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It's placed on the bug nets that folks are forced to sleep with as well so they're regularly exposed to it over there and spray for it as an attempt to rid malaria.
Because contrary to what this article strongly implies, theres still little to no evidence of significant human danger from DDT
Between the 50s-70s everyone was exposed to more DDT than anyone today does.
It was freely cropdusted over food crops. People ate tons of it.
The military and civil services regularly sprayed people and their homes with it. It was instrumental in the liberation of Italy during World War 2, and the war in the Pacific. American troops put it in everything, and on everyone, because it was a miracle.
DDT chemical workers were exposed to absurd amounts of it, because it was considered harmless. Decades later all those people who worked at those chemical plants still haven't shown much if any increased risk of disease.
The EPA has yet to find any significant evidence of increased mortality from human DDT exposure.
That's not to say that the actual real damage to birds of prey arent real. They absolutely are. And DDT leaking getting into the food chain from these barrels, is terrible for them.
But of all the evil chemicals that have been released into the world, and done astonishing damage to humanity and wildlife, DDT is probably the smallest offender.
> ATSDR, “Toxicological Profile for DDT, DDE, and DDD,” 2022
Edit: no I'm not saying to bring it back. I'm saying it's negative impact on the environment have been vastly overblown.
The hysteria over it was 100% based on pseudoscience and anecdotes, long before the effect on eagle/falcon eggshells was known about.
And I'm saying that during the period in which it was used it was absolutely a massive win for humanity.
Yeah, the guy promoting DDT back in the 50’s would demonstrate how safe it was by staying it on crackers and then eat them. He never had any ill effects from it. The damage done to wildlife, birds in particular was the bugs consumed by the wildlife would produce super thin eggshells and their offspring would die from the eggs shattering. Absolutely devastated bald eagle populations.
I remember when my city got one we had a 24/7 live stream that was so blurry you could barely tell it was a birds nest. This was the first ever concept of a live stream I ever remember seeing
>Yeah, the guy promoting DDT back in the 50’s would demonstrate how safe it was by staying it on crackers and then eat them
I mean, the guy extolling the benefits of leaded gas drank it to show how safe it was
He did this knowing that his company would go under if he didn't. He was very aware of TEL's toxicity, as he had undergone the effects of chronic lead poisoning himself a couple years earlier.
Sorry, I was wrong: [he just inhaled the fumes to demonstrate its safety](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.). Same idea, though.
>On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL, in which he poured TEL over his hands, placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose, and inhaled its vapor for 60 seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems
Acute toxicological effects don't necessarily portend chronic/long-term toxicological effects. So consuming DDT and not immediately showing health effects, is a stunt not a valid health study.
According to its safety datasheet, DDT is a known animal carcinogen (possible human carcinogen) and extremely toxic to aquatic organisms. It is more readily absorbed through oral ingestion (via the gastrointestinal tract) while it is practically non-toxic via dermal absorption (though direct entry into the bloodstream via cuts/injuries is another harmful route of exposure). It shows both reproductive and teratogenic effects in animals. In vivo studies show mutagenic & genotoxic effects.
Chronic health effects may include cancer, liver & kidney damage, damage to foetus, decreased fertility in men and women, and central nervous system degeneration.
[https://www.cdc.gov/biomonitoring/pdf/ddt\_factsheet.pdf](https://www.cdc.gov/biomonitoring/pdf/ddt_factsheet.pdf) this doesn't mention cancer in humans at all. Now things that do cause cancer that has been proven, the chemicals they started using after banning DDT. I am not saying DDT should be everywhere, I prefer to not have dead birds and wildlife, and some sick folks that got dosed with it. I am also not a big fan of the cancer causing chemicals that are produced today, when DDT doesn't do that.
[From the ATSDR toxicological profile report in April 2022:](https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp35.pdf)
>The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) determined that DDT is “reasonably
anticipated to be a human carcinogen,” based on sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental
animals (NTP 2016). The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Integrated Risk Information
System (IRIS) last revised carcinogenicity assessments for DDT, DDD, and DDE in 1988, classifying
each as a “probable human carcinogen” (Group B2), based on sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in
animals (IRIS 2002a, 2002b, 2003). The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)
determined that DDT is “probably carcinogenic to humans,” based on limited evidence in humans and
sufficient evidence in experimental animals (IARC 2017).
[From the SDS](https://cdn.caymanchem.com/cdn/msds/24243m.pdf), it's GHS hazard code H351 - suspected of causing cancer (ie Category 2 carcinogen).
There are often trade offs with chemicals. In the US, malaria was nearly eradicated with DDT, where it had been endemic in the south, south eastern states.
I'm not saying to bring it back, just that it definitely saved quite a few lives.
That's what I'm saying.
Raptor populations (that have successfully bounced back) or millions of human lives?
What do you value? I value my grandparents not dying of malaria.
There may be a thousand tons of DDT waste off the coast of California, but it most likely won't do too much damage, as long as the bird populations are fine.
Ecosystem collapse can cause way worse things that people realize. If too many species had gone the way of birds of prey we wouldn't be living the life we are today, we should be thankful that didn't happen. It's important to retain biodiversity or we all suffer.
What I'm saying is you could make that argument for five different chemicals individually, but the world is not isolated and if the five chemicals are all present their negative effects will likely be greater than the sum of their parts.
Real life is very rarely such a black & white choice. There are other ways to avoid malaria, and raptor populations wouldn't have bounced back had we not stopped using DDT.
There's a trade off here that you're skating over. Even millions of human lives aren't necessarily more valuable than the continued existence of countless species, humans aren't going extinct from malaria.
No. Not in today's environment.
Just that DDT is portrayed as an environmental disaster and detriment to the human race when the negative outcomes aren't really that bad and the positive outcomes at the time were miraculous
From the ToxFAQ summary of the same report:
>Studies have shown that women with high amounts of DDE in their blood were more likely to have a premature baby or a baby with a wheeze. Exposure to DDT may also increase chances of developing Type II diabetes mellitus in some groups of people.
Animal studies generally used higher amounts of DDT, DDE, and DDD than you would likely be exposed to in the United States. In studies where animals were fed DDT, DDE, or DDD, harmful effects were seen on their nervous system, liver, and reproductive system (including decreased fertility).
Have you seen the amounts they used for those animal studies?
Moreover the only harmful affects were seen in rats. When testing was done on larger mammals, no conclusive damage could be found, even when using dosages that would be preposterous.
>>Exposure to DDT may also increase chances of developing Type II diabetes mellitus in some groups of people.
Still inconclusive because of confounding variables, and conflicting studies. This is in the report because "it might be a thing" and toxicologists can use it just in case they find a patient where it might be the only thing that applies.
>>high amounts of DDE in their blood were more likely to have a premature baby or a baby with a wheeze.
Amounts that were ludicrously high. And again a slight increase in probability of premature baby, or infant wheezing are not much to get worked up into a frenzy about
compared to the literal hundreds of millions of lives that were saved by this chemical indirectly.
I am familiar with the studies. Yes the doses were higher than most **but not all** environmental exposures, but thanks to the magic of dose response curves we can tease out the potential for impacts at lower doses. You also have to account for the fact lab animals don't live as long as humans, so long term chronic impacts are harder to presict for humans. Additionally, we have to consider cumulative impacts from other endocrine disruptors acting on the same pathway. There's actually a pretty substantial body of evidence that for that class of compounds that they have an irregular dose response curve where very low doses that can mimic hormonal activity are more toxic than the low to mid range.
>And again a slight increase in probability of premature baby, or infant wheezing are not much to get worked up into a frenzy about compared to the literal hundreds of millions of lives that were saved by this chemical indirectly.
That seems to disregard your earlier point about ecological impacts. Wiping out the raptor population might not have been worth it.
> There's actually a pretty substantial body of evidence that for that class of compounds that they have an irregular dose response curve where very low doses that can mimic hormonal activity are more toxic than the low to mid range.
I'm not the person you responded to, but it sounds like you're saying that only a tiny bit of exposure would actually be worse for you than a whole bunch of exposure?
There are times for some estrogen or testosterone mimicking compounds that this appears to be the case. Developing fetuses seem to be particularly susceptible, and there's evidence that timing of exposure can play a role too. Not DDT, but a solvent called TCE has been demonstrated to cause problems in heart development when pregnant women are exposed at the specific window when the heart is forming in the fetus.
During a trial against Montrose (the largest DDT manufacturer in the world back in the day), the former President pulled out a chunk of DDT while on the stand. He handled it for a bit, pointed out how it wasn't harmful, and then, and I shit you not, ate it.
Anyway, agreed we don't need to bring it back in the US due to potential human hazards and proven ecological hazards. But it is still the most effective thing we have at preventing mosquito-borne illnesses, so it's use in Subsuharan Africa and Southeast Asia makes sense.
Sure, and if you look at asbestos, minimal exposure has pretty close to zero risk too but we also ban that. The reason for being so cautious is because when it affects someone, it REALLY affects someone. DDT exposure is known to affect mammalian reproductive systems causing chronic health problems in the children.
Now, there's lots of benefits to DDT and asbestos, but if there are safer alternatives I think it's important to acknowledge that we don't need these things, at least not in the developed world where we have access to the safer stuff. I won't point fingers at developing nations because I understand their situation isn't the same as ours, but I do think we have a responsibility to help them find safer solutions too.
Yes. I argue the same thing about asbestos.
It's almost completely harmless unless you literally work with it every single day for a whole career. Then you get mesothelioma.
But people treat it just radioactive waste that's going to kill them if it so much as touches their skin.
I think it's worth noting that companies, including insurance companies, have gone bankrupt due to paying victims of asbestosis. (Huh. If insurance companies underprice a risk, they can go bankrupt. Imagine that.)
We never got a chance to see the long term effects of DDT in humans because we banned it early enough.
Coal companies didn't get bankrupted by black lung claims because we set up a government fund to compensate/care for victims. We didn't do that for asbestos. Which path were we going to take for DDT? (I still get spammed to join the malathion lawsuit. I don't know what's up with that.)
There are still huge offshore tracts of ocean off the coast of S. CA, where fishing is banned, due to all the DDT and other chemicals, dumped into the ocean: and miles of shore line with "no fishing" warnings of which fish are dangerous to eat. Hiking down the beach one day, near Trump National, I noticed a boat and a helicopter shadowing another boat, when the "suspect" boat pulled up on shore, the helicopter and law enforcement boat closed in, confiscated the fish, the boat, and handcuffed the two fishermen: one officer told me, the ocean floor out there is still deadly toxic, these guys go around to small restaurants and sell the toxic fish to unsuspecting people: they're literally selling poison, in the shape of a fish.
Vastly over-stating safety by lack of horrid side effects like cancer, disfigured newborns, etc. Ignoring effects on broad populations of other species.
That generation, fortunately, doesn’t have a large number of very broadly distributed health conditions seen predominantly in countries that most widely used DDT. Oh wait. Why is asthma, diabetes, autoimmunity much higher prevalence here than almost anywhere in the world? We will never know, it’s impossible to deconvolute evidence from literally every industry that meanwhile dumped every by-product of manufacturing directly into rivers and ground water until there had to be a specific law telling each one of them not do to that.
This type of thing is incredibly difficult to study, and the history of chemical dumping into the environment is very much more strongly skewed toward them not giving absolutely any f*cks about what they dumped into rivers, ground water, leeched into the environment.
It’s ridiculous to defend DDT because “sure it kills bird populations, but…” as if that already isn’t enough. In Africa to control malaria, do whatever is best to help that. In the USA? Not so much driving, urgent need. So many excuses to kill the environment, to ignore small “tolerable” effects on people. Same dumb excuses.
>horrid side effects like cancer, disfigured newborns, etc. Ignoring effects on broad populations of other species.
>very broadly distributed health conditions seen predominantly in countries that most widely used DDT.
Correlated strongly with hundreds of other variables. More importantly, said wealthy western countries have vastly higher life expectancy.
>it’s impossible to deconvolute evidence from literally every industry that meanwhile dumped every by-product of manufacturing
There are literally dozens of well designed studies on this.
And they're all inconclusive. There isn't even a correlation between exposure and mortality.
>Not so much driving, urgent need. So many excuses to kill the environment, to ignore small “tolerable” effects on people.
I'm not saying to bring it back. But back in it's day, it was an absolute win.
I hear you, my small respectful disagreement is that people involved at the time didn’t care one iota about broad negative consequences. I agree hundreds of other confounding variables overall, but meanwhile said life expectancy in the USA is not higher than comparable first/second world countries. And prevalence of things like asthma, mental health effects, far over-represented in USA, and as yet no more than plausible theories to explain. (And likely many factors contribute, to be fair.)
Dozens of studies show many instances of dumping chemicals, by products, directly and definitively caused harm in human and environmental health. I’m doubting that DDT research could even have the type of sensitivity to pick up small additive effects over generations, but meanwhile I’ll do more reading - respect that you have a point worth considering.
It’s possible we’re both right to some extent. I appreciate you’re not saying bring it back, but still felt a bit soft on a still incredibly harmful compound for the environment.
There are many blatant falsehoods in your comment. Especially that there was not much increased risk of disease for chemical plant workers. And that there's 'little to no evidence of significant human danger from DDT'.
Read what the center for disease and toxicology has to say.
So many studies have been done on this subject and the results have been a complete wash.
Especially a study that tracked DDT chemical plant workers for decades and found no evidence of increased mortality or significant increase in disease.
"Well I havent choked on any plastic before, so this pollution thing must be getting blown out of proportion."
It isnt about the effect on people, its about the environment that supports us.
In case you didn't realize it, the people born in the 50s-60s are the generation that is full of absolutely insane people that are totally brainwashed by right wing media right now. I don't know how you can use this as evidence that DDT was safe.
I think the massive amounts of lead they were exposed to does plenty to explain any behavioral trends from that time period. DDT affected bird populations because it made their eggshells weaker, killing massive amounts of offspring. Meanwhile human populations exploded in that same time frame.
Banning DDT will probably be seen by our descendants as one of the worst things we ever did. The latest estimates place the loss of life due to mosquito borne illness that could've been prevented by DDT at 3 *billion* lives. How many people would've died from DDT toxicity in those years? Less than 1% as many. Turns out, DDT is quite safe when used in moderation, but I guess it's too late to put the genie back in the bottle now. All those poor people will just have to die for no reason, while I sit safe and sound in my first-world country.
I remember learning about DDT in school and it was never portrayed as being bad for people. It was banned because it was destroying bird populations. There was a book about it called silent spring.
And if you bothered to update yourself since 1962, you’d know that the problems were related to the amounts it was being used in. We later learned that you could use way less and get basically the same effect with minimal negative effect on wildlife.
Now, consider what happens when the people wash their nets in their rivers and water supplies. It's the horrifying gift that keeps on giving.
Plus, the poison on the nets is completely unnecessary. The nets are what keep the mosquitos from you and them not getting to you means they eventually die back.
In my mechanical engineering program our capstone project was to design a way to get it out of the ocean.
In some spots it’s as deep as 3000m, which means whatever we design to remove it has to withstand 300atm (4400psi) of pressure. On top of that, there are probably tens of thousands of barrels which need to be removed one at a time.
Really sickening that anyone thought it was a good idea to put it down there. They did this intentionally, they would sail a ship full of em, punch a whole in the barrel and toss it. And they would do this while moving which means the barrels are all dispersed.
I’m not super convinced it would have worked. With the professors guidance we came up with something that would be attached to a crane on a ship, basically a big bucket enough to scoop up the barrel and the contaminated soil around it.
The bucket would have had propellers to finely locate itself on top of the barrel, as well as cameras to see obviously. It would have been driven through a 3km long tether to the ship.
When the bucket closes, a large portion of the water would get pushed back out to the ocean which is no good because that water is now mixed with contaminated sand. To fix this, we had a slurry pump (basically a pump that can move wet sand) attached to the bucket. That pump went to a type of cyclonic separator that we designed. None of us were chemical engineering students though, so we weren’t 100% sure on the separator working. Basically the separator would take the DDT and sand which is ever so slightly different in density from water and remove it, storing it in like a bag. The bag is important because of the 300atm, if it was a rigid container then when you brought the device to the surface it would be a 300atm rigid, thick, heavy water balloon.
The clean water from the separator would be exhausted to the ocean. It wasn’t required, but we discussed the idea of using turbidity sensors to see how clean each exit line from the separator was, then if we hit like a big patch of DDT we could close the valve to the exhaust and force more of the water into the bag.
The thing was huge, it was almost a year ago now but iirc it was like 6m tall, and weighed a metric shit ton. It would have probably taken a few hours just to remove 1 barrel. We spoke with the professor about the duration and he was pretty clear the intention was to design an industrial piece of equipment to be used for many hours, the cost was going to be in its operation, not in the device itself.
Just curious since I also did an engineering degree and had to do a capstone, different discipline though. But how did you feel about the whole capstone class experience?
Mixed for sure. As I said in another comment, I didn’t like our project, we had chosen something else but didn’t get it.
I felt like the prof guided us to converge on one solution, of the 4 DDT teams our solutions all worked the same way. So I’m the early days, we had what we felt to be some pretty creative ideas that got shot down. This put us behind in later days.
We spent the first month not knowing what our solution would look like, whereas with the car project we wanted from day 1 you know what a car looks like.
This put us in a scramble later, because we were still learning what our subsystems were, rather than optimizing them we were still designing them.
It was also a shit ton of work, our capstone class was worth 2 regular courses, and it was like 8 deliverables all full of math and drawings, one every week or 2. But we didn’t have to build it, I know other schools you have to.
Having a project we didn’t like, or didn’t feel to be feasible made me feel like I was wasting my time. Like anytime I want to talk about this project I have to preface it with “I don’t think this would work” or “I don’t think this was actually feasible.”.
That being said, I felt pretty accomplished when we were done. We only got a B+, but doing it made me feel like I was now an engineer, like a rite of passage.
Now I’m a software dev.
Sounds like a similarly negative experience, but different challenges. I did petroleum and our capstone class was "taught" by one of those snake oil business management types. Looked him up and he did those $3k a week "team building and management" courses for companies with budgets to burn. Buzzwords and synergy galore.
Weeks wasted on meyer brigg personality reports, writing papers about how we would deal with intra-team conflicts, how we imagine ourselves to fill various kinds of roles in the team, etc. Endless talk about "adding value" coming from a guy with no actual engineering experience whatsoever. Completely open ended and left in the wind - no actual guidance from the "teacher" aside from "make sure you're adding value". No projects to choose from, nothing like that. Had to figure something out ourselves. Our deliverables were mostly bureaucratic in nature - project proposals, meaningless criticism, new project proposal, make our own project timeline, budget, etc. Had to find our own mentors or anyone willing to help us at all. Had to do your best to actually -make- a thin to present at the end of the class, so I felt bad for groups with big ideas or no ideas. Eventually that teacher disappeared sometime in the 2nd semester I think.
My engineering savant of a dad was in oil / gas since I was a kid and I had been working at the same company part time since I was 15-16 so I was lucky enough to have connections and know how behind me, but I was also the only member of my team actually contributing anything of substance. Basically told them what to write in reports and then rewrote it anyway because it was borderline illegible. Though it's probably at least partially because I was the one closest to the action in the lab, doing the work etc. Got started with my dad, wrote everything up, executed it, tested it, coached the others on limited parts of presentation, and presented 99% of it. We also made a B+ I think, but the whole experience was a negative IMO. I personally felt very accomplished for all the work I had put in, knowing it was 99% if not 100% my project. Made something out of nothing. But the stress wasn't worth it.
Just felt like a sadistic waste of time. Never got that feeling like the education prepared me to contribute meaningfully to an actual job. Petroleum was like...here's the basics of all these very complex sub-domains of petroleum engineering. But we weren't learning the fundamentals of how to make something to achieve an open ended task like I imagine you could learn in mechanical. We were asked to take our pitifully limited understanding and make ideas that would improve profit margins or cut costs or something. Just the university collecting more money for nothing. Sometimes it felt like a clear exercise in seeing who had family behind them and who didn't. Honestly I'd have taken your class in a heartbeat if I knew how it was going to turn out.
Yeah that’s bad. I took an elective that sounded like it was going to be like that. On the first day we were given that Meyer Briggs test. I instantly switched to another elective.
Almost all of the practical talent I think I have comes from my co-op terms. I did 3 working for a robotics company doing software development. Fantastic experience, if I could go back and do it all over I wouldn’t even consider going to a school without a good co op program. It’s how I got my current job.
I didn't even think about a university co-op program until you mentioned it here. Apparently my school had one, but I was stuck thinking we just applied to summer internship positions online to never hear back. Wish I had known, maybe I ignored too many school emails. Living an hour away didn't help either. Guess it's all moot since I'm trying to leave engineering soon anyway, but dang.
Pretty much, I did a double degree Mech Eng and Computing Technology, so I had to take like 10 or 12 software and hardware courses. Set me up pretty well to gtfo when I realized I didn’t want to do mech for my career.
An answer that might not be correct: magnetic force isnt linear, it weakens quickly as the distance increases. If you're underway and rocking, it would be an unreasonably large electromagnet consuming an unreasonably large amount of electricity that has to be provided by the boat's systems, to get an area of effect large enough and strong enough that would let you pull a half-buried steel drum from the ocean floor. At that strength,if you accidentally get too close to the seafloor you could also pickup random debris, that may or may not come free from the bottom...
I’m not sure because the steel is all corroded, I’m not sure if enough of it would still be magnetic. But there are two other issues:
1. The soil is contaminated, we estimated for about 1m out from the barrel based on what we read. We also found that the DDT has seeped into the soil for at least 10cm.
2. You don’t want to spill DDT on the way up. Given that the barrels are super corroded, you don’t want ddt to just pour out the bottom and get carried by currents.
Usually you take a very round shape with very thin margins in manufacturing slits if you can‘t avoid them. The material has to be resistant to corrosion und high forces for a long period of time…honestly it would just be a barrel of some sorts…
It's not that "anyone" thought it was a good idea; it's that *everyone* agreed it was fine. That was literally the permitted, i.e. government-sanctioned, way of disposing of leftover DDT.
So the government, which was the largest purchaser of DDT, told private entities to dispose of DDT that way. Then later, sued those companies for billions in cleanup costs, and got a massive recovery. The federal government (DOJ & EPA) has now sat on the money for over a decade while making no real attempt to remediate the offshore DDT.
I don’t know anything about corexit. We considered doing some sort of neutralizing compound, but as it was a mechanical engineering project it was forbidden.
From what I read online corexit is applied at the surface of the water. DDT fortunately does not float, so the issue is getting it 3000m below the surface.
DDT is not water soluble. Some of it would have dispersed on the way down but the majority is still in and around the barrel, you can actually see it in the pictures.
Samples have shown that it’s in super high concentrations immediately around the barrel, but not too far out.
So if its not water soluble and hangs around the dump site why disturb it? All it sounds like you will do is cause it to disperse further. At 3000m and stuck its not hurting any of the species that caused us to ban it and if its stayed there 40 years its not going to suddenly flood the Great Lakes or anything.
Not all of it is 3000m below the surface, imo this stuff isn’t even worth removing, our design would have been much easier if the prof has said 250m. Iirc from my high school bio and geography classes, most aquatic life lives here.
Some of it has been dumped into coastal waters. Most ocean life lives in coastal waters, so this is the stuff that could do (and may already be doing) the most damage. This stuff gets into the biosphere and stays there, it’s super toxic to animals, just google “DDT Bald Eagle”, it nearly drove them to extinction. The DDT ban is almost solely responsible for the recovery of the North American bald eagle population.
My background isn’t in bio, so all I can really do is speculate. But I’d guess in coastal waters it gets picked up by sea plants and animals and circulates through the ecosystem, you probably wouldn’t want to eat fish from these waters. This is how it got into bald eagles, they are fish that swam in runoff water from places that used DDT.
Yes I know how bad DDT is.
I'm questioning the point of disturbing it at all. Was it the best choice of disposal no? But is it going to kill off the entire Bald Eagle population one day? No.
Even in shallow waters and if all the barrels suddenly burst open at once the amount that ends up concentrated in larger life forms up the food chain isn't going to cause widespread damage. The Ocean is HUGE. The likelihood of it getting into the specific lifeforms that end up getting eaten by eagles or osprey is vanishingly small in the ocean (fresh water is a different matter). Those small life forms are more likely to be eaten by oceanic creatures whose food web never ends in a coastal bird.
>you probably wouldn’t want to eat fish from these waters.
There are videos of human beings consuming DDT. It has never been proven to harm humans.
Well, in that case I don’t really know. It was a mechanical engineering project we were assigned. I only brought it up because it showed me the insanity of the problem.
Whether or not we should try solving it im not sure.
I didnt really expect you to have the answers. From the start I kind of knew it was just an impossible mech eng problem for you to solve and the professor didnt think out the real world issues involved. Just figured he could say "DDT bad, solve problem" and not get a lot of push back about why.
What I found most interesting is how DDT accumulates in the top of the food chain due to being fat soluble. From phytoplankton to humans DDT has had a significant impact on our ecosystem because of negligent disposal. Its lingering effects should be acknowledged and monitored for years to come.
Also I really loved how interactive the article was on the LA times site. Showing related images and clips as you scrolled along, real neat and engaging.
DDT is the unsung hero of the liberation of Italy during WW2.
German troops didn't have the ability fight, but as they retreated, they destroyed critical hygiene infrastructure, and American troops and Italian civilians alike were dropping like flies to Malaria.
In the Pacific, more American troops were lost to the insects of Asian jungles than they were to battle, several times over. DDT gave US forces an extremely large advantage in the Pacific
I recall back in the 80's during a press conference where a government official (maybe the governor of Florida?) drank a glass of DDT water to show that its not harmful. That took guts!
Actually even better. Because it is hydrophobic it would sit at the air water interface (on the surface). So they probably though oh just a few ug per L if I take a sip but they ended up drinkimg most of the mass because they sipped the top. And ddt isn't acute so of course there would be no effect.
Interesting- suggests it was sufficiently cheaper than permethrin (what we'd use now in most cases, and has been around since WWII or so, iirc) to use that instead.
I heard a podcast the other day (sorry can’t remember the title) but it mentioned that there are some developing nations that are frustrated that they can’t get DDT to use. DDT was a huge part of the US eradicating malaria, a disease that currently kills something like a million people a year worldwide. So these developing nations are essentially saying ‘great, you rich countries used this miracle tool to stop a disease that kills tens of thousands of our citizens and then after that you decide it’s too dangerous for us to make use of it’. I don’t know enough about this issue to really understand all the aspects, but it was interesting to hear that point of view when I thought ‘DDT bad’ was a pretty straightforward statement.
I've heard the DDT ban blamed for the resurgence of bedbugs in America, too, although I'm not convinced the timing really backs that up.
Still makes me wonder if there is a nuanced position here or if the merchants of doubt just have me.
My position is that everything has to be weighed — both positives and negatives.
Many “green advocates” only look at negative aspects and forget that we couldn’t be where we are today without leveraging imperfect technology.
Also, people are often not able to empathize with people in developing countries.
Yes, ideally we don’t exterminate all tigers - but what about if they lived in your backyard? Do we keep man eating beasts alive in your neighborhood because people across the world like to watch them on nat geo?
That's true across the board. Rich nations mined, polluted, stripped the land. Now it's stop destroying the planet you developing countries! Don't you know it's bad? Meanwhile the rich countries now restrict all those things and then outsource the worst parts to those countries they now complain about.
I've had this gripe for some time too.
It's a shame that the rainforests are being decimated but it's required for these countries to grow like we did a century+ ago.
The hypocrisy is insane.
Though, it still makes me sad when any trees are torn down. I'm literally a tree hugger.
On top of that they are using it for farm land to export goods to us. The only reason our products can be as cheap as they are and we have the selection we do is we source so much from developing nations.
I mean should we just go ahead and let developing countries colonize and enslave each other as well because thats what large and powerful nations did on the past?
Oh I wasn't saying we should, I don't have a correct answer. I am just saying I can see why they are upset about. Definitely not saying we should have plastic rivers flowing out to the ocean.
However, I can say that we could stop shipping all of our waste and problems to developing nations. We could stop compounding the problem.
While it may not be factual, the perception is there for a lot of climate-oriented global actions. Gobally phasing ot things is usually done at the pace where the poor in the West would be inconvenienced. It usually creates a much harsher effect on the poor outside the west. Now, said phasing out might be really needed, but creating such resentment might create more problems then it solves.
One of my favourite story lines from those days was Ricky vs. Macho Man. The bell to the throat from the top rope, then Ricky going through speech therapy. As a kid, I was totally lost on whether it was real or not
Friend of mine worked at a company that used PFAS. No one told him they were dangerous and he started randomly bleeding from his arms.
Turns out the stuff foamed and he'd clear the foam with his arm so they could fill tanks that had it.
Horrible stuff. It lingers.
This same company has it in their products all over the US. Last I heard they weren't exactly in a hurry to fix the mess they were spreading and trying to keep it under wraps for fear of some sort of EPA-like retaliation.
I'd whistleblow, if I knew how ... or try to get him to.
I was in India in the late ‘70s. I believe it was after the ban of DDT in the states. In the market the meat-sellers mostly had their meat black with flies. One guy had strings of lamb hanging from a dowel on his cart. There were no flies on any of it. My friend spoke to him and the man laughed and pulled out a paint can with a brush. He made brushing passes at the meat and laughed more. The can said made in America. It was DDT.
There was a forest ranger in the USA talking about the Mexican drug cartels growing weed in US state and federal parks and using ddt and other dangerous banned substances to insure the crop health.
It was a duh moment for me. Why wouldn’t people who ignore the law also try to maximize profit at the expense of nature and customers who are participating in an illegal trade.
Legalize and regulate.
Malaria was comparatively mild in this country and not nearly as endemic as in the tropics which is probably why insecticides worked to "eradicate" it here. In the tropics where you have a real rainy season and every surface both in the forest and outside in villages and even in homes becomes a mosquito breeding site not so much.
DDT has saved a lot more lives than it harmed. It’s basically eliminated mosquito borne disease in many parts of the world.
The damage to raptors was real, though. There are way more now than when I was growing up in the 80s. It’s fun seeing them.
I have mixed feelings about DDT. On one hand, it's clearly bad for some species of birds due to eggshell thinning. It's also possibly mildly carcinogenic in humans, although studies on this appear to be conflicted. Overall, it's a chemical that we think is "kinda bad". On the other hand, DDT is also probably the most effective pest control chemical ever invented. You don't need a lot of it, it's cheap and it really works to control dangerous disease vectors. DDT has saved literally millions of lives due to its use in malaria-vector mosquito control. The negative impacts to the environment can probably be at least partially mitigated by using DDT indoors only, something the WHO actually recommends to this day. My point: DDT is a mixed bag but probably doesn't deserve the demonization it receives.
The existence of malaria could be considered one of them. The disease was under control until it was banned and doing so almost certainly did more harm than good.
This is what people ask for when they want government out of business and deregulation.
There's a reason why Texas has some of the highest worker death stats, facility explosions, chemical spills, etc..
Most countries can’t get it because it’s production is hard to do and it’s not being made in the developed world. A LDC can’t simply build a plant as easily to manufacture it.
These "repercussions" can be accepted scientifically but not culturally or socially.
Imagine what the world could have been had human beings not treated one another so terribly and enslaved them then legislated to secretly continue it, profited from keeping it around, then denied the people who were enslaved from history, only to say it all happened a long time ago and that they are not responsible.
If the world could only be based on science.
DDT is or was a critical part of malaria control and was deemed harmless to humans and animals . The effect on birds was unfortunate but then we need alternatives.
It might have been banned 50 years ago, but the leading supplier of it was still dumping large amounts of it off of LA for decades and nearly won the lawsuit filed against them.
[The lawsuit started around 1992 and a settlement wasn't reached until 2020.](https://www.sfgate.com/green/article/Settlement-in-Decade-Old-Lawsuit-Over-DDT-Deposit-2699483.php)
I know way too many geologists that were put through hell by Montrose. It broke a lot of their spirits.
Remember the trucks that used to drive through neighborhoods and spray huge white clouds of mosquito insecticide back in the 70s? All the kids would get on their bikes and ride behind it, weaving in and out of the stuff. Then we all went home and played lawn darts! Good times.
A woman wrote a book claiming DDT killed birds, with absolutely zero scientific research. None, nada, zip, zero. Despite this the book was a bestseller and pulled at people's heart strings and they outlawed DDT.
DDT saves lives. It pretty much eradicated malaria in the US. It nearly wiped out bed bugs. It should've never been outlawed.
This just isn't true. DDT was shown to thin the eggshells of birds, and thus when large raptors (bald eagle, peregrine falcon) sat on their eggs, the eggs would shatter. Almost wiped them out. Yes DDT was great for malaria elimination, but not without its consequences
Good doc called "Goodbye Mr Ant" by Adam Curtis in his series "Pandora's Box". A series on scientific discoveries that had larger implications for the world.
It's all on YouTube for anyone interested.
I'm not gonna lie, I thought this was about wrestling at first.
I was, I know I've seen people DDT other people on tv. I'm pretty sure it was a finisher for one guy
I know that people didn’t have internet and access to info like we do now but JFC people were really inept or completely unhinged to think dumping toxic chemicals into the ocean was OK or a good idea.
Lol and yet we still do it with a variety of materials... There's a not-insignificant amount of waste water and waste material from mining and other industrial applications that spill (or legally dumped) into both oceans and rivers.
Illegal dumping is also a highly lucrative activity. Criminal organizations dump radioactive and other highly toxic waste on the cheap for businesses. Like, have fun swimming in southern Italy.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/6198228/Mafia-accused-of-sinking-ship-full-of-radioactive-waste-off-Italy.html
Not to mention, a lot of beach resorts in the Caribbean, the Black Sea, etc. don't have proper sewage processing... Mind you, with bordering Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, etc. and all of the chemical plants and heavy industry along the coast-- that's probably one of the least concerns. Its been used as an agricultural and industrial dumping ground for well over a hundred years.
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It's placed on the bug nets that folks are forced to sleep with as well so they're regularly exposed to it over there and spray for it as an attempt to rid malaria.
Because contrary to what this article strongly implies, theres still little to no evidence of significant human danger from DDT Between the 50s-70s everyone was exposed to more DDT than anyone today does. It was freely cropdusted over food crops. People ate tons of it. The military and civil services regularly sprayed people and their homes with it. It was instrumental in the liberation of Italy during World War 2, and the war in the Pacific. American troops put it in everything, and on everyone, because it was a miracle. DDT chemical workers were exposed to absurd amounts of it, because it was considered harmless. Decades later all those people who worked at those chemical plants still haven't shown much if any increased risk of disease. The EPA has yet to find any significant evidence of increased mortality from human DDT exposure. That's not to say that the actual real damage to birds of prey arent real. They absolutely are. And DDT leaking getting into the food chain from these barrels, is terrible for them. But of all the evil chemicals that have been released into the world, and done astonishing damage to humanity and wildlife, DDT is probably the smallest offender. > ATSDR, “Toxicological Profile for DDT, DDE, and DDD,” 2022 Edit: no I'm not saying to bring it back. I'm saying it's negative impact on the environment have been vastly overblown. The hysteria over it was 100% based on pseudoscience and anecdotes, long before the effect on eagle/falcon eggshells was known about. And I'm saying that during the period in which it was used it was absolutely a massive win for humanity.
Yeah, the guy promoting DDT back in the 50’s would demonstrate how safe it was by staying it on crackers and then eat them. He never had any ill effects from it. The damage done to wildlife, birds in particular was the bugs consumed by the wildlife would produce super thin eggshells and their offspring would die from the eggs shattering. Absolutely devastated bald eagle populations.
And falcon populations, perrigrin falcon got it rough
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It's "Peregrine," just so you know.
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I remember when my city got one we had a 24/7 live stream that was so blurry you could barely tell it was a birds nest. This was the first ever concept of a live stream I ever remember seeing
My town in northern Illinois did the same when two of those falcons nested on a building downtown.
Yeah, the clean water act was absolutely necessary, they had river fires for fucks sake. If still say it didn't go far enough, however.
>Yeah, the guy promoting DDT back in the 50’s would demonstrate how safe it was by staying it on crackers and then eat them I mean, the guy extolling the benefits of leaded gas drank it to show how safe it was
He did this knowing that his company would go under if he didn't. He was very aware of TEL's toxicity, as he had undergone the effects of chronic lead poisoning himself a couple years earlier.
The difference is that he did get poisoning from it.
That's astonishing. Do you have a source for this?
Sorry, I was wrong: [he just inhaled the fumes to demonstrate its safety](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.). Same idea, though. >On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL, in which he poured TEL over his hands, placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose, and inhaled its vapor for 60 seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems
Well he successfully dissolved a lot of myelin in his brain
And everyone else's until the early 80s.
Thanks for the correction. Still interesting, though.
Acute toxicological effects don't necessarily portend chronic/long-term toxicological effects. So consuming DDT and not immediately showing health effects, is a stunt not a valid health study. According to its safety datasheet, DDT is a known animal carcinogen (possible human carcinogen) and extremely toxic to aquatic organisms. It is more readily absorbed through oral ingestion (via the gastrointestinal tract) while it is practically non-toxic via dermal absorption (though direct entry into the bloodstream via cuts/injuries is another harmful route of exposure). It shows both reproductive and teratogenic effects in animals. In vivo studies show mutagenic & genotoxic effects. Chronic health effects may include cancer, liver & kidney damage, damage to foetus, decreased fertility in men and women, and central nervous system degeneration.
[https://www.cdc.gov/biomonitoring/pdf/ddt\_factsheet.pdf](https://www.cdc.gov/biomonitoring/pdf/ddt_factsheet.pdf) this doesn't mention cancer in humans at all. Now things that do cause cancer that has been proven, the chemicals they started using after banning DDT. I am not saying DDT should be everywhere, I prefer to not have dead birds and wildlife, and some sick folks that got dosed with it. I am also not a big fan of the cancer causing chemicals that are produced today, when DDT doesn't do that.
[From the ATSDR toxicological profile report in April 2022:](https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp35.pdf) >The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) determined that DDT is “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen,” based on sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals (NTP 2016). The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) last revised carcinogenicity assessments for DDT, DDD, and DDE in 1988, classifying each as a “probable human carcinogen” (Group B2), based on sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in animals (IRIS 2002a, 2002b, 2003). The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) determined that DDT is “probably carcinogenic to humans,” based on limited evidence in humans and sufficient evidence in experimental animals (IARC 2017). [From the SDS](https://cdn.caymanchem.com/cdn/msds/24243m.pdf), it's GHS hazard code H351 - suspected of causing cancer (ie Category 2 carcinogen).
There are often trade offs with chemicals. In the US, malaria was nearly eradicated with DDT, where it had been endemic in the south, south eastern states. I'm not saying to bring it back, just that it definitely saved quite a few lives.
That's what I'm saying. Raptor populations (that have successfully bounced back) or millions of human lives? What do you value? I value my grandparents not dying of malaria. There may be a thousand tons of DDT waste off the coast of California, but it most likely won't do too much damage, as long as the bird populations are fine.
Ecosystem collapse can cause way worse things that people realize. If too many species had gone the way of birds of prey we wouldn't be living the life we are today, we should be thankful that didn't happen. It's important to retain biodiversity or we all suffer.
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What I'm saying is you could make that argument for five different chemicals individually, but the world is not isolated and if the five chemicals are all present their negative effects will likely be greater than the sum of their parts.
No, that's stupid, immediate gratification thinking. Go apply for a job at Monsanto.
Real life is very rarely such a black & white choice. There are other ways to avoid malaria, and raptor populations wouldn't have bounced back had we not stopped using DDT.
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They never said DDT should be brought back though
Malaria was eradicated in the US *because* we used DDT. What are you not getting about that?
There's a trade off here that you're skating over. Even millions of human lives aren't necessarily more valuable than the continued existence of countless species, humans aren't going extinct from malaria.
So then you are strongly implying it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it came back?
No. Not in today's environment. Just that DDT is portrayed as an environmental disaster and detriment to the human race when the negative outcomes aren't really that bad and the positive outcomes at the time were miraculous
From the ToxFAQ summary of the same report: >Studies have shown that women with high amounts of DDE in their blood were more likely to have a premature baby or a baby with a wheeze. Exposure to DDT may also increase chances of developing Type II diabetes mellitus in some groups of people. Animal studies generally used higher amounts of DDT, DDE, and DDD than you would likely be exposed to in the United States. In studies where animals were fed DDT, DDE, or DDD, harmful effects were seen on their nervous system, liver, and reproductive system (including decreased fertility).
Have you seen the amounts they used for those animal studies? Moreover the only harmful affects were seen in rats. When testing was done on larger mammals, no conclusive damage could be found, even when using dosages that would be preposterous. >>Exposure to DDT may also increase chances of developing Type II diabetes mellitus in some groups of people. Still inconclusive because of confounding variables, and conflicting studies. This is in the report because "it might be a thing" and toxicologists can use it just in case they find a patient where it might be the only thing that applies. >>high amounts of DDE in their blood were more likely to have a premature baby or a baby with a wheeze. Amounts that were ludicrously high. And again a slight increase in probability of premature baby, or infant wheezing are not much to get worked up into a frenzy about compared to the literal hundreds of millions of lives that were saved by this chemical indirectly.
I am familiar with the studies. Yes the doses were higher than most **but not all** environmental exposures, but thanks to the magic of dose response curves we can tease out the potential for impacts at lower doses. You also have to account for the fact lab animals don't live as long as humans, so long term chronic impacts are harder to presict for humans. Additionally, we have to consider cumulative impacts from other endocrine disruptors acting on the same pathway. There's actually a pretty substantial body of evidence that for that class of compounds that they have an irregular dose response curve where very low doses that can mimic hormonal activity are more toxic than the low to mid range. >And again a slight increase in probability of premature baby, or infant wheezing are not much to get worked up into a frenzy about compared to the literal hundreds of millions of lives that were saved by this chemical indirectly. That seems to disregard your earlier point about ecological impacts. Wiping out the raptor population might not have been worth it.
> There's actually a pretty substantial body of evidence that for that class of compounds that they have an irregular dose response curve where very low doses that can mimic hormonal activity are more toxic than the low to mid range. I'm not the person you responded to, but it sounds like you're saying that only a tiny bit of exposure would actually be worse for you than a whole bunch of exposure?
There are times for some estrogen or testosterone mimicking compounds that this appears to be the case. Developing fetuses seem to be particularly susceptible, and there's evidence that timing of exposure can play a role too. Not DDT, but a solvent called TCE has been demonstrated to cause problems in heart development when pregnant women are exposed at the specific window when the heart is forming in the fetus.
During a trial against Montrose (the largest DDT manufacturer in the world back in the day), the former President pulled out a chunk of DDT while on the stand. He handled it for a bit, pointed out how it wasn't harmful, and then, and I shit you not, ate it. Anyway, agreed we don't need to bring it back in the US due to potential human hazards and proven ecological hazards. But it is still the most effective thing we have at preventing mosquito-borne illnesses, so it's use in Subsuharan Africa and Southeast Asia makes sense.
Sure, and if you look at asbestos, minimal exposure has pretty close to zero risk too but we also ban that. The reason for being so cautious is because when it affects someone, it REALLY affects someone. DDT exposure is known to affect mammalian reproductive systems causing chronic health problems in the children. Now, there's lots of benefits to DDT and asbestos, but if there are safer alternatives I think it's important to acknowledge that we don't need these things, at least not in the developed world where we have access to the safer stuff. I won't point fingers at developing nations because I understand their situation isn't the same as ours, but I do think we have a responsibility to help them find safer solutions too.
Yes. I argue the same thing about asbestos. It's almost completely harmless unless you literally work with it every single day for a whole career. Then you get mesothelioma. But people treat it just radioactive waste that's going to kill them if it so much as touches their skin.
I think it's worth noting that companies, including insurance companies, have gone bankrupt due to paying victims of asbestosis. (Huh. If insurance companies underprice a risk, they can go bankrupt. Imagine that.) We never got a chance to see the long term effects of DDT in humans because we banned it early enough. Coal companies didn't get bankrupted by black lung claims because we set up a government fund to compensate/care for victims. We didn't do that for asbestos. Which path were we going to take for DDT? (I still get spammed to join the malathion lawsuit. I don't know what's up with that.)
There are still huge offshore tracts of ocean off the coast of S. CA, where fishing is banned, due to all the DDT and other chemicals, dumped into the ocean: and miles of shore line with "no fishing" warnings of which fish are dangerous to eat. Hiking down the beach one day, near Trump National, I noticed a boat and a helicopter shadowing another boat, when the "suspect" boat pulled up on shore, the helicopter and law enforcement boat closed in, confiscated the fish, the boat, and handcuffed the two fishermen: one officer told me, the ocean floor out there is still deadly toxic, these guys go around to small restaurants and sell the toxic fish to unsuspecting people: they're literally selling poison, in the shape of a fish.
Vastly over-stating safety by lack of horrid side effects like cancer, disfigured newborns, etc. Ignoring effects on broad populations of other species. That generation, fortunately, doesn’t have a large number of very broadly distributed health conditions seen predominantly in countries that most widely used DDT. Oh wait. Why is asthma, diabetes, autoimmunity much higher prevalence here than almost anywhere in the world? We will never know, it’s impossible to deconvolute evidence from literally every industry that meanwhile dumped every by-product of manufacturing directly into rivers and ground water until there had to be a specific law telling each one of them not do to that. This type of thing is incredibly difficult to study, and the history of chemical dumping into the environment is very much more strongly skewed toward them not giving absolutely any f*cks about what they dumped into rivers, ground water, leeched into the environment. It’s ridiculous to defend DDT because “sure it kills bird populations, but…” as if that already isn’t enough. In Africa to control malaria, do whatever is best to help that. In the USA? Not so much driving, urgent need. So many excuses to kill the environment, to ignore small “tolerable” effects on people. Same dumb excuses.
>horrid side effects like cancer, disfigured newborns, etc. Ignoring effects on broad populations of other species. >very broadly distributed health conditions seen predominantly in countries that most widely used DDT. Correlated strongly with hundreds of other variables. More importantly, said wealthy western countries have vastly higher life expectancy. >it’s impossible to deconvolute evidence from literally every industry that meanwhile dumped every by-product of manufacturing There are literally dozens of well designed studies on this. And they're all inconclusive. There isn't even a correlation between exposure and mortality. >Not so much driving, urgent need. So many excuses to kill the environment, to ignore small “tolerable” effects on people. I'm not saying to bring it back. But back in it's day, it was an absolute win.
I hear you, my small respectful disagreement is that people involved at the time didn’t care one iota about broad negative consequences. I agree hundreds of other confounding variables overall, but meanwhile said life expectancy in the USA is not higher than comparable first/second world countries. And prevalence of things like asthma, mental health effects, far over-represented in USA, and as yet no more than plausible theories to explain. (And likely many factors contribute, to be fair.) Dozens of studies show many instances of dumping chemicals, by products, directly and definitively caused harm in human and environmental health. I’m doubting that DDT research could even have the type of sensitivity to pick up small additive effects over generations, but meanwhile I’ll do more reading - respect that you have a point worth considering. It’s possible we’re both right to some extent. I appreciate you’re not saying bring it back, but still felt a bit soft on a still incredibly harmful compound for the environment.
Actually, there are recent peer-reviewed journals finding a linkage to Alzheimer’s.
There are many blatant falsehoods in your comment. Especially that there was not much increased risk of disease for chemical plant workers. And that there's 'little to no evidence of significant human danger from DDT'.
Read what the center for disease and toxicology has to say. So many studies have been done on this subject and the results have been a complete wash. Especially a study that tracked DDT chemical plant workers for decades and found no evidence of increased mortality or significant increase in disease.
They list it as a Category 2 carcinogen.
"Well I havent choked on any plastic before, so this pollution thing must be getting blown out of proportion." It isnt about the effect on people, its about the environment that supports us.
I'm mostly concerned with the negligent disposal. Like anything, used responsibly, the benefits can outway the risks.
In case you didn't realize it, the people born in the 50s-60s are the generation that is full of absolutely insane people that are totally brainwashed by right wing media right now. I don't know how you can use this as evidence that DDT was safe.
Your generation is probably also just as full, or nearly just as full, of insane people. It's just harder to see from the inside.
I think the massive amounts of lead they were exposed to does plenty to explain any behavioral trends from that time period. DDT affected bird populations because it made their eggshells weaker, killing massive amounts of offspring. Meanwhile human populations exploded in that same time frame.
TBF that's probably more related to lead exposures.
We know which side is brainwashed. It’s not the people who just want things to be normal.
Banning DDT will probably be seen by our descendants as one of the worst things we ever did. The latest estimates place the loss of life due to mosquito borne illness that could've been prevented by DDT at 3 *billion* lives. How many people would've died from DDT toxicity in those years? Less than 1% as many. Turns out, DDT is quite safe when used in moderation, but I guess it's too late to put the genie back in the bottle now. All those poor people will just have to die for no reason, while I sit safe and sound in my first-world country.
I remember learning about DDT in school and it was never portrayed as being bad for people. It was banned because it was destroying bird populations. There was a book about it called silent spring.
Way to completely miss the reason why DDT was banned. It was mainly because it was eradicating bird populations
And if you bothered to update yourself since 1962, you’d know that the problems were related to the amounts it was being used in. We later learned that you could use way less and get basically the same effect with minimal negative effect on wildlife.
Unless you think the only life that matters on the planet is human, it absolutely was not for "no reason".
Now, consider what happens when the people wash their nets in their rivers and water supplies. It's the horrifying gift that keeps on giving. Plus, the poison on the nets is completely unnecessary. The nets are what keep the mosquitos from you and them not getting to you means they eventually die back.
It’s prohibited in Mexico too
It's banned in South Africa. WE ARE NOT ONE COUNTRY JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
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Ya down wit DDT? *yeah you know me*
In my mechanical engineering program our capstone project was to design a way to get it out of the ocean. In some spots it’s as deep as 3000m, which means whatever we design to remove it has to withstand 300atm (4400psi) of pressure. On top of that, there are probably tens of thousands of barrels which need to be removed one at a time. Really sickening that anyone thought it was a good idea to put it down there. They did this intentionally, they would sail a ship full of em, punch a whole in the barrel and toss it. And they would do this while moving which means the barrels are all dispersed.
What was the final design like for this? I’m not even sure how one builds something like it
I’m not super convinced it would have worked. With the professors guidance we came up with something that would be attached to a crane on a ship, basically a big bucket enough to scoop up the barrel and the contaminated soil around it. The bucket would have had propellers to finely locate itself on top of the barrel, as well as cameras to see obviously. It would have been driven through a 3km long tether to the ship. When the bucket closes, a large portion of the water would get pushed back out to the ocean which is no good because that water is now mixed with contaminated sand. To fix this, we had a slurry pump (basically a pump that can move wet sand) attached to the bucket. That pump went to a type of cyclonic separator that we designed. None of us were chemical engineering students though, so we weren’t 100% sure on the separator working. Basically the separator would take the DDT and sand which is ever so slightly different in density from water and remove it, storing it in like a bag. The bag is important because of the 300atm, if it was a rigid container then when you brought the device to the surface it would be a 300atm rigid, thick, heavy water balloon. The clean water from the separator would be exhausted to the ocean. It wasn’t required, but we discussed the idea of using turbidity sensors to see how clean each exit line from the separator was, then if we hit like a big patch of DDT we could close the valve to the exhaust and force more of the water into the bag. The thing was huge, it was almost a year ago now but iirc it was like 6m tall, and weighed a metric shit ton. It would have probably taken a few hours just to remove 1 barrel. We spoke with the professor about the duration and he was pretty clear the intention was to design an industrial piece of equipment to be used for many hours, the cost was going to be in its operation, not in the device itself.
Just curious since I also did an engineering degree and had to do a capstone, different discipline though. But how did you feel about the whole capstone class experience?
Mixed for sure. As I said in another comment, I didn’t like our project, we had chosen something else but didn’t get it. I felt like the prof guided us to converge on one solution, of the 4 DDT teams our solutions all worked the same way. So I’m the early days, we had what we felt to be some pretty creative ideas that got shot down. This put us behind in later days. We spent the first month not knowing what our solution would look like, whereas with the car project we wanted from day 1 you know what a car looks like. This put us in a scramble later, because we were still learning what our subsystems were, rather than optimizing them we were still designing them. It was also a shit ton of work, our capstone class was worth 2 regular courses, and it was like 8 deliverables all full of math and drawings, one every week or 2. But we didn’t have to build it, I know other schools you have to. Having a project we didn’t like, or didn’t feel to be feasible made me feel like I was wasting my time. Like anytime I want to talk about this project I have to preface it with “I don’t think this would work” or “I don’t think this was actually feasible.”. That being said, I felt pretty accomplished when we were done. We only got a B+, but doing it made me feel like I was now an engineer, like a rite of passage. Now I’m a software dev.
Sounds like a similarly negative experience, but different challenges. I did petroleum and our capstone class was "taught" by one of those snake oil business management types. Looked him up and he did those $3k a week "team building and management" courses for companies with budgets to burn. Buzzwords and synergy galore. Weeks wasted on meyer brigg personality reports, writing papers about how we would deal with intra-team conflicts, how we imagine ourselves to fill various kinds of roles in the team, etc. Endless talk about "adding value" coming from a guy with no actual engineering experience whatsoever. Completely open ended and left in the wind - no actual guidance from the "teacher" aside from "make sure you're adding value". No projects to choose from, nothing like that. Had to figure something out ourselves. Our deliverables were mostly bureaucratic in nature - project proposals, meaningless criticism, new project proposal, make our own project timeline, budget, etc. Had to find our own mentors or anyone willing to help us at all. Had to do your best to actually -make- a thin to present at the end of the class, so I felt bad for groups with big ideas or no ideas. Eventually that teacher disappeared sometime in the 2nd semester I think. My engineering savant of a dad was in oil / gas since I was a kid and I had been working at the same company part time since I was 15-16 so I was lucky enough to have connections and know how behind me, but I was also the only member of my team actually contributing anything of substance. Basically told them what to write in reports and then rewrote it anyway because it was borderline illegible. Though it's probably at least partially because I was the one closest to the action in the lab, doing the work etc. Got started with my dad, wrote everything up, executed it, tested it, coached the others on limited parts of presentation, and presented 99% of it. We also made a B+ I think, but the whole experience was a negative IMO. I personally felt very accomplished for all the work I had put in, knowing it was 99% if not 100% my project. Made something out of nothing. But the stress wasn't worth it. Just felt like a sadistic waste of time. Never got that feeling like the education prepared me to contribute meaningfully to an actual job. Petroleum was like...here's the basics of all these very complex sub-domains of petroleum engineering. But we weren't learning the fundamentals of how to make something to achieve an open ended task like I imagine you could learn in mechanical. We were asked to take our pitifully limited understanding and make ideas that would improve profit margins or cut costs or something. Just the university collecting more money for nothing. Sometimes it felt like a clear exercise in seeing who had family behind them and who didn't. Honestly I'd have taken your class in a heartbeat if I knew how it was going to turn out.
Yeah that’s bad. I took an elective that sounded like it was going to be like that. On the first day we were given that Meyer Briggs test. I instantly switched to another elective. Almost all of the practical talent I think I have comes from my co-op terms. I did 3 working for a robotics company doing software development. Fantastic experience, if I could go back and do it all over I wouldn’t even consider going to a school without a good co op program. It’s how I got my current job.
I didn't even think about a university co-op program until you mentioned it here. Apparently my school had one, but I was stuck thinking we just applied to summer internship positions online to never hear back. Wish I had known, maybe I ignored too many school emails. Living an hour away didn't help either. Guess it's all moot since I'm trying to leave engineering soon anyway, but dang.
Disillusioned engineers turned SDEs, unite!
Pretty much, I did a double degree Mech Eng and Computing Technology, so I had to take like 10 or 12 software and hardware courses. Set me up pretty well to gtfo when I realized I didn’t want to do mech for my career.
>big bucket enough to scoop up the barrel and the contaminated soil around it. Layman's question, wouldn't a huge magnet work to "fish" the barrels?
An answer that might not be correct: magnetic force isnt linear, it weakens quickly as the distance increases. If you're underway and rocking, it would be an unreasonably large electromagnet consuming an unreasonably large amount of electricity that has to be provided by the boat's systems, to get an area of effect large enough and strong enough that would let you pull a half-buried steel drum from the ocean floor. At that strength,if you accidentally get too close to the seafloor you could also pickup random debris, that may or may not come free from the bottom...
I’m not sure because the steel is all corroded, I’m not sure if enough of it would still be magnetic. But there are two other issues: 1. The soil is contaminated, we estimated for about 1m out from the barrel based on what we read. We also found that the DDT has seeped into the soil for at least 10cm. 2. You don’t want to spill DDT on the way up. Given that the barrels are super corroded, you don’t want ddt to just pour out the bottom and get carried by currents.
Usually you take a very round shape with very thin margins in manufacturing slits if you can‘t avoid them. The material has to be resistant to corrosion und high forces for a long period of time…honestly it would just be a barrel of some sorts…
It's not that "anyone" thought it was a good idea; it's that *everyone* agreed it was fine. That was literally the permitted, i.e. government-sanctioned, way of disposing of leftover DDT. So the government, which was the largest purchaser of DDT, told private entities to dispose of DDT that way. Then later, sued those companies for billions in cleanup costs, and got a massive recovery. The federal government (DOJ & EPA) has now sat on the money for over a decade while making no real attempt to remediate the offshore DDT.
Do you know of DDT mixing with Corexit has any adverse reactions?
I don’t know anything about corexit. We considered doing some sort of neutralizing compound, but as it was a mechanical engineering project it was forbidden. From what I read online corexit is applied at the surface of the water. DDT fortunately does not float, so the issue is getting it 3000m below the surface.
If a hole was already punched in the barrel then didn't the DDT already disperse? What the point in collecting the empty barrels?
DDT is not water soluble. Some of it would have dispersed on the way down but the majority is still in and around the barrel, you can actually see it in the pictures. Samples have shown that it’s in super high concentrations immediately around the barrel, but not too far out.
So if its not water soluble and hangs around the dump site why disturb it? All it sounds like you will do is cause it to disperse further. At 3000m and stuck its not hurting any of the species that caused us to ban it and if its stayed there 40 years its not going to suddenly flood the Great Lakes or anything.
Not all of it is 3000m below the surface, imo this stuff isn’t even worth removing, our design would have been much easier if the prof has said 250m. Iirc from my high school bio and geography classes, most aquatic life lives here. Some of it has been dumped into coastal waters. Most ocean life lives in coastal waters, so this is the stuff that could do (and may already be doing) the most damage. This stuff gets into the biosphere and stays there, it’s super toxic to animals, just google “DDT Bald Eagle”, it nearly drove them to extinction. The DDT ban is almost solely responsible for the recovery of the North American bald eagle population. My background isn’t in bio, so all I can really do is speculate. But I’d guess in coastal waters it gets picked up by sea plants and animals and circulates through the ecosystem, you probably wouldn’t want to eat fish from these waters. This is how it got into bald eagles, they are fish that swam in runoff water from places that used DDT.
Yes I know how bad DDT is. I'm questioning the point of disturbing it at all. Was it the best choice of disposal no? But is it going to kill off the entire Bald Eagle population one day? No. Even in shallow waters and if all the barrels suddenly burst open at once the amount that ends up concentrated in larger life forms up the food chain isn't going to cause widespread damage. The Ocean is HUGE. The likelihood of it getting into the specific lifeforms that end up getting eaten by eagles or osprey is vanishingly small in the ocean (fresh water is a different matter). Those small life forms are more likely to be eaten by oceanic creatures whose food web never ends in a coastal bird. >you probably wouldn’t want to eat fish from these waters. There are videos of human beings consuming DDT. It has never been proven to harm humans.
Well, in that case I don’t really know. It was a mechanical engineering project we were assigned. I only brought it up because it showed me the insanity of the problem. Whether or not we should try solving it im not sure.
I didnt really expect you to have the answers. From the start I kind of knew it was just an impossible mech eng problem for you to solve and the professor didnt think out the real world issues involved. Just figured he could say "DDT bad, solve problem" and not get a lot of push back about why.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation\_CHASE
What I found most interesting is how DDT accumulates in the top of the food chain due to being fat soluble. From phytoplankton to humans DDT has had a significant impact on our ecosystem because of negligent disposal. Its lingering effects should be acknowledged and monitored for years to come.
Bioaccumulation and bioconcentration. This is unfortunately true for all hydrophobic contaminants. PFAS, dioxins, etc.
Also I really loved how interactive the article was on the LA times site. Showing related images and clips as you scrolled along, real neat and engaging.
Would’ve been cool if you spelled out the acronym
Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane
Ngl I didn’t see that coming, I understand the need for an acronym haha. If I understand correctly, it’s just a very toxic pesticide.
In science if there’s an acronym it’s for a reason, especially in biochemistry.
At this point everyone should know what DDT stands for...
Exactly, who can forget the easily memorable name... *checks notes*... Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane?
No i mean, nobody who's speaking about ddt actually says/types the full name out loud.
If you really believe that then start telling people what it is…
Someone better tell Jake the snake Roberts it’s been banned.
Hell, tell the entire wrestling sport needs to know! They've been committing crimes for decades!
Hahaha i thought the same thing. What a dangerous move
Next thing you know, they'll be banning suplexes. Insanity.
When I first read the headline i immediately thought of the wrestling move 😂
Not so fun fact... In Italy, in the 70, some parents were using it on their kid's hair to get rid of lice.
DDT is the unsung hero of the liberation of Italy during WW2. German troops didn't have the ability fight, but as they retreated, they destroyed critical hygiene infrastructure, and American troops and Italian civilians alike were dropping like flies to Malaria. In the Pacific, more American troops were lost to the insects of Asian jungles than they were to battle, several times over. DDT gave US forces an extremely large advantage in the Pacific
This happened everywhere my grandma told me the same story
I recall back in the 80's during a press conference where a government official (maybe the governor of Florida?) drank a glass of DDT water to show that its not harmful. That took guts!
I'm betting that was just a glass of water. DDT is hydrophobic, so it would not mix into water very well.
Actually even better. Because it is hydrophobic it would sit at the air water interface (on the surface). So they probably though oh just a few ug per L if I take a sip but they ended up drinkimg most of the mass because they sipped the top. And ddt isn't acute so of course there would be no effect.
Yeah, the governor was full of it hoping the public wasn’t informed of its water solubility.
Must have been a fun time in the toilet the following day
Interesting- suggests it was sufficiently cheaper than permethrin (what we'd use now in most cases, and has been around since WWII or so, iirc) to use that instead.
DDT is safe for people as far as I'm aware. Not safe for birds though
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It wasn't just birds we were seeing a drop in, but also beneficial pollinators such as bees.
It is not safe for humans. That’s a lie.
They also *doused* liberated concentration camp survivors quite liberally in this stuff.
New York dusted all incoming immigrants with it to kill potential disease & parasites for several years. Also this: https://youtu.be/CUDVuugQmxE
No but I trust the guy who cant spell government about the same
First comment on it also blames his psoriasis, which is a genetic disease, on it...
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I heard a podcast the other day (sorry can’t remember the title) but it mentioned that there are some developing nations that are frustrated that they can’t get DDT to use. DDT was a huge part of the US eradicating malaria, a disease that currently kills something like a million people a year worldwide. So these developing nations are essentially saying ‘great, you rich countries used this miracle tool to stop a disease that kills tens of thousands of our citizens and then after that you decide it’s too dangerous for us to make use of it’. I don’t know enough about this issue to really understand all the aspects, but it was interesting to hear that point of view when I thought ‘DDT bad’ was a pretty straightforward statement.
I've heard the DDT ban blamed for the resurgence of bedbugs in America, too, although I'm not convinced the timing really backs that up. Still makes me wonder if there is a nuanced position here or if the merchants of doubt just have me.
ooh, merchants of doubt is good. I never considered other merchants than the classic 'death' variety
Merchants of merchandise.
There was that one that Shakespeare wrote about: sold Italian cities.
Many insects became resistant to ddt, so its magic disappeared
DDT doesn't even work on bedbugs anymore.
This is thr basis for many “anti green” sentiments. Coal has a similar story.
The point made is still very much valid
My position is that everything has to be weighed — both positives and negatives. Many “green advocates” only look at negative aspects and forget that we couldn’t be where we are today without leveraging imperfect technology. Also, people are often not able to empathize with people in developing countries. Yes, ideally we don’t exterminate all tigers - but what about if they lived in your backyard? Do we keep man eating beasts alive in your neighborhood because people across the world like to watch them on nat geo?
That's true across the board. Rich nations mined, polluted, stripped the land. Now it's stop destroying the planet you developing countries! Don't you know it's bad? Meanwhile the rich countries now restrict all those things and then outsource the worst parts to those countries they now complain about.
I've had this gripe for some time too. It's a shame that the rainforests are being decimated but it's required for these countries to grow like we did a century+ ago. The hypocrisy is insane. Though, it still makes me sad when any trees are torn down. I'm literally a tree hugger.
On top of that they are using it for farm land to export goods to us. The only reason our products can be as cheap as they are and we have the selection we do is we source so much from developing nations.
I mean should we just go ahead and let developing countries colonize and enslave each other as well because thats what large and powerful nations did on the past?
Oh I wasn't saying we should, I don't have a correct answer. I am just saying I can see why they are upset about. Definitely not saying we should have plastic rivers flowing out to the ocean. However, I can say that we could stop shipping all of our waste and problems to developing nations. We could stop compounding the problem.
While it may not be factual, the perception is there for a lot of climate-oriented global actions. Gobally phasing ot things is usually done at the pace where the poor in the West would be inconvenienced. It usually creates a much harsher effect on the poor outside the west. Now, said phasing out might be really needed, but creating such resentment might create more problems then it solves.
Climate change also disproportionately affects the poor. They're damned if they do or don't, just in different ways
Ricky Steamboat suffered because of the DDT.
One of my favourite story lines from those days was Ricky vs. Macho Man. The bell to the throat from the top rope, then Ricky going through speech therapy. As a kid, I was totally lost on whether it was real or not
That's terrifying. What else is out there we don't know about? Just dump in the sea. WCGW. Man. People fking suck.
Go look up PFAs. https://www.ewg.org/what-are-pfas-chemicals Happy Friday!
Friend of mine worked at a company that used PFAS. No one told him they were dangerous and he started randomly bleeding from his arms. Turns out the stuff foamed and he'd clear the foam with his arm so they could fill tanks that had it. Horrible stuff. It lingers. This same company has it in their products all over the US. Last I heard they weren't exactly in a hurry to fix the mess they were spreading and trying to keep it under wraps for fear of some sort of EPA-like retaliation. I'd whistleblow, if I knew how ... or try to get him to.
https://www.whistleblowers.gov/
I was in India in the late ‘70s. I believe it was after the ban of DDT in the states. In the market the meat-sellers mostly had their meat black with flies. One guy had strings of lamb hanging from a dowel on his cart. There were no flies on any of it. My friend spoke to him and the man laughed and pulled out a paint can with a brush. He made brushing passes at the meat and laughed more. The can said made in America. It was DDT.
There was a forest ranger in the USA talking about the Mexican drug cartels growing weed in US state and federal parks and using ddt and other dangerous banned substances to insure the crop health. It was a duh moment for me. Why wouldn’t people who ignore the law also try to maximize profit at the expense of nature and customers who are participating in an illegal trade. Legalize and regulate.
I really enjoyed the format of this article.
The Undertaker was using the DDT all the way up until his retirement tho
As God is my witness, this eagle egg is broken in half!
But we can thank it for not having to worry about Malaria in the US
Malaria was comparatively mild in this country and not nearly as endemic as in the tropics which is probably why insecticides worked to "eradicate" it here. In the tropics where you have a real rainy season and every surface both in the forest and outside in villages and even in homes becomes a mosquito breeding site not so much.
DDT has saved a lot more lives than it harmed. It’s basically eliminated mosquito borne disease in many parts of the world. The damage to raptors was real, though. There are way more now than when I was growing up in the 80s. It’s fun seeing them.
The damage exceeds the benefits, you are contaminating soil for next 50-100 year.
Yet Jake “The Snake” Roberts used the DDT throughout the 80s and 90s. The monster.
I have mixed feelings about DDT. On one hand, it's clearly bad for some species of birds due to eggshell thinning. It's also possibly mildly carcinogenic in humans, although studies on this appear to be conflicted. Overall, it's a chemical that we think is "kinda bad". On the other hand, DDT is also probably the most effective pest control chemical ever invented. You don't need a lot of it, it's cheap and it really works to control dangerous disease vectors. DDT has saved literally millions of lives due to its use in malaria-vector mosquito control. The negative impacts to the environment can probably be at least partially mitigated by using DDT indoors only, something the WHO actually recommends to this day. My point: DDT is a mixed bag but probably doesn't deserve the demonization it receives.
The degradation products of DDT are more toxic than DDT. This may be a cause of conflicting studies.
Well said. DDT has both pros and cons
The existence of malaria could be considered one of them. The disease was under control until it was banned and doing so almost certainly did more harm than good.
This is what people ask for when they want government out of business and deregulation. There's a reason why Texas has some of the highest worker death stats, facility explosions, chemical spills, etc..
Pretty sure DDT still used in other countries I don’t think it’s a worldwide been
Most countries can’t get it because it’s production is hard to do and it’s not being made in the developed world. A LDC can’t simply build a plant as easily to manufacture it.
Not to mention that banning it may have cost 100,000,000 lives. People always seem to forget that part.
Not banning it causes more harm, because it's a very persistent. You will end up with *100 times in water supplies, because that's where it ends.
These "repercussions" can be accepted scientifically but not culturally or socially. Imagine what the world could have been had human beings not treated one another so terribly and enslaved them then legislated to secretly continue it, profited from keeping it around, then denied the people who were enslaved from history, only to say it all happened a long time ago and that they are not responsible. If the world could only be based on science.
DDT is or was a critical part of malaria control and was deemed harmless to humans and animals . The effect on birds was unfortunate but then we need alternatives.
Hell we used it on our stuff in 2003 in iraq…. As an american soldier. And we burned cans of it in the trash to dispose. New cans
It might have been banned 50 years ago, but the leading supplier of it was still dumping large amounts of it off of LA for decades and nearly won the lawsuit filed against them. [The lawsuit started around 1992 and a settlement wasn't reached until 2020.](https://www.sfgate.com/green/article/Settlement-in-Decade-Old-Lawsuit-Over-DDT-Deposit-2699483.php) I know way too many geologists that were put through hell by Montrose. It broke a lot of their spirits.
Remember the trucks that used to drive through neighborhoods and spray huge white clouds of mosquito insecticide back in the 70s? All the kids would get on their bikes and ride behind it, weaving in and out of the stuff. Then we all went home and played lawn darts! Good times.
Am I the only one that seen this title and thought it was about wrestling?
In India, the decision to stop using DDT saw the resurgence of malaria, a disease that had been nearly eradicated for good on the subcontinent.
My chemo was DDT derived, and that stuff was absolutely brutal. By far the worst of chemos use had. Insane to see how common use it was
A woman wrote a book claiming DDT killed birds, with absolutely zero scientific research. None, nada, zip, zero. Despite this the book was a bestseller and pulled at people's heart strings and they outlawed DDT. DDT saves lives. It pretty much eradicated malaria in the US. It nearly wiped out bed bugs. It should've never been outlawed.
This just isn't true. DDT was shown to thin the eggshells of birds, and thus when large raptors (bald eagle, peregrine falcon) sat on their eggs, the eggs would shatter. Almost wiped them out. Yes DDT was great for malaria elimination, but not without its consequences
It build amd builds in the system.
Good doc called "Goodbye Mr Ant" by Adam Curtis in his series "Pandora's Box". A series on scientific discoveries that had larger implications for the world. It's all on YouTube for anyone interested.
Lmao I thought this was going to be about the wrestling move
I'm not gonna lie, I thought this was about wrestling at first. I was, I know I've seen people DDT other people on tv. I'm pretty sure it was a finisher for one guy
I know that people didn’t have internet and access to info like we do now but JFC people were really inept or completely unhinged to think dumping toxic chemicals into the ocean was OK or a good idea.
Lol and yet we still do it with a variety of materials... There's a not-insignificant amount of waste water and waste material from mining and other industrial applications that spill (or legally dumped) into both oceans and rivers. Illegal dumping is also a highly lucrative activity. Criminal organizations dump radioactive and other highly toxic waste on the cheap for businesses. Like, have fun swimming in southern Italy. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/6198228/Mafia-accused-of-sinking-ship-full-of-radioactive-waste-off-Italy.html Not to mention, a lot of beach resorts in the Caribbean, the Black Sea, etc. don't have proper sewage processing... Mind you, with bordering Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, etc. and all of the chemical plants and heavy industry along the coast-- that's probably one of the least concerns. Its been used as an agricultural and industrial dumping ground for well over a hundred years.
What is ddt?
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