Word: aldrin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Environmental Protection Agency forbade the use of the pesticides aldrin and dieldrin on corn and citrus crops. Because such spraying accounts for 90% of the chemicals' usage, EPA'S action is a virtual ban. Shell Chemical Co., the sole U.S. producer, is appealing the decision in federal court. The pesticides now protect the crops from cutworms and other insects. But they are so long-lasting that they get into animal feed, water supplies, and thus into human food as well. What the pesticides do to people is still unknown. But they have been found to trigger cancers...
Nearly 10% of the U.S. corn crop is treated with aldrin, a highly effective pesticide. Both the manufacturer, Shell Chemical, and the Department of Agriculture consider the substance essential to control insect damage in the Midwest corn belt. Recently, after a year of still-unfinished hearings, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it plans to order a halt in the production of aldrin and a related Shell pesticide, dieldrin. Reason: the chemicals present "extremely high cancer risk...
After it is applied, aldrin gradually breaks down into dieldrin, a durable chlorinated hydrocarbon; the pesticide is long-lasting and requires only one application per year. That makes it more popular with farmers than shorter-lived, less potent pesticides that must be used more often and only at specific stages of the corn plants' growth. Dieldrin's impressive durability, says the EPA, is the very quality that makes it an increasingly serious threat...
With its 1975 production of aldrin scheduled to begin on Sept. 1, Shell has been granted a hearing on the ban order and hopes for a quick final decision by the EPA. But at week's end, it seemed all but certain that next year corn growers will no longer have aldrin/dieldrin to kill their bugs...
Then there is Michael Collins, the man most likely to be forgotten as the pilot of the Apollo 11 mother ship that circled the moon while fellow astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to take an extraterrestrial walk. Now a brigadier general (U.S. Air Force, ret.), Collins is director of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, which will soon house flying relics from the earliest balloons through Skylab...