Good For Me

I found a packet of ddt in my house, so I called up the local fire department to ask them what i should do with it only to be greeted with an "what's DDT?" response.

it's refreshing to see so many people who are actually aware of WHY DDT was banned, and that it wasn't actually the scourge that so many people were led to believe it to be (under mostly false and factless claims).

the fact of the matter is that almost ANY pesticide can cause health issues, but it depends on how it's used. scientifically speaking, there should've been no reason that DDT was banned, and there are plenty of pesticides still readily available at Home Depot that are just as dangerous, if not moreso. take a look at Sevin (carbaryl): it's available in pretty much every garden shop in the US. but it's also directly related to one of the worst industrial accidents in world history (the Bhopal Disaster) and it's STILL causing problems 25 years later.

sure, if you're going to blanket-spray urban areas on a constant basis with any pesticide, there's a huge risk of health problems...which is why we don't do things like that. but if you're spraying the perimeter of your home while wearing rubber gloves and a face mask, the health risks are pretty minimal. certainly in places like Africa, the benefits FAR outweigh the very slight potential health risks as long as the product is used carefully and responsibly.

the World Health Organization considers DDT to be extremely important, but more and more countries are banning it (and again, with a huge lack of truthful data). and like others have said, there is has been a resurgence of malaria-carrying mosquitoes over the past several years, and now they're becoming resistant to DDT (it's kinda like using an antibiotic: unless you use ALL of it and take it exactly like your supposed to, there's a good chance that it won't work anymore in the future. i learned this first-hand, and amoxycillan doesn't work on me anymore).

i also fully believe that the ban on DDT is the primary reason that the bedbug population has exploded, and trust me, those things are almost impossible to get rid of! and now they're finding bedbugs that are extremely resistant to most other pesticides as well. luckily they're not considered disease vectors, but they say that could change too.

More people die each year of dihydromonoxide poisoning than have ever died of DDT. Dihydromonoxide is also found in the tissues under electron microscope scan.

As for Monsanto, the government should have stepped in and shut them down years ago. Making seeds and fertilizers is unconscionable. How dare they remain in business.

One other note- DDT is easy to see in tissue samples with an electron microscope. The granules show up as bright glowing spots under the beam in both regular (SEI) mode and in backscatter (BEI) mode.

OMG- I actually tore this out of an old magazine and had it posted on the wall of one of my lab spaces back in the mid 1980's. It's nice to see it again. :)

I used to tell my friends about this ad/graphic, but they simply wouldn't believe me.