Word: ddt
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Many scientists, especially those who study living wild creatures, are leary of DDT. It does too good a job, upsets the balance of nature. By killing innocuous insects, it starves insectivorous birds. By killing bees and other pollinators, it keeps plants from producing seeds. If it gets into water, it may kill fish...
Last year, a group of nature-loving scientists at New York's American Museum of Natural History decided to find out how DDT could be used against harmful insects without hurting innocent wildlife. As a test area they chose five square miles of Bear Mountain Park, a popular resort infested with pestiferous, germ-spreading flies...
...encouragement worked well. Potato production in 1943 reached an all-time high of 464,999,000 bushels, there was plenty for all. But last week the Government was reaping a bumper crop of wastage from the seed it had so generously sown. Perfect weather and DDT combined with the Government incentive to boost this year's crop to a near-record...
Health authorities, faced with demands to "DO something," have outdone previous efforts to exorcise the disease. Latest efforts: dusting cities with DDT from planes, draining of swamps and pools, street cleanups...
...yellow fever and the shotgun quarantine of a century ago, when people were driven by blind fear, ignorance and superstition." Added Winslow: "There is no reason to believe that improved methods of sewage treatment and disposal, more rigid standards for the purification of water supplies, or the dusting of DDT over a city . . . will have any measurable effect on the incidence of infantile paralysis...