Word: ddt
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Censorship was lifted last week from one of the great scientific discoveries of World War II. It is an insecticide called DDT. DDT stopped a typhus epidemic in Naples. It promises to wipe out the mosquito and malaria, to liquidate the household fly, cockroach and bedbug, to control some of the most damaging insects that prey on the world's crops. Lieut. Colonel A. L. Ahnfeldt, of the U.S. Surgeon General's office, exclaimed last week: "DDT will be to preventive medicine what Lister's discovery of antiseptics was to surgery...
...DDT as a delousing agent against typhus has been an open secret for several months. But last week for the first time its manufacturers and Army, Agriculture and WPB officials joined in announcing some of its other amazing properties...
...sprayed with DDT remains deadly to bedbugs for 300 days...
...great are DDT's potentialities that no fewer than seven U.S. laboratories and hundreds of biochemists are concentrated on it. Production has multiplied 350-fold in the last year; four manufacturers are now turning out about 350,000 pounds a month-all for the Army...
Beetle Blaster. Last week the developers of DDT, Geigy Co., Inc., an old dye firm with branches in Switzerland and New York, told reporters in Manhattan how the chemical was discovered. Like penicillin, DDT was known long before its usefulness was appreciated. A complicated chemical (full name: dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane), whose chief ingredients are chlorine, alcohol and sulfuric acid, DDT was first synthesized in 1874 by a German student named Othmar Zeidler. He had no idea of its possibilities as an insecticide, dismissed his discovery in six lines in a German chemical journal...