Word: ddt
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When dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) was first offered to the general public in 1945, the U.S. Army and Public Health Service warned that the wonder insecticide had better be used cautiously. No one knew much about DDT's long-range effect on human beings or on the balance of nature...
...warnings have often been repeated in technical journals. But the public, delighted with DDT, kept right on spraying closets, beds, kitchens and household pets. Whole communities were engulfed in artificially created DDT fogs. Gardeners and dairy farmers found it a quick means of destroying insect pests. By 1947, the manufacture of DDT .had boomed into a $30 million industry...
...deserted," said an Israeli captain. "There wasn't even a stray cat here. We didn't consider these Arab villages fit places for our people to live, but we had to have some place to put them." First the government sent workmen to spray Akir with DDT. Cement was poured over the earthen floors; boards or tin roofs replaced Arab thatching. Water pipes were laid between the courtyards...
...Barton Akeley, who had been popular with his students but not with the town ("My beard, my beret. They just can't take idiosyncrasies"). When some of the students picketed in protest, Ashby was outraged. At his convocation, he promised to eliminate "termites" with a squirt of DDT (TIME...
...methods? The plague is spread in a double bacillus play from rats to fleas to man; men usually catch it not from flea bites, but from rubbing flea vomit or feces into the skin. Science tries to kill the rats by new, powerful poisons like "1080," the fleas with DDT (see above), attack the disease itself with modern medicines and vaccines...