Due to outcry from environmentalists and concern about Rachel Carson's Silent Spring(1), and over the objections of scientists, the attorney who had been appointed to run the new Environmental Protection Agency created by President Nixon, William Ruckelshaus, banned it.(2)
The United Nations followed suit but later recanted that when they found other products didn't work very well.(3) Now it is used in 31 countries and the same EPA that banned it in the U.S. literally wrote the book on how people should spray it inside homes.
Here is LIFE magazine from 1948, where Kay Heffernon at Jones Beach, NY, knows science better than every attorney at Natural Resources Defense Council, current or prior.
With no DDT(4) to stop them, bed bugs have enjoyed a resurgence in many countries. That is due to resistance to new products they never developed to DDT. A recent study implicates the Rdl gene that may be contributing to resistance to other pesticides. The work involved sampling 134 unique populations of North American bed bugs collected between 2008 and 2022. Two bugs from two separate populations had the same Rdl mutation, one previously discovered in the nerve cells of white flies and German cockroaches that have developed resistance. Bedbugs inbreed more heavily than 18th century British nobles so one specimen per sample is generally representative of that population but to be certain they still tested them all. They were all fixed for that mutation.
This is an impressive study and I applaud the work but further discovery and then a genetic engineering solution that will be blocked by environmental activists - they block vitamin-fortified rice and the CRISPR that can cure Sickle Cell disease using their eternal "needs more study" posturing - makes less sense than the Trump administration simply asking for a reconsideration of DDT.
The evidence against DDT is as suspect as the link between the MMR and vaccines. Yet DDT is still reflexively declared harmful by people who oppose genetic engineering of seeds (unless it uses Mutagenesis, that gets certified organic™) nuclear energy, and cell phones towers yet think acupuncture and supplements increase lifespan. The only environmental group that does not still unscientifically oppose DDT is Sierra Club, and they were co-founded by a eugenicist so you know the science is clear if they endorse something that helps poor people of color in developing countries.
The demographic that opposes science only even began to embrace vaccines after decades claiming they cause autism when a Republican president criticized it after losing the 2020 election. Even though he was the one who fast-tracked development of the vaccines. Deniers haven't become pro-science, they sway with the political winds just like 42% of those on the other side do.
If government wants to rethink useful lifesaving interventions, DDT would be an easier place to start, because we have decades more real-world use. It's unfortunately unthinkable to change minds about some science when the American political party that opposed the anti-science left chose to become them.
NOTES:
(1) I.L. Baldwin, professor of agricultural bacteriology at University of Wisconsin and chairman of the Committee on Pest Control and Wildlife Relationships of the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council , reviewed Carson's book in Science and stated it was more like a "prosecuting attorney's impassioned plea for action against" chemicals despite their benefits than science.
(2) Ruckelshaus did as he was told as long as it was something he knew nothing about. He was named Deputy Attorney General in 1973 but then resigned rather than fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was investigating the Watergate Hotel burglary and potential involvement of...the same Nixon whose command he had obeyed three years earlier.
(3) "We must take a position based on the science and the data," said Dr Arata Kochi, Director of WHO’s Global Malaria Programme. “One of the best tools we have against malaria is indoor residual house spraying. Of the dozen insecticides WHO has approved as safe for house spraying, the most effective is DDT.”
They shouldn't have listened to environmentalists in the 1980s any more than Sri Lanka should have a few years ago, which almost caused an overthrow of their government.
(4) Great products are tarnished by aggressive political propaganda. DDT was hailed as a miracle product by the U.N. and Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering DDT's insecticide properties, but after Carson claimed birds and bees were keeling over, its reputation was ruined. The same fate has befallen Ivermectin, a Nobel-Prize-winning parasite treatment also hailed as a miracle product by the U.N., because political propaganda efforts against it began when a Republican touted peer-reviewed epidemiology papers claiming it might be a therapy for COVID-19.
The same epidemiology methods that claim endocrine disrupting chemicals are killing us and that weedkillers cause cancer. Where the left overwhelmingly sides against science and for correlation.
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