Elena Conis

History of DDT’s rise and fall and attempted rise—both at the hands of public health advocates who acknowledged its long-term risks and harm to birds but found it the most effective against malarial mosquitoes, and at the hands of anti-regulation types who wanted to use DDT’s history against environmentalists generally, accusing them of sacrificing millions of poor children for a few birds. As it turns out, there probably are some pretty bad tradeoffs—Conis documents that, while the connection to cancer takes a while, the endocrine changes caused by DDT can cause much more risk of illness, including cancer, to exposed people’s children and grandchildren. Indoor spraying might still be justified in high-malaria environments, but it is not a safe product.… (more)

The story of DDT is a rollercoaster ride of scientists, damaged people and the environment, fighting to get rid of this dangerous insecticide, while corporations campaign with every trick in the Big Tobacco book to bring it back. The lies, the fraud, the misinformation and the disinformation will be very familiar to any reader who has been the least bit awake the past five years.

Elena Conis, a historian of medicine, tells the whole frustrating story in How to Sell a Poison. Her book is an easy reading, fast paced collection of less than delightful stories, a biography of an ongoing disaster that needs remembering and examination. If Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was a closeup and exposé of a bad situation, this book tacks on a further 60 years' worth of dishonesty and manipulation in the neverending struggle for profit over people and ecology.

In a nutshell, Big Tobacco heavily funded think tanks, non profits and journalists to make it seem as though the science was wrong, and to dictate that DDT was safe for humans. That it magically only hurt insects, and even then, selectively. That people could spray it on the walls inside their homes to kill mosquitoes. That anyone could eat, yes eat it, like candy, and that it would save millions of lives every year.

Why would they say these things? Simply to demonstrate that authorities could not be trusted to make public health policy, and that tobacco products should not be regulated by institutions that got it all wrong, all the time. Also, tobacco itself comes loaded with DDT. The whole world is paying the price for their efforts.

It is a story of unsung heroes, mostly women, it seems, who suffered the effects, did the research, brought experts together, wrote up the stories and pushed for legislation to outlaw DDT before it did any more damage. They raised awareness, got scientists and labs to undertake studies, and sued at the slightest opportunity. Even when they lost, they felt they won by raising awareness nationally.

For a while, it worked. But the money pump kept up the pressure from the other side, eventually getting DDT off the blacklist of chemical compounds too dangerous to use.

For a few decades through the middle of the last century, the USA was under the rule of the Delaney Clause, which stipulated that if any additive could be shown to cause cancer in lab animals, it must be banned from human consumption. While it sounded great, the truth is anything pumped into rats in truly and profoundly excessive amounts will cause cancer. For example, when the FDA banned the new sugar substitute cyclamates in the early 70s, it cited a study where if raised to human-sized quantities, would require adults to drink 1200 sugar-free drinks a day for ten years to achieve the same effect. In other words, they pump those rats with absurdly high quantities of chemicals. Had they done it with salt or sugar, those would have to have been banned as well. I remember when they banned nitrites in bacon. A similarly absurd amount would be required to achieve the goal of cancer in humans. The reporter on ABC News said that of course this could never happen, because no one could afford it (the country was experiencing huge price increases in meats). It all became that silly. So Delany had to go.

Delany was symptomatic of the general state of ignorance over chemicals and their unintended side effects. The government operated under no standards in the first two thirds of the century. Laws were generally absent. Lawmakers were in the pockets of corporations. Scientists had no consistent process for measuring them or their effects. Anyone could develop a chemical compound and distribute it to the world without testing, licensing or approval. 88,000 of them were released; only about 125 were ever tested. Today, it's more like 125,000 chemical compounds and the planet is staggering under the burden.

So with DDT. It was put out there as a miracle chemical from World War II, capable of killing bad insects like mosquitoes without killing good ones like bees. Of course, no one could explain why, because no testing was done to prove it. So whole fields of crops were dusted with DDT powder from airplanes, including right over the farmworkers picking the strawberries and grapes below. People were sickened, weakened and dying all over the world, while DDT makers increased production dramatically to cover the planet with their miracle. It was cheap to make, cheap to buy, and legendary in its killing powers.

The most forceful lie was that DDT would wipe out malaria, saving millions of lives. Therefore, anything government did to curtail DDT was equivalent to murdering people. It was touted as the way to eradicate polio too. This was all false. Plus, various insects could easily be shown to evolve immunity to DDT. Malaria has not looked back either. If malaria hasn't been wiped out by 80 years of DDT application, it's not going to be - ever.

But what DDT did do was accumulate in body fat, and thrive there. Fish, when tested at all, would show up with huge multiples of the amount of DDT considered safe. So did people. Birds developed neurological conditions causing them to tremble uncontrollably, lose their balance, and die. Their eggs became so frail they would break just from a parent incubating them. Birds of prey, from eagles to falcons, were almost totally wiped out from this one factor alone. They got DDT from eating fish and other birds saturated with DDT.

When science finally caught up to how to investigate things like chemical pesticides, it was discovered that the same bioaccumulation was at work in humans. Younger women accumulated far more of it than older women, who might show no ill effects at all. Breast cancer was a typical (if unproven) result. But the really bad victims, it turned out, were the newborns of the younger women. Starting off in the fetus allowed DDT to do major damage to future generations. "In general their children had more symptoms of allergies, including wheezing and rashes, and more frequent fevers than the children of women with lower levels of DDT," Conis says.

DDT is at bottom, a neurotoxin. And everyone everywhere now has DDT in their bodies. There is no getting away from it on this planet. From Antarctic penguins to American billionaires in their spaceships, DDT is now part of every living being. Big business has seen to that.

Males of every species were not spared either. DDT mimics estrogen. Males could develop minuscule reproductive organs, and sprout female nipples, or malfunctioning organs of both sexes. All through the animal kingdom, males have been incapable of mating, while both sexes have been dropping dead from the effects of DDT. Boys and girls have early onset of puberty from DDT, and women suffer miscarriages and thyroid conditions. And sadly, endocrine disruptors were so new at the time, it was far too easy not just to deny DDT as their cause, but to deny they existed at all.

There is an American Conservative meme that played a major role in the rise and resurrection of DDT. I call it Are you okay now. It is extreme short-term thinking that dictates no action be taken if everything seems fine at the moment. And as most people did not die immediately from the effects of DDT, therefore it was perfectly safe to use in homes, in and on people, and basically everywhere over the Earth. We saw this again when the COVID pandemic began. The US president himself claimed there were only 50 people who had it, so there was no point in mobilizing anyone or anything to deal with it. No action was taken until the bodies began piling up. If you didn't have COVID, there was nothing to worry about.

But there was plenty of backlash over DDT. Who caught the the direct fire of it was Rachel Carson, who had died decades earlier. She was vilified in the media and in Congress, called a paranoid liar and a mass murderer who killed more people than Hitler. All because she (correctly) predicted the effects of DDT. And wasn't around to defend herself.

The DDT ban was labeled ecoimperialism. Big Tobacco hired all the "professional science deniers" it could find, a tactic very much in evidence today over climate change. It helped Roger Bate create a global science-denying enterprise. This British curmudgeon had been denying the value of science for decades, and built an empire of global misinformation thanks to tobacco dollars. Philip Morris alone paid him ten thousand pounds sterling a month. America had its Elizabeth Whelan, accepted as a qualified pundit everywhere, in every medium. She was also expert at gathering dollars from a who's who of Fortune 500 firms. Conis says "they funded Bate, whose ESEF (European Science and Environment Forum) had previously denied the harms of secondhand smoke, endocrine disruption, and global warming. Now Bate authored a document titled 'International Public Health Strategy,' which wove its way through tobacco executives’ inboxes as the POPs (Persistent Organic Pollutants) convention brought DDT back into the public eye."

So DDT is back. It has been dropped from several international agreements limiting chemical poisons. Farmers demand it. It is safe and effective. There is no proof it has ever killed anyone. It helps produce abundant safe food, and is clearing the world of malaria. And if you believe all that, I have a bridge I'd like to offer you, connecting Brooklyn to Manhattan.

Conis says “'Like McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Levi’s jeans,' wrote journalist Paul Thacker, at this point 'scientific disinformation is an iconic American product.'”

For Conis "It’s an illustration: of forces unseen, of values unacknowledged, and of the endless game of catch-up we play when we pollute first, regulate later; deploy first, study later; and act first, reflect later."

David Wineberg… (more)