Word: ddt
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Pesticides such as DDT, parathion, aldrin and dieldrin are both ally and enemy to man. The chemicals annihilate predators: the aphids that plague rose fanciers, disease-bearing mosquitoes, beetles that spread Dutch elm disease, in sects that devour crops. As a farmer's helper, pesticides increase crop yields, hence profits. But poison is blind. Loosed annually by the ton from planes, boats, trucks, tractors and handy spray cans, it cannot isolate its target. Since Rachel Carson exposed the pesticides' threat seven years ago, in Silent Spring, evidence of the chemicals' pernicious effects on birds, plants, fish, animals...
Arizona has outlawed DDT for one year to determine just how harmful it is. Similar legislation is pending in Pennsylvania and Michigan, while the Illinois house of representatives has passed two pesticide-control bills without a single dissenting vote. The Wisconsin department of natural resources is in the midst of pesticide hearings. Among other things, DDT, with its long-lived potency, is blamed for causing birds to produce eggs with thin shells, thereby contributing to the disappearance of the bald eagle, osprey and peregrine falcon...
...Food and Drug Administration last month seized 28,150 pounds of Lake Michigan coho salmon infected by pesticide residue. But no one knows how much of the fish plucked from U.S. lakes daily by commercial and sport fishermen is contaminated. A classic example is Clear Lake, Calif., where DDT (at the minuscule proportion of two one-hundredths of a part per million parts of water) was used to kill off a troublesome, lake-hatching insect. As a result, plankton accumulated DDT residues at five parts per million; fatty tissue of fish feeding on lake-bottom life was found to contain...
...strike. Face swollen and complaining of dizziness and shortness of breath, a woman told the general counsel of the United Farm Workers, Jerome Cohen, that she had been drenched by wind-blown pesticides while working in a field. Other pickers have reported becoming sick after exposure to parathion and DDT. Cohen asked the Kern County agricultural commissioner for permission to see permits for pesticide spraying, which are required by California law. But before he could look at the records, three spraying companies obtained a court order prohibiting scrutiny of the papers...
...Czech-mating technique works on other insect species, it may provide a final answer to man's bug problems. Unlike the spraying of DDT and other chemical pesticides, the hormone technique affects only the treated species of insect and does not contaminate plant and animal life. And insects cannot develop immunity against it, for if they did, they would become immune to the hormone that is essential to part of their life cycle. The new technique is also superior to the release of radiation-sterilized male insects, which often fail to compete with their unradiated brothers in mating with...