Word: dieldrin
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Meanwhile, the insecticide barrage had been augmented by dieldrin, parathion, heptachlor, malathion and other fearful compounds many times stronger than DDT, all of which the government planned to distribute through the Department of Agriculture for public use and commercial manufacture. "The more I learned about the use of pesticides, the more appalled I became," Carson recalled. "I realized that here was the material for a book. What I discovered was that everything which meant most to me as a naturalist was being threatened, and that nothing I could do would be more important...
PCBs have been repeatedly discovered in mothers' milk, as well as in the pasteurized milk and dairy products you buy packaged in the supermarket. Pesticides, too, have been found on your grocery shelves. In 1974, for instance, the Food and Drug Administration found the carcinogenic pesticide dieldrin in 85 per cent of all dairy products sampled...
Jones began checking into their diet, mainly laboratory mice provided by a scientific supply house. The mice too turned out to be contaminated by dieldrin, although there was nothing in their standard pellets of food that could account for the poison's presence. Jones, however, did find that there was a potentially damaging concentration of dieldrin in the sawdust used as bedding in the rodents' cages. With all the fervor of a Baker Street Irregular, he then traced the suspect sawdust to a maker of wooden window frames. There, Jones found, the manufacturer had, quite legally, sprayed...
After performing post-mortems on the carcasses (which had carefully been preserved for further study), Jones and his colleagues learned that 20 of the birds had excessively high concentrations of dieldrin, a chemical kin of DDT, in their livers and brains. But use of the lethal insecticide is sharply restricted in Britain, as it is in the U.S. and other countries. So how did the owls pick up the poison...
...files showing that the pesticide 2,4-D caused "increased tumor formation" in rats; as recently as April 1976 it approved what many experts believe to be unacceptably high tolerance levels of the chemical in food products. The agency was also blasted for dragging its feet on aldrin, dieldrin and heptachlor. An EPA review revealed as early as 1971 that there were serious deficiencies in the data that had been previously used to register the pesticides; new tests showed that the substances apparently caused tumors to form in laboratory animals. It was not until 1975, however, that aldrin and dieldrin...