Word: ddt
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Department of Agriculture had a mournful announcement to make: DDT, the wonderful insecticide that debugged World War II, is losing its effect against mosquitoes...
...first bad news had come from the Air Force, which for four years has been DDTing the marshes near Cocoa, Fla. with signal success. But this year, massed mosquito formations roared out of the swamps once again to puncture young & old. The Air Force fought back with more DDT, but it could not regain command of the air. The Department of Agriculture discovered that the Air Force defeat was due to a new, tough breed of mosquitoes...
...salt-marsh species so thoroughly adapted themselves to life with DDT that it took ten times the regular dose to kill their wiggler offspring. The discovery justified an uneasy suspicion held by entomologists: when the weaker members of the tribe are killed off, the survivors, mating together, gradually produce a strain that can ignore DDT...
...fears that other mosquito species, including those that carry malaria and yellow fever, may adapt themselves too, as house flies in some places already have. But the department is not discouraged. Other powerful insecticides (e.g., the gamma isomer of benzene hexachloride) can probably take over the job of defeated DDT - at least for a while...
...DDT has now become the most powerful of the antimalarial police. New drugs are being perfected to replace quinine and wartime atabrine. The ideal drug, says Dr. Warshaw, must cure (not merely suppress) all forms of malaria. It must be easy to make and take, and so cheap that hundreds of millions of men, women & children all over the world...