Letter: Bring back DDT to fight insect-borne diseases
“During the war in Europe in 1944, we slept every night while being feasted upon by bedbugs and fleas. We had heard about ‘cooties’ (body lice) causing typhus, which killed more than 3 million people in Europe during World War 1.
“One day, I was ordered to dust every soldier in our company with an insecticidal powder that had just arrived. For two weeks I dusted the insecticide on soldiers and civilians, breathing the fog of white dust for several hours each day. The body lice were killed, and the DDT persisted long enough to kill young lice when they emerged from eggs. No humans have been harmed by DDT.”
Those are the words of Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, who led the opposition to banning DDT in the wake of Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring.
DDT was blamed for the thinning of egg shells in eagles and other wild birds. Yet captive caged test birds, intentionally deprived of calcium in their feed, produced eggs after scavenging their own bodies for a calcium source.
The U.S. National Academy of Science credited DDT in 1970 for preventing 500 million human deaths because of malaria and other insect-borne diseases in little more than two decades.
Bring back DDT!
Rob Dupuy, Pasco
This story was originally published February 17, 2016 at 2:47 PM with the headline "Letter: Bring back DDT to fight insect-borne diseases."