Word: ddt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...twice caught fire. Masses of dead alewives washed ashore in Lake Michigan, fouling beaches. Tangles of Cladophora, a smelly freshwater seaweed, clogged other beaches. Commercial fisheries, which had long flourished on the lakes, perhaps a bit too aggressively, began closing for lack of good fish and fear of DDT and mercury contamination...
Even contamination from DDT, which some scientists had predicted would take hundreds of years to be washed out of the Great Lakes, is only 10% of what it was ten years ago. Says Wayland Swain, director of the EPA's Large Lakes Research Laboratory in Grosse He, Mich...
...Even in Lake Erie we now expect DDT to disappear completely in a rather short time. In fact, it is now difficult to find it anywhere in the lake except in the sediment...
...shown to cause stillbirth, numbness in limbs and bone deformities, PCBs have been found in over 90 per cent of all Americans. Leaking from unprotected industrial dumps, gushing from factory pipelines and pouring out of the tank trucks of illegal dumpers, PCBs have permeated more places and people than DDT ever reached. The chemical has even been found in fish 11,000 feet down in the Atlantic Ocean...
...public has needed no expertise to read about DDT, thalidomide and cyclamates, nor to learn that the DES that seemed a nifty preventive of miscarriage in the 1950s was being linked to cancer a generation later. The citizen's problem, at bottom, is how to assess the things that so often come forth in the beguiling guise of blessings. What to believe? Whom to trust? This is a recipe for public frustration...