Word: ddt
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Mamazan has a tractor. Grain yields have doubled, cucumber yields multiplied by six. DDT saved the latest melon crop. A young American, Theodore Noe, is the organizer of Mamazan's progress. He represents the Near East Foundation, a private organization backed by voluntary contributions. The N.E.F. put up $20,000 to help Mamazan. Impressed by what the $20,000 bought, Iran's government put a whopping $400,000 into the N.E.F.'s work A ten-year-old who had gone to Noe's school said proudly: "I can teach my father how to transplant lettuce...
Becoming more daring, Holmes persuaded the farmers, a few at a time, to use a little fertilizer, grow improved vegetables, kill insects with DDT. Even the sacred cows got some benefits. When Holmes arrived in the district, he found plenty of rinderpest and other cattle diseases. The government already provided veterinary services, but the suspicious farmers hid their cattle rather than allow them to be immunized. Holmes set up village schools that taught the advantages of immunization. Last year not a cow in the district died of rinderpest...
...trouble with DDT is that insects get used to it, develop hardy strains that resist the poison. Another trouble is that DDT kills both injurious insects and their natural enemies. In some cases, long-continued spraying with DDT has caused insect plagues by killing "good" bugs (e.g., insects' parasites) and leaving the bad bugs alive...
Last week Dr. Patrick D. Pielou of the Dominion Parasite Laboratory at Belleville, Ont. told how he hopes to lick this problem. Dr. Pielou breeds friendly bugs called Macrocentrus (which attack the destructive Oriental fruit moth) and exposes each generation of them to DDT not quite strong enough to wipe them out. The survivors, says Dr. Pielou, grow progressively tougher. Eventually, he hopes, they will be able to ignore DDT. Then they will be released in orchards to mop up the fruit moths that have survived DDT...
...Army brought out a new drug, a large white pill which seems to be both a preventive and cure for malaria, and has to be taken only once a week. Halazone tablets [to purify water], which were used in the last war, offer protection against one source of dysentery. DDT is effective against the flies, but so far it has been in critical supply in Korea, and most soldiers have scratched themselves into infections from the maddening bites...