I never had a job this bad :D

BlunderWoman

BlunderWoman

Senior Member
I was reading on a website where this employee had to get her head infested with lice several times so they could do research on lice removal. Now that's earning a paycheck the hard way :D
 

We know what works and works well... DDT. It also controls mosquitoes, etc. I watched a documentary a while back on Amazon Prime called "3 Billion and Counting" that had some amazing things to say about why DDT was banned (hint, it's a conspiracy theory documentary). I don't know what the truth is in all of that but it made me think of chlorine; we use it all over the place, life as we know it would be a lot different without it, and it can cause serious problems too, especially if used "incorrectly".
 

I studied chemistry at university and one of my major assignments was on the subject of the unintentional effect of metabolites of organochlorines (DDT, aldrin and dieldrin) on non target species. I chose the effect of DDT on chickens and what I learned was this:-

DDT is harmless to humans if it falls on the skin. You can bathe in it and dust it under your arms and it won't be absorbed because it doesn't dissolve in water, so cannot enter the body through the skin.

It does dissolve in fats and oils and it enters humans and lower order animals via the food we eat that contains fats and oils. Once in the body it is converted to a metabolite (a DDT derivative molecule) that is even less soluble in water and thus cannot be excreted by the kidneys in urine or by sweat so it accumulates in fatty tissues. Breast feeding mothers pass it on to their babies in their milk which is rich in lipids. The metabolite has (from memory) a half life of about 25 years which means that it stays in the body for a very long time and goes on accumulating in fat.

How does it get into food? First it is sprayed onto crops and some of it leaches into the soil and is consumed by worms and other microbes, which are then eaten by birds and all the way up the food chain to the apex predators, being concentrated at each stage. For chickens, they either scratch around as free range birds and pick it up from the soil and worms or they are battery raised and pick it up from wooden pallets that have been sprayed for borers. In the end, humans end up consuming it in the egg yolks and in chicken meat. The same thing happens with fish because the run off from spraying crops ends up in the rivers and water supplies. Beef and lamb are less likely to have such concentrated levels but milk and other fatty dairy products can be very contaminated.

The problem was first highlighted by Rachel Carson in her book The Silent Spring where she brought the world's attention to what was happening to eagles. DDT absorption was causing their eggs to have thin shells and few chicks were hatching. Numbers of wild eagles were in rapid decline. Further studies confirmed that organochlorines were to blame.

When DDT was first used it saved many lives from starvation by improving crop yields, and from diseases such as malaria and plague that were transmitted by insect vectors. Consequently it was adopted with great enthusiasm and sprayed about willy nilly. It was only later that some restraint occurred and finally it was banned, especially when it was found in the fat cells of Antarctic penguins. It had become a major pollutant across the whole globe.

There was no conspiracy involved in the banning of organochlorines. The long term negatives outweighed the positives, especially so as insects evolved by natural selection to become resistant quite quickly.
 
Warrigal said:
I studied chemistry at university and one of my major assignments was on the subject of the unintentional effect of metabolites of organochlorines (DDT, aldrin and dieldrin) on non target species. I chose the effect of DDT on chickens and what I learned was this:-

DDT is harmless to humans if it falls on the skin. You can bathe in it and dust it under your arms and it won't be absorbed because it doesn't dissolve in water, so cannot enter the body through the skin.

It does dissolve in fats and oils and it enters humans and lower order animals via the food we eat that contains fats and oils. Once in the body it is converted to a metabolite (a DDT derivative molecule) that is even less soluble in water and thus cannot be excreted by the kidneys in urine or by sweat so it accumulates in fatty tissues. Breast feeding mothers pass it on to their babies in their milk which is rich in lipids. The metabolite has (from memory) a half life of about 25 years which means that it stays in the body for a very long time and goes on accumulating in fat.

How does it get into food? First it is sprayed onto crops and some of it leaches into the soil and is consumed by worms and other microbes, which are then eaten by birds and all the way up the food chain to the apex predators, being concentrated at each stage. For chickens, they either scratch around as free range birds and pick it up from the soil and worms or they are battery raised and pick it up from wooden pallets that have been sprayed for borers. In the end, humans end up consuming it in the egg yolks and in chicken meat. The same thing happens with fish because the run off from spraying crops ends up in the rivers and water supplies. Beef and lamb are less likely to have such concentrated levels but milk and other fatty dairy products can be very contaminated.

The problem was first highlighted by Rachel Carson in her book The Silent Spring where she brought the world's attention to what was happening to eagles. DDT absorption was causing their eggs to have thin shells and few chicks were hatching. Numbers of wild eagles were in rapid decline. Further studies confirmed that organochlorines were to blame.

When DDT was first used it saved many lives from starvation by improving crop yields, and from diseases such as malaria and plague that were transmitted by insect vectors. Consequently it was adopted with great enthusiasm and sprayed about willy nilly. It was only later that some restraint occurred and finally it was banned, especially when it was found in the fat cells of Antarctic penguins. It had become a major pollutant across the whole globe.

There was no conspiracy involved in the banning of organochlorines. The long term negatives outweighed the positives, especially so as insects evolved by natural selection to become resistant quite quickly.
Click to expand...
With your background it would be interesting to hear your take on that documentary. That documentary was impressive to me but I understand that I'm not in a position to tell fact versus fiction on that subject.
 
We were always being asked to volunteer for germ warfare tests at the UK's Chemical Warfare Establishment at Porton Down, ostensibly for research into the common cold.

I never went, but many did, and suffered for years afterwards, as do those who volunteered for radiation experiments at the UK's nuclear tests in the southern oceans..

As you say, hell of a way to earn a buck.
 

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