Word: ddt
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...those who would like to use DDT but are afraid of being poisoned by it, the current Mosquito News (published by the American Mosquito Control Association) has a word of reassurance. According to Lieut. Commander William J. Perry and Lieut. Leonard J. Bodenlos of the Medical Corps, U.S. Navy, DDT is practically harmless to humans who get it on their skins or breathe it into their lungs...
...World Health Day last week. No bugles blared to mark the second birthday of the United Nations' World Health Organization. But in Terai, in the far-off foothills of the Himalayas, members of a WHO team journeyed by elephant from village to village, crawled into thatched huts spraying DDT to fight an outbreak of malaria. WHO workers were aboard river boats plying the Rhine from the North Sea to Switzerland, giving boatmen examinations and treatments for venereal diseases which had been, carried from country to country. In Shanghai, a WHO nurse kept up a tuberculosis nursing program that...
...Greeks have a word for it! You speak of the fact that DDT has become ineffective against mosquitoes [TIME, Dec. 5]. Last summer while I was in Crete, a friend of mine said: "Yes, we have flies, and they have been Mithridated." Mithridates was King of Pontus just before the birth of Christ. He was quite unpopular, and made himself immune to poison by taking small and gradually increasing doses [until] he could take without risk something like 26 or 27 poisons...
...salt-marsh species so thoroughly adapted themselves to life with DDT that it took ten times the regular dose to kill their wiggler offspring. The discovery justified an uneasy suspicion held by entomologists: when the weaker members of the tribe are killed off, the survivors, mating together, gradually produce a strain that can ignore DDT...
...fears that other mosquito species, including those that carry malaria and yellow fever, may adapt themselves too, as house flies in some places already have. But the department is not discouraged. Other powerful insecticides (e.g., the gamma isomer of benzene hexachloride) can probably take over the job of defeated DDT - at least for a while...