Please email webmaster sierraclub. By signing up, you are opting in to receive periodic communications from the Sierra Club. Carey Gillam is a journalist and author , and a public interest researcher for US Right to Know , a not-for-profit food industry research group. You can follow her on Twitter careygillam. Report shows a critical need to study other pesticides and chemicals. By Carey Gillam Apr 23 Disrupting hormones DDT dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane was introduced in the s as a highly effective insecticide designed to combat the spread of malaria, typhus, and other diseases carried by insects.
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More stories about: health , pesticides. Related Stories. Why all genders should care, plus how to tell if a product is truly PFAS-free. People of color are 3x more likely to live in the most polluted counties. By some estimates, the death toll in Africa alone from unnecessary malaria resulting from the restrictions on DDT has exceeded million people.
We shall examine each in turn. In the late s and early s, the average American could be expected to ingest DDT in food and drink at levels of around 30 micrograms per day. There is scientific evidence that ingesting DDT or its byproduct DDE can cause mice to develop tumors, but only if they are fed at least ten times the amount per day by body weight that a person would normally expect to ingest. Summarizing all of the relevant research, the U. Birds with Extinction. Indeed, it was from this poignant image that she drew the title for her book.
It can be seen that far from declining, the number of birds encountered by each observer nearly quadrupled over the period in question. Many other studies show the same pattern of sharp increase of some bird populations during the DDT years. For example, a bird sanctuary that has been counting birds over Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania since the s reported an increase in sightings of ospreys from less than in to over by , and an increase in sightings of migrating raptors from 9, in to 29, in Eggshell thinning is a potential problem, but it should not be overstated.
The levels of DDT required for malaria control are much less than those required for crop dusting as practiced in the s. Furthermore, the problem does not affect every bird species — indeed, for some species, there is reason to believe that DDT has an overall beneficial effect, by protecting them from the insect-borne diseases that are a primary cause of bird mortality.
For example, some marsh bird populations grew so dramatically during the DDT years that they emerged from their marshes in millions to cause significant damage to crops in the American Midwest. In a note published in Science magazine in , Wurster claimed to have shown that the presence of parts per billion ppb of DDT in seawater would stop photosynthesis by phytoplankton.
This was truly an alarming result. However, the maximum solubility of DDT in seawater is only 1. It is hardly surprising that marine algae stopped functioning when thrown into such stuff. In contrast, other scientists found no harm or loss of activity of the same species of marine algae that Wurster used when immersed in actual seawater saturated to the limit with DDT. The Wurster experiment was thus meaningless as science.
But as a propaganda tool for those seeking to ban the life-saving chemical, it was quite useful. The end of the ocean came late in the summer of , and it came even more rapidly than the biologists had expected. There had been signs for more than a decade, commencing with the discovery in that DDT slows down photosynthesis in marine plant life.
It was announced in a short paper in the technical journal, Science , but to ecologists it smacked of doomsday. And they knew that DDT and similar chlorinated hydrocarbons had polluted the entire surface of the earth, including the sea. But, as a result of the mendacity and actions of Carson, Ruckelshaus, Wurster, Ehrlich, and their allies, DDT has been banned, and hundreds of millions of people who might have lived to enjoy those oceans, to sail on them, fish in them, surf in them, or swim in them, to play on their beaches or write poems about their sunsets, are dead.
Charles T. Spring We are the only publication of our kind, dedicated to exploring science and technology as a cultural project — one that might elevate our humanity or degrade it.
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Discussed in this article. Silent Spring. January The U. Army uses DDT to end the typhus epidemic in Naples. Adapted from. As a result of the ban on DDT, millions of African children continue to die every year from malaria. Table 1. West and G. Soulsby and William R. Citations are to the Mariner edition.
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