DDT -- A Banned Insecticide

DDT the first of the chlorinated organic insecticides, was originally prepared in 1873, but it was not until 1939 that Paul Muller of Geigy Pharmaceutical in Switzerland discovered the effectiveness of DDT as an insecticide he was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology in 1948 for this discovery).

The use of DDT increased enormously on a worldwide basis after World War II, primarily because of its effectiveness against the mosquito that spreads malaria and lice that carry typhus. The World Health Organization estimates that during the period of its use approximately 25 million lives were saved. DDT seemed to be the ideal insecticide it is cheap and of relatively low toxicity to mammals (oral LD50 is 300 to 500 mg/kg). However, problems related to extensive use of DDT began to appear in the late 1940s. Many species of insects developed resistance to DDT, and DDT was also discovered to have a high toxicity toward fish.

The chemical stability of DDT and its fat solubility compounded the problem. DDT is not metabolized very rapidly by animals; instead, it is deposited and stored in the fatty tissues. The biological half-life of DDT is about eight years; that is, it takes about eight years for an animal to metabolize half of the amount it assimilates. If ingestion continues at a steady rate, DDT builds up within the animal over time.

If your browser is properly equipped the DDT molecule will appear below and can be manipulated by placing your mouse over the image, holding down the left mouse button, and rotating and shifting the image.  If you cannot do this, you may be able to install this program by clicking on this link:  http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/mom/ddt/ddt.mol .

The use of DDT was banned in the United States in 1973, although it is still in use in some other parts of the world. The buildup of DDT in natural waters is a reversible process: the EPA reported a 90% reduction of DDT in Lake Michigan fish by 1978 as a result of the ban.

 Other Molecules of the Month

Copyright Karl Harrison 1996 and 1997.

Source

DDT Ban Takes Effect

[EPA press release - December 31, 1972]

The general use of the pesticide DDT will no longer be legal in the United States after today, ending nearly three decades of application during which time the once-popular chemical was used to control insect pests on crop and forest lands, around homes and gardens, and for industrial and commercial purposes.

An end to the continued domestic usage of the pesticide was decreed on June 14, 1972, when William D. Ruckelshaus, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, issued an order finally cancelling nearly all remaining Federal registrations of DDT products. Public health, quarantine, and a few minor crop uses were excepted, as well as export of the material.

The effective date of the EPA June cancellation action was delayed until the end of this year to permit an orderly transition to substitute pesticides, including the joint development with the U.S. Department of Agriculture of a special program to instruct farmers on safe use of substitutes.

The cancellation decision culminated three years of intensive governmental inquiries into the uses of DDT. As a result of this examination, Ruckelshaus said he was convinced that the continued massive use of DDT posed unacceptable risks to the environment and potential harm to human health.

Major legal challenges to the EPA cancellation of DDT are now pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi. The courts have not ruled as yet in either of these suits brought by pesticide manufacturers.

DDT was developed as the first of the modern insecticides early in World War II. It was initially used with great effect to combat malaria, typhus, and the other insect-borne human diseases among both military and civilian populations.

A persistent, broad-spectrum compound often termed the "miracle" pesticide, DDT came into wide agricultural and commercial usage in this country in the late 1940s. During the past 30 years, approximately 675,000 tons have been applied domestically. The peak year for use in the United States was 1959 when nearly 80 million pounds were applied. From that high point, usage declined steadily to about 13 million pounds in 1971, most of it applied to cotton.

The decline was attributed to a number of factors including increased insect resistance, development of more effective alternative pesticides, growing public and user concern over adverse environmental side effects--and governmental restriction on DDT use since 1969.  

Source

Rachel Carson: Giving a Voice to the Silent Spring

Rachel Carson is one of the most influential women in the history of science. With the publication of her best-selling book, Silent Spring, she single-handedly launched the American and global environmental movements. A marine biologist by training, Carson and her writings taught Americans a new way of thinking about the earth which was really a very old way: she helped us to see ourselves as connected to the earth, as part of an interconnected web of life rather than the controllers of a world intended to satisfy our needs.

Born in 1907, Carson lived the first twenty-two years of her life on her family¹s small farm in Springdale, Pennsylvania (RCHA, para. 1). Encouraged in her education by a mother who insisted on music and reading in the home, she graduated from high school and went on to study at Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College). It was in her collegiate study that she learned to combine biology and writing, and the discovery was thrilling (RCHA, para. 2). Carson found that through her writing about nature, she could ³make animals in the woods or waters, where they live, as alive to others as they are to me (RCHA, para. 3).²

After college, she went on to graduate work and teaching in marine biology at Johns Hopkins University, and she also taught Zoology at the University of Maryland. After an extensive period of research in Chincoteague, Virginia, she took a position with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. A few years later, working full time at the Fisheries Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Carson spent her nights researching and writing her first book, Under the Sea Wind, which had developed by the late 1950¹s into her popular ³Sea² books series (Under the Sea Wind, The Sea Around Us, and The Edge of the Sea) (RCHA, para. 4, 5).

With her ³Sea² books serialized in New Yorker magazine, Carson had earned a significant following. It was at this time that she turned her attention to the dangers of pesticides for Silent Spring. This seminal work challenged and offended officials from the government and industry, as well as the scientific community, but Carson¹s thorough research eventually prevailed. In 1992, Silent Spring was named the most influential book in the last fifty years (Gore, p.5).

Silent Spring challenged the ³widely accepted notion that man was destined to control nature -- specifically to control ³pests² through use of chlorinated hydrocarbons such as DDT (RCHA, para. 6).² Though ³experts² accused Carson of being hysterical , challenged her credibility as a scientist, and launched a negative propaganda campaign against the book, her words continued to speak for themselves. Silent Spring remained on the bestseller list for almost a year, and the world began to take notice. Time magazine, which originally lambasted the book, soon added a new ³The Environment² section, complete with a photo of Carson (RCHA, para. 9). CBS News aired an hour long program about the book even after two ³major corporate sponsors withdrew their support (Gore, p. 2).² President Kennedy spoke of the book at a press conference and called for a committee to investigate its findings. The committee¹s report wholly supported Carson¹s findings and exposed the standard of ³corporate and bureaucratic indifference (Gore, p. 2).²

As a result of the book and its reception, the Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970, and Pesticide Regulation and the Food Safety Inspection Service were moved under its auspices (Gore, p. 3). DDT and PCB¹s have been almost completely outlawed in the U.S., and some of the species most at risk from those pesticides, such as eagles and peregrine falcons, are no longer facing extinction. In addition, a worldwide grassroots environmental movement has been established, keeping checks on government and industry¹s tendency towards leniency.

However, Carson herself admitted that things might have to get worse before they got better, and that is precisely what we have seen happen. DDT and PCB¹s, while not used in the U.S., are still routinely produced here and sold to other countries. In the U.S. they have been replaced by ³narrow-spectrum pesticides of even higher toxicity, which have not been adequately tested and present equal or even greater risks (Gore, p. 3).² As if that weren¹t distressing enough, the research we have (and that which we don¹t have) on pesticides indicates that we really have no concept of what effects they may be having. For instance, toxicity levels have been determined by studies on adults. Children, whose systems are much more sensitive to pesticides, are surely receiving the deadly end of this bargain. In addition, tests have only been done on the effects of individual chemicals, not on the more common experience of combined pesticides (among the foods we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink, etc.) (Gore, p. 4).

Vice President Al Gore, whose own environmentalism grew directly from his experience reading Carson¹s work, admits that ³in the twenty-two years since the publication of Silent Spring, the legal, regulatory, and political system has failed to respond adequately (Gore, p. 4).² Since the book hit the market, pesticide use on farms alone has doubled (to 1.1 billion tons a year) and we have increased pesticide production by 400%. While DDT and PCB¹s are gone from the U.S., other estrogen mimicking pesticides have been wreaking reproductive havoc worldwide. Reduced fertility has been noted in Scotland, Germany, and U.S. studies, and evidence suggests that we are now experiencing a worldwide drop in sperm counts by 50% (Gore, p. 4). The sad fact is that this phenomenon has been clearly established for years in wildlife studies, and yet is rarely noted when a new pesticide comes up for approval.

The bitterest irony of all is that Carson may herself have been a victim of environmental toxins. Two years after the publication of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson died of breast cancer. While writing the book, she had undergone a radical mastectomy and radiation treatment. Now, of course, it has been shown that exposure to toxic chemicals can contribute to breast cancer. Her quiet, articulate, and passionate courage have helped to create a world view quite different from the one which preceded her. Robert White Stevens, a major critic of Carson¹s work, made this statement when the book was released, showing only how backwards the prevailing sentiment was: ³The crux, the fulcrum over which the argument chiefly rests, is that Miss Carson maintains that the balance of nature is a major force in the survival of man, whereas the modern chemist, the modern biologist and scientist, believes that man is steadily controlling nature (Gore, p. 2).² Indeed, Rachel Carson changed our thinking forever.

Source

U.S. Customs records reveal that 3.2 billion pounds of pesticide products were exported in 1997-2000, an average rate of 45 tons per hour. Nearly 65 million pounds of the exported pesticides were either forbidden or severely restricted in the United States; however, no banned pesticide export was recorded for the year 2000. 2.2 million pounds of pesticides regulated under a treaty on persistent organic pollutants (POPs) were exported between 1997 and 1999, with no such export in 2000. Exports of pesticides subject to the prior informed consent (PIC) treaty decreased 97% from the 1997 total of nearly 3 million pounds. Thus, international efforts to reduce the trade in hazardous pesticides may be bearing fruit. However, they are balanced by high rates of export of pesticides designated "extremely hazardous" by the WHO (89 million pounds), pesticides associated with cancer (170 million pounds), and pesticides associated with endocrine disrupting effects (368 million pounds), mostly to developing countries. These findings point in two directions: first, progress is possible, and second, the focus of international efforts should be expanded. From public health and environmental protection perspectives, exports of hazardous pesticides remain unacceptably high. Key words: pesticide exports; developing countries; international policy.

SUBSCRIBE:  The Wednesday Letter is a free electronic monthly newsletter written and published by Karl Loren.  You can view more than 50 back issues of this publication by clicking here.  The Wednesday Letter subscription list is maintained on a secure server, no name is ever given or sold to anyone, and it is never used except for this Newsletter.  It is automatically published on the Tuesday night just before the first Wednesday of every month.  You can subscribe to this free monthly electronic letter by entering your eMail address and name below.  You will then automatically receive a request for confirmation, sent to whatever address you have entered.  If you do NOT receive this confirmation request, then you will not be subscribed.  There may have been an error with your address and you should resubmit.  The letter is never sent twice to the same address -- so you do not have to worry about a duplicate subscription.  When you receive this confirmation request you must reply to it, or your subscription will not become active.  No one can subscribe your name, and address, without you being notified, and if you get an unwanted notice of subscription you only need to DO NOTHING and the subscription will NOT be active.

REMOVAL:  You can remove yourself from the subscription list in several different ways.  Click here to read about this entire newsletter system.  Every edition of The Wednesday Letter is delivered to your address with YOUR name and address in view on the letter, with a link that allows you to remove THAT name from the subscription list.  If you try to send this removal message from an address different from the one you used to send in your original confirmation, then you will get a warning notice first, sent to the subscription address, asking you to confirm that you want to be removed from the list -- by replying to THAT request for confirmation, you will then be automatically removed.  Thus, no one else can unsubscribe you, from some other computer, without your knowledge.  But, if you send in the unsubscribe notice from the same machine used to receive the Letter, then the removal from the subscription list is automatic.

Personal Message:  When you send a personal message to Karl Loren, you will receive a personal reply as per his instructions.  Karl pledges that every personal message will get a personal answer. When you provide your mail address, we will send you free information including our free catalog and a cassette tape lecture by Karl Loren about heart disease, no charge, by mail, even if outside the US.  You can select particular information you would like to receive, along with the free cassette tape and catalog.

You can reach Vibrant Life in many ways, including by mail to Vibrant Life, 2808 N. Naomi St., Burbank, CA 91504.  Within the US and Canada, use the toll free number:  (800) 523-4521, the local number:  (818) 558-1799, the FAX:  (818) 558-7299, eMail to kimberly@oralchelation.com or any one of the hundreds of message forms throughout the 50 web sites.  Vibrant Life normally ships the same day we get an order.  There are message forms on each of the 100,000+ pages on this and other sites where you can communicate with Vibrant Life.  Check out our companion site, at:  http://www.oralchelation.net where Karl's 2000 page book is published.  Karl Loren is the author and webmaster for this BOOK, as well as for another web site about ORAL CHELATION.  His personal philosophical articles are at PHILOSOPHY. 

Copyright © May 20, 2008 6:24 AM by Karl Loren on behalf of Vibrant Life, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  Permission is granted for non-commercial downloading, copying, distribution or redistribution on two conditions:  One, that some form of copyright notice is included in every copy distributed or copied, showing the copyright belonging to Vibrant Life, Burbank, CA, at www.oralchelation.com . The second condition is that the material is not to be used for any purpose contrary to the purposes and objectives of this site.  This permission does not extend to materials on this site which are copyrighted by others.