassed on the pesticide indicated that it might be harmful to humans but offered no conclusive proof that it was. And the more experts she questioned, the more she was told that DDT had above all saved countless lives around the globe, all while never harming a person. Army soldiers demonstrating DDT-spraying equipment. To her this was reason enough to worry. They noted early on as National Geographic had reported that DDT was deadly to honeybees, butterflies, small fish and reptiles, and, in high enough concentrations, birds and small mammals.
Death to pollinators would lead to fruitless orchards and barren crop fields. As a report by the U. Such expert worries were no secret. Newspapers far and wide reported that the new chemical was a threat to nature. Older agricultural chemicals, such as lead and arsenic, typically got press space only when they poisoned people. The stories we tell over and over again, like that of DDT, explain how we arrived at the present, and they point to a hoped-for future.
It will kill most of the flowers for the same reason and will wipe out many of our vegetables. But Cope had other observations to share as well. The pesticide had eliminated the bugs pestering his mules, dairy cows, Scottish terrier, cat, and pig; and it seemed to be keeping the bugs from coming in through cracks and crevices in his windows and walls.
Despite their trepidation Americans were enamored with the ways in which DDT promised to improve life on the farm and at home. Unmolested by insects, dairy cattle produced more milk and steers yielded more meat. Cockroaches disappeared from cupboards, ants from the sugar, bedbugs from mattresses, and moths from rugs. Even the flies then suspected of carrying polio seemed to take the disease with them as they disappeared. And so the nation moved forward, still ambivalent: DDT production increased tenfold to more than million pounds by the beginning of the s the vast majority of it used in agriculture.
The following year, and for the rest of the s, DDT became a focus of congressional hearings about the safety of the food supply.
FDA scientist Arnold J. Lehman testified that small amounts of DDT were being stored in human fat and accumulating over time and that, unlike with the older poisons, no one knew what the consequences would be.
Physician Morton Biskind shared his concern that DDT was behind a new epidemic, so-called virus X an epidemic later attributed to chlorinated naphthalene, a chemical in farm machinery lubricants. Instead, we tell the story of a chemical whose powers were so awe-inspiring that no one gave any thought to its downsides—at least not until they were brought to light by one renegade scientist.
The spread of Zika reignited the debate on whether DDT should be put back into use. As a society we use narratives to organize our shared past into a beginning, middle, and end. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. JavaScript appears to be disabled on this computer. Please click here to see any active alerts. DDT dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane was developed as the first of the modern synthetic insecticides in the s.
It was initially used with great effect to combat malaria, typhus, and the other insect-borne human diseases among both military and civilian populations. It also was effective for insect control in crop and livestock production, institutions, homes, and gardens. DDT's quick success as a pesticide and broad use in the United States and other countries led to the development of resistance by many insect pest species. The U. Department of Agriculture, the federal agency with responsibility for regulating pesticides before the formation of the U.
Environmental Protection Agency in , began regulatory actions in the late s and s to prohibit many of DDT's uses because of mounting evidence of the pesticide's declining benefits and environmental and toxicological effects. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Syndicate. Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane DDT Factsheet.
Minus Related Pages. DDT exposure in people Exposure to DDT in people likely occurs from eating foods, including meat, fish, and dairy products. A small portion of the population had measurable DDT.
Most of the population had detectable DDE. Links with this icon indicate that you are leaving the CDC website. Linking to a non-federal website does not constitute an endorsement by CDC or any of its employees of the sponsors or the information and products presented on the website.
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