Beyond Silent Spring: An Alternate History of DDT | Hacker News Reader

Beyond Silent Spring: An Alternate History of DDT

chemheritage.org

60 pointsHooke61 comments

The problem with DDT isn't that it hurt higher animals directly. The problem was that it is a very stable molecule that doesn't decay well over time. It built up in the food chain and killed birds which eat fish and birds which eat other birds.

There are plenty of fine pesticides now which work well on mosquitoes. Since the newer pesticides decay, they don't build up in the food chain. Talk of bringing back DDT is silly.

Reading through the comments here, you seem to have nailed the point where people are talking past each other:

"DDT isn't terribly harmful and is useful" vs "DDT bio-accumulates much more than other pesticides"

As with most such debates, there are points on both sides, but that doesn't mean the arguments have equivalent weight. As someone with no real knowledge on the topic, I'm inclined to trust the latter case that I've heard all my life but keep an open mind that what I've been told could be wrong.

If you (that is, someone thinking that way and not you, above poster) are trying to sway me (as a proxy for a lot of people with similar thinking) to the "DDT should be brought back" side, you need to address the issue that is convincing me. Saying that people have eaten large doses of DDT or that DDT is super-useful for fighting malaria or parasites in, say, Africa, can be true without contradicting that it accumulates in environment and causes harm to some wide groups of animal life.

Even the linked article (which I'll admit to only skimming) doesn't say the charges against DDT were WRONG, just incomplete, particularly in what survives into the modern thoughts on the matter.

These are claims from "Silent Spring" but many sources argue that most of it was entirely made up by Carlson[1], with no scientific basis.

Personally I think those are overly broad claims and demand strong studies and proofs.

  [1]: http://scienceheroes.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=309&Itemid=263

Your linked article does not say anything about the scientific basis of Carlson's claims.

I will say Carlson's claims were overdone. The book title, "Silent Spring", implies the extinction of all songbirds, and most songbirds were not affected by DDT.

But here's the facts: all birds which eat fish or other birds had a massive dieback which reversed in the 1970s. For example, consider Bald Eagles and Golden Eagles. The former eats fish and died off; the latter eats mammals and did much better. It wasn't just one species: every fish-eating bird died off: cormorants, pelicans, Bald Eagles, egrets. If DDT does not explain this die-off and recovery, what do you propose to explain this preferential near-extinction?

The "DDT is Innocent" train of thought is, in my view, wishful thinking on the part of some who want environmentalists to always be wrong. They were right on this one.

The linked article is very unbiased, but it links to positions from both camps.

> Studies published in Poultry Science found chicken eggs almost completely unaffected by high dosages of DDT.

> In 1998, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds researcher Rhys Green published a study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B which found that eggshell thinning of some bird species had begun 50 years before the introduction of DDT.

Despite some studies linking a byproduct (DDE) to moderate egg thinning in sensitive raptors, the ban was an overreaction.

There is a lot of FUD surrounding DDT, and it costs lives. Spraying DDT on the internal walls in my country would save hundreds of lives.

You have not provided an alternate explanation for the population crash and subsequent recovery of piscivore birds. I note that DDT perfectly explains it.

The study by Rhys Green is entirely misrepresented. He studied four species of thrush. Thrush don't eat fish, nor do they eat other birds. That literally supports what I said: DDT affected specific species of birds based on whether or not they consumed environmentally-concentrated sources of DDT.

Nor have you explained why DDT alone, rather than a less-stable alternative, must be used.

I'm sorry, but you have bought into FUD. We all do that sometimes. Today was your turn. I'm not looking forward to my next turn.

DDT was never banned for use in fighting malaria and other diseases. Its use declined because mosquitoes develop resistance to it, and more efficient methods became available.

Of course, some interest groups like to present a different picture, as usual with environmental issues.

Yes, it was not banned for malaria fighting in a few countries, but it was banned for all applications in most of the world including my country, Brazil.

Now with the recent Zika virus outbreak many kids were born with microcephaly (crippled brains half the normal size), many people died or were crippled by Guillain–Barré syndrome.

I'm not saying DDT is a safe chemical, just arguing that its ban is exaggerated.

DDT probably wouldn't help all that much: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2016/02/22/no-ddt-wont-sav...

I don't know all the details, but between heightened public awareness, state-level regulations, and the federal Clean Water Act, overall pollution levels in American freshwater was improving markedly.

It seems plausible to me that we're talking about poisons of all sorts being cleaned from the environment, not just DDT.

So, the Wikipedia article on DDT has like 6 different citations/links on DDT and egg shell thinning in birds of prey:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethan...

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/232

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1474-919X.2003....

Many are behind a paywall but here are some with abstracts we can read:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0742841397...

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23273747.2016.11...

Also, there may well be a valid debate about when or when not to use DDT, but the link you cite does not inspire confidence.

http://junkscience.com/1999/07/100-things-you-should-know-ab...

Are these enough citations to bury yours with?

I'm not saying DDT is harmless. But please, look at the baby from my country on the end of the article: I would ratter have a few hundred less raptors than a few thousand humans crippled for life or dead.

Scardine, the book Silent Spring was published in 1962. That is 55 years ago. Since then there have been thousands of studies about the damage done by DDT. Start here:

https://www.google.com/search?q=damage+by+ddt&oq=damage+by+d...

You can easily track down a few dozen studies that will inform you about the damage.

There is a reason why nearly all the governments of the developed nations have moved to block or limit the use of DDT.

Well, sure, if your query is limited to bad effects of anything, you'll get disproportionately negative results.

Try this, for that matter:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=climate+change+due+to+ddt

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=damage+to+bagels+due+to+ddt

Yea, but we also have plenty of pesticides that aren't tainted. Why not use them?

My understanding is that they're all some combination of more dangerous to humans, less effective, and more expensive. You actually end up spraying more pesticide, or denying the chemical to poor people who want to dust it inside their houses.

Is that incorrect?

I believe you made a fair portrait of the current situation.

  plenty of pesticides that aren't tainted

... as far as we know... now.

Sometimes, adverse effects of pesticides aren't known (widely enough, anyway) until decades later. Dursban comes to mind and still pops up in new papers.

Your statement may be true but doesn't refute the post you were replying to. Rather it is orthogonal.

In addition, if the "taint" is incorrect then DDT could be a wonder.

(Actually I am not DDT fan, but I do know how to make an argument)

I mean, I wasn't trying to refute the parent comment; it is true that we should know more about DDT.

That's less an argument and more a "what if?" assertion.

I note its molecular structure looks like MC Hammer

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/11/DD...

DDT: you (shouldn't) touch this

This is a beautiful finding, thank you for this.

I don't know why this isn't already a meme but it should be.

> "Any poison strong enough to kill or damage honey bees is surely strong enough to affect people."

This doesn't seem reasonable. For one thing, honey bees are smaller and weaker than people, and a poison that affected both uniformly should be more damaging to the weaker species. For another, honey bees are very different from humans, and there may be poisons that attack the bees without attacking any part of humans.

I agree and understand that ecological damage is bad, and that many real poisons do too much incidental damage to people to be considered "safe", but it seems foolish to base a persuasive argument like this on such faulty reasoning.

I'm not a biologist, but DDT is very effective against larvae (including fish seed), with I think is a good reason to place strong controls on its use (because the DDT sprayed over crops will end up in the rivers).

According to [an article in Gismodo][1], In 1971 two people in North Hollywood started eating DDT pills every day. That's right, they willingly swallowed 10mg of poison every single day for three months. In front of witnesses.

From the Associated Press:

> Robert Loibl and his wife, Louise, hold 10-milligram capsules of DDT which they took in front of witnesses for 93 days at lunch time, June 10, 1971. Loibl said their total dosage was more than the average person consumes in 83 years. He said his wife's dandruff disappeared, their appetites perked up and they feel better. Loibl said they just wanted to call attention to the public that DDT was safe.

  [1]: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/12/these-people-took-ddt-pills-in-the-1970s-to-prove-it-was-safe/#R7vW5olFepe1Toz5.99

This reminds me of CA Conservation Corps director B.T. Collins[0], who drank malathion to reassure those being exposed to spraying in 1981.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malathion#General

The theobromine in chocolate is highly toxic to dogs, but is what makes humans feel good after eating it.

It's an argument which is so demonstrably wrong that it beggars belief he would ever have thought he could get away with it.

She wasn't wrong. If the honey bees die, so do many of our crops which no longer get pollinated.

Except because of her we replaced DDT with something far more harmful to bees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid#Bees

Hindsight.

Would you expect to find a chimpanzee poison that doesn't hurt people? What about a rat poison that doesn't hurt people? An insect poison? A fungus poison? A bacteria poison?

Biological machinery is remarkably well-conserved, to the point where we can use fish, worms, etc. as reasonable approximations of human biology. Finding fungus poisons that don't have terrible side effects is in practice very difficult, and even antibiotics that don't hurt people are pretty tricky. So it's not terribly faulty reasoning.

> What about a rat poison that doesn't hurt people?

You mean Coumadin (Warfarin), the popular blood thinner? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warfarin

It is literally Rat Poison.

Yes, the blood thinner that needs tight monitoring and dietary restrictions to safely take, and causes >30,000 life threatening or fatal incidents every year in the US.

In fairness, I think if a man ingested the same proportion a rat ingests, he'd be poisoned too.

Warfarin is also people poison if you take enough. An appropriate clinical dose is a few milligrams.

Well, anything is people poison if you take enough. Forced consumption of sufficient water can kill someone.

Toxicity isn't really yes/no, it's always a matter of dosage.

> Well, anything is people poison if you take enough.

Yes, but that's not interesting or really relevant. As someone else pointed out, Warfarin is people poison if you take the same amount that's normally used to poison rats.

What about a rat poison that doesn't hurt people? An insect poison? A fungus poison? A bacteria poison?

Permethrin and cypermethrin come to mind. Highly toxic to arthropods but much less so to mammals.

The article is a strange one, it's not really about DDT, but uses DDT to look at how we tell stories to shape our understanding of the past. From the article:

"But the fears didn’t fade away. In the spring of 1949 headlines across the country carried the news that DDT had found its way into the nation’s dairy supply and that the “slow, insidious poison” was building up in human bodies. The following year, and for the rest of the 1950s, 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). Pesticide-eschewing farmers, such as Louis Bromfield, testified they simply could not meet the demand for spray-free crops from Heinz, Campbell’s, A&P, and other companies—all of which were themselves trying to meet the demands of consumers worried about pesticides generally, and specifically the ubiquitous and well-publicized DDT.

By the time Rachel Carson detailed DDT’s harm to falcons, salmon, eagles, and other forms of wildlife in Silent Spring, a good number of Americans had been demanding more information about the insecticide’s ill effects for the better part of two decades. And yet to this day that’s not how we talk about DDT’s past. 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. It’s a narrative that gave Americans a hero for the latter part of the 20th century, a female scientist and writer smart enough and brave enough to take on the establishment and win. It’s a story about the power of social movements to remake society for the better. And it’s a story of a nation reformed, able to set aside hubris for reason."

It’s a narrative that gave Americans a hero for the latter part of the 20th century, a female scientist and writer smart enough and brave enough to take on the establishment and win. It’s a story about the power of social movements to remake society for the better.

That was an enlightening sentence. I had been asking myself for years just why DDT would be such a touchstone for the conservative/libertarian faction, even though it's so well known that the compound bioaccumulates and becomes concentrated in fatty tissue as it is moved through the food chain. It's not the action of the compound, it's the fear of citizen action!

You have to remember that these big moneied interests are 100% self interested and are often not accountable to anyone, even corporate boards.

Dead birds don't need sanctuaries!

The left wing people do it too. There are plenty of phoney environmental marches to stop <X> that are really funded by real estate people or others who stand to lose something.

DDT used to be used in construction, to prevent bedbugs. Sprayed inside walls before the wallboard went on, it killed bedbugs and other insects for decades. Modern insecticides are biodegradable and won't work long-term like that.

It's agricultural use that was the problem. That used far larger quantities and put DDT into agricultural runoff.

Imidclopirid is currently used to control bed bugs and also sprayed on animal bedding to kill lice and other insect parasites. While it has other problems (honeybees) it doesn't bioaccumulate like DDT does. Why would we ever want to go back to DDT, knowing what we know now.

My husband remembers seeing puddles with dead birds around if after spraying DDT in nearby fields. His father died from a serious lung disease, and his family attributes it to the chemicals he was exposed to while farming. My husband remembers him mixing up the chemicals with his bare arm immersed completely in it.

> My husband remembers him mixing up the chemicals with his bare arm immersed completely in it.

I think one of the issues with DDT was that it was perceived as entirely safe. People dumped it on themselves during WWII as an anti-flea treatment.

Other insecticides are far more acutely toxic, meaning that mixing the chemicals with your bare arm is going to kill you. This means that people are going to be more careful in applying it rather than just casting it everywhere.

Kids used to chase DDT trucks and play in the fog they sprayed out. While we may talk these days about how people are too paranoid over "chemicals," before films like Silent Spring people were far too confident that they were safe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2NmuQW8cjE

> His father died from a serious lung disease, and his family attributes it to the chemicals he was exposed to while farming.

Was he a smoker? If so, I'm sure that couldn't have been the cause!

Silent Spring has caused the unnecessary deaths of millions due to fear and banning of DDT.

https://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/15583-d...

DDT may be unfairly or overly demonized, and could be used carefully in certain limited situations where the benefit is greater than the risk.

But a careless attitude like sticking your bare arm in vats of industrial chemicals (or drenching the inside of a house with kerosene and DDT, as the article describes) should not be encouraged. That sort of exposure will cause damage from even relatively safe chemicals.

Unfortunately, people are bad at moderation. A binary choice between "perfectly safe" or "silent spring" seems to be the only public policy which works.

I doubt that's true. Insects evolve around pesticides relatively rapidly, and in the places DDT is still used it's not nearly as effective as it was when it was introduced.

I've heard people say that banning DDT caused more human death than all of our wars throughout history combined.

Hmm, a nagging concern about DDT that doesn't result in changed behavior sure reminds me of privacy and the internet.

Only crisis defeats convenience.

*Alternative

The 1962 book "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson was instrumental at affecting public opinion against [DDT][1] and other pesticides culminating on [banning DDT all over the world][2]. While Carlson has many detractors, ecology militants would label them as being mercenaries at service of industrial interests.

From "[Bring Back DDT, and Science With It!][3]" by Marjorie Mazel Hecht:

> The campaign to ban [DDT][6] got its start with the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962. Carson’s popular book was a fraud. She played on people’s emotions, and to do so, she selected and falsified data from scientific studies, as entomologist Dr. J. Gordon Edwards has documented in his analysis of the original scientific studies that Carson cited.

From "[DDT: A Case Study in Scientific Fraud][5]" by Dr. J. Gordon Edwards:

> The chemical compound that has saved more human lives than any other in history, [DDT][6], was banned by order of one man, the head of the U.S. [Environmental Protection Agency][7] (EPA). Public pressure was generated by one popular book and sustained by faulty or fraudulent research. Widely believed claims of carcinogenicity, toxicity to birds, anti-androgenic properties, and prolonged environmental persistence are false or grossly exaggerated. The worldwide effect of the U.S. ban has been millions of preventable deaths..

All my life I was told [DDT][6] (and pesticides in general) accumulates on the body across the whole food chain with severe consequences to the environment.

But is [DDT][6] really significantly less harmful than the current [EPA][8] official position?

From [TOXICOLOGICAL PROFILE FOR DDT, DDE, and DDD][9]. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES - Public Health Service - Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry

> Numerous studies have been conducted on the effects of DDT and related compounds in a variety of animal species, but the human data are somewhat limited. Most of the information on health effects in humans comes from studies of workers in DDT-manufacturing plants or spray applicators who had occupational exposure to DDT over an extended period and also from some controlled exposure studies with volunteers. Epidemiological studies of the general population are also available. Because of limitations inherent to all epidemiological studies, disease causality cannot be determined from them; however, epidemiological studies have been conducted that allow the evaluation of the potential role of DDT and related compounds in specific health outcomes.

My conclusion? There's no doubt that DDT has many negative health effects but I'm not sure the ban is justified and I would like to see more studies on this substance - but as often is the case with recreational drugs, nobody wants to pay the political price for funding studies about "devilish" chemicals.

For example, could DDT prevent the hundreds of microcephaly cases in Brazilian babies attributed to the recent Zika virus outbreak?

  [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT
  [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Restrictions_on_usage
  [3]: http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/summ02/DDT.html#The%20Silent%20Spring%20Fraud
  [4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT
  [5]: http://www.jpands.org/vol9no3/edwards.pdf
  [6]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT
  [7]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Environmental_Protection_Agency
  [8]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Environmental_Protection_Agency
  [9]: http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp35.pdf

> For example, could DDT prevent the hundreds of microcephaly cases in Brazilian babies attributed to the recent Zika virus outbreak?

Maybe, but there is no evidence that it would work better than a more targeted approach. DDT kills a lot of different insects, both the good and the bad. It's like using a sledgehammer when what you really want is a pair of tweezers.

Seems like it worked for the [USA and Europe][1]:

> Prior to 1950, malaria was common in the southern US, infecting 15,000 people a year and killing about the same number as scarlet fever.

> Beginning in 1947, 4.6 million houses were sprayed in the United States, completely eradicating malaria from the country. Similar sprayings eradicated malaria from Europe.

> The Center for Disease Control (CDC) began as an organization to eradicate malaria. When malaria was gone, it sought other ways to benefit America. That’s why it’s located in Atlanta, GA, in the southern US.

  [1]: http://scienceheroes.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=309&Itemid=263

These points are unsourced "DDT Trivia" in the position paper (which is being generous) that you cite.

There is no question that DDT helped with eradicating malaria from the US, but to give it all the credit to DDT seems a little generous to me. Malaria was also brought under control in Panama years before DDT was even known to be a pesticide. Cholorquin and cultural changes were also important.

https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/

Neat article on eradication of the A. aegypti mosquito in most of South America. http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/while-brazil-was-eradic...

The awesome effect that DDT had that most other pesticides didn't have is the excito-repellent effect, recent study on that: https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/14...

Haha, just in the wake of the Monsanto email scandal we get "legalize DDT" thinkpieces. Complete with intellectual-yet-stupid contrarian ycombinator comments about how awesome mass spraying non-biodegradable poisons is.

Also: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160624150813.h...

>In light of this evidence, NECSI says the cause of microcephaly in Brazil should be reconsidered. One possibility that has been raised is the pesticide pyriproxyfen, which is applied to drinking water in some parts of Brazil to kill the larvae of the mosquitos that transmit Zika. Pyriproxyfen is an analogue for insect juvenile hormone which is cross reactive with retinoic acid, which is known to cause microcephaly. A physicians group in Brazil and Argentina, the Swedish Toxicology Sciences Research Center, and NECSI have called for further studies of the potential link between pyriproxyfen and microcephaly.

Totally thought this was a wrestling article at first glance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT_(professional_wrestling)

Oh, my late 90s childhood, how I miss the.

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