Word: ddt
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...avoid using DDT and other pesticides, more and more U.S. communities are turning to nature for help. The latest to do so are Claremont, Calif., and Albuquerque, N. Mex., whose residents have imported thousands of ladybugs to control millions of sap-sucking aphids. Claremonters report that ladybugs are cheaper than chemical sprays: $85 for 375,000 ladybugs v. $180 for a chemical spray used in Claremont last year. Moreover, a single ladybug devours as many as 40 or 50 aphids a day. Ladybugs are also easy to handle. The gardener should first cool them in his refrigerator to make them...
...DDT has been outlawed in Canada, Cyprus, Sweden, Hungary and Norway. Last week Japan followed suit. The Japanese ban includes not only DDT, which Japanese farmers use mainly on fruit trees, but also BHC, a pesticide that is widely credited with making Japan a self-sufficient rice producer. "We're still in the dark on what residual BHC and DDT will do to the human system," says Dr. Hideo Fukuda of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. "But we've decided that it is wise to ban them sooner rather than later...
...Last month William Ruckelshaus, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced that five economic poisons are not "imminent" hazards to humans, and therefore may be used pending further studies. The poisons are the insecticides DDT, aldrin, dieldrin and Mirex, plus 2, 4, 5-T, once widely used as a defoliant by U.S. forces in Viet...
...nine years since Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring first documented DDT's disastrous effects on animal life, environmentalists have carried on a determined campaign against the potent pesticide. The U.S. Government has responded to their efforts by restricting the use of DDT. Several states have gone even further, banning the chemical completely. But DDT still has its defenders. The World Health Organization, admittedly more concerned with public health than conservation, has warned that a ban on DDT spraying could doom worldwide malaria-eradication efforts, which in the past 25 years have freed more than 1 billion people...
...sounding the alarm, which should give pause to even the most ardent environmentalists, WHO pointed to the experience of Ceylon, located off the southern tip of India in a tropical climate ideal for the breeding of the malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquito. There, a concentrated campaign of DDT spraying cut the incidence of malaria from 2.8 million cases in 1946 to only 110 cases in 1961. But after Ceylonese authorities, considering the battle won, dropped the spraying program, the disease returned with a vengeance. During 1968 and 1969, it afflicted 2.5 million people...