Word: ddt
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UNRRA had only a tiny medical staff: about 600 doctors, 600 nurses, 60 sanitary engineers, 40 dentists. But it had plenty of miracle workers like DDT and penicillin. To trouble spots, UNRRA shipped: 7.5 million pounds of DDT powder, 809,550 million units of penicillin, one million pounds of sulfa drugs, six million cc of diphtheria toxoid, 5,167 million units of antitoxin. By 1946's end, UNRRA reported, typhoid, which had caused Europe's most serious postwar epidemic, was under control, diphtheria had been greatly reduced, typhus was rare, smallpox and plague had virtually been wiped...
...Poland, one of the hardest hit by disease, there were severe typhoid and typhus outbreaks, but by improving sanitation and shipping in enough DDT to delouse every inhabitant, UNRRA stopped both. In 1946, Poland had only 3,500 typhus cases...
...China, UNRRA doctors and sanitary engineers helped to contain cholera, bubonic plague, kala azar (black fever, borne by sand flies, which were attacked with DDT...
...Greece, where malaria has been endemic for centuries, a DDT campaign against mosquitoes (including the spraying of 300,000 houses and stables) gave protection to 80% of the population...
...knows how phloem necrosis spreads. Dutch elm disease is better understood; it is a fungus carried from elm to elm by small bark beetles. They slip through the meshes of the strictest quarantine. Spraying will kill them, and the Department is experimenting with DDT and its rival, benzene hexachloride ("Gammexane" in Britain; TIME, June 24). But it is not too hopeful. There are too many elms to spray...