Word: ddt
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Mayor Julio Rodrigues used his meager municipal funds to send two DDT sprayers through the town. The spray made some people vomit, but the crickets "just licked it off and kept on coming," said Schoolteacher Mariestela Barros. Some Altinhos thought the plague was a sign that God was displeased with long hair, miniskirts, rock music and the decrease in churchgoing among Altinho's youth. But Dona Nina Lemos, another of the town's schoolteachers, questioned that notion. She wondered: "If God were going to punish clothing styles, wouldn't he send a plague...
Strategic Momentum. E.D.F. had its scattergun start on Long Island in 1967. In its first case, a fiery lawyer named Victor J. Yannacone Jr. went to court to stop the Suffolk County mosquito control commission from dousing marshlands with DDT. Rather than alleging personal damages, he sued in the name of all the people of the U.S. and "generations yet unborn." Even though the court ducked the issue and declared it a problem for the state legislature, the mosquito commission was sufficiently impressed by expert testimony presented in court to quit using DDT...
Yannacone's (and E.D.F.'s) unofficial motto was: "Sue the bastards." Backed up by an articulate biologist, Charles Wurster, who was his perennial best witness. Yannacone launched fierce and well-documented attacks on DDT in Michigan and Wisconsin; eventually both states banned most uses of the chemical. Later, he haled into court a Hoerner Waldorf paper plant in Montana for polluting the air; the resulting publicity embarrassed the company into installing antipollution devices before the litigation could run its course...
PESTICIDE ABUSE. Instead of advocating a ban on all pesticides, E.D.F. approves limited spraying of some farm poisons, plus full deployment of the pest's natural enemies. E.D.F. scientists do not oppose using DDT abroad in areas where the clear and present danger of malaria overrides all other considerations. But they do oppose it in the U.S., where malaria is not a problem and DDT's secondary effects are well documented. To block DDT, the group brought actions against the Health, Education and Welfare and Agriculture departments. The court passed the complaint to the federal Environmental Protection Agency...
...Menance of PCB Environmentalists were confident that they had ferreted out the nation's major pollutants after they put the finger on substances like DDT, mercury, lead and phosphates. Now an important newcomer has cropped up in the form of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), colorless, odorless, syrupy chemicals that are manufactured in the U.S. under the trade name Aroclor by the Monsanto Co. Until recently, PCBs were used in industry in many ways, for instance as softeners in plastics, paints and rubber, as additives in printing inks and papers. Although they are now used primarily as agents in heat exchangers...