Posted on 12/07/2015 11:17:08 AM PST by DogByte6RER
These People Took DDT Pills In the 1970s to Prove it Was Safe
In 1971 two people in North Hollywood started eating DDT pills every day. That's right, they willingly swallowed 10mg of poison every single day for three months. In front of witnesses.
From the Associated Press:
- Robert Loibl and his wife, Louise, hold 10-milligram capsules of DDT which they took in front of witnesses for 93 days at lunch time, June 10, 1971. Loibl said their total dosage was more than the average person consumes in 83 years. He said his wife's dandruff disappeared, their appetites perked up and they feel better. Loibl said they just wanted to call attention to the public that DDT was safe. The potential dangers of DDT first came to mainstream America's attention in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. The book jumpstarted the modern environmental movement in the US and helped bring attention to the harmful effects that DDT was having on wildlife. Spraying DDT was not great for birds and marine life. But we now know that its danger to humans was overstated.
DDT became controversial in mainstream American culture during the late 1960s and the EPA banned the use of DDT as a pesticide in 1972. But the stigma attached to the chemical has had negative consequences around the world, especially for the fight against malaria.
In the first half of the 20th century, malaria was infecting millions of Americans a year and killing about 3,000 annually. Despite being synthesized in 1874, DDT wasn't developed as an insecticide until 1939 by Swiss scientist Paul Muller. But DDT then quickly helped wipe out malaria in the Western world. By 1951 the United States was officially rid of the mosquito-transmitted disease. But other countries weren't so lucky.
In 2006 malaria was still infecting about 300 million people worldwide and killing about 1 million people a year. The World Health Organization took another look at DDT in the mid-2000s and controversially promoted it as a way to fight the malaria epidemic in Africa and Asia. Today, roughly a decade later, the number of malaria deaths worldwide have been almost cut in half.
DDT typically doesn't cause health problems in humans after limited exposure. It's the prolonged exposure that scientists are most concerned about. The FDA has classified DDT as a B2 carcinogen, which is to say it's a probable human carcinogen based on tests on animals. That's below a B1 carcinogen, which is based on evidence found in humans, and an A carcinogen, which is a classification reserved for when something is definitively carcinogenic to humans.
Whatever happened to Robert and Louise Loibl who swallowed DDT for three months straight? I haven't been able to figure that one out. They don't show up in any newspaper accounts of the mid-1970s and I can't find death records for either of them. For all we know, they may have died of acute DDT poisoning the following year. But it's a safe bet that however they eventually died, it wasn't from malaria.
Cite that study please. Birds reserve calcium in their leg bones, and draw on the reserve for making shell. They do not use dietary calcium directly.
It was great stuff.
LOL!
And you have to have the stored calcium to draw on.
Having raised chickens I know that a low calcium diet does result in egg with thin shells and hens eating their own eggs to get back the minerals expended in the laying.
I still remember chasing the DDT trucks up the street as they drove by and deeply breathing in the “noxious” fumes. The neighborhood kids and I did it every time they passed our streets. It was a cloud of DDT and I have no breathing problems or health problems. I miss mosquito-free summer days.
When I was a kid, the mosquito trucks went down the street once a year spraying and there was a big fog hanging in the air. I would run through that fog, as the smell was nice, and it was fun to run through the fog. No ill effects whatsoever.
Hens eat broken eggs, to be sure. And I had a Buff Orpington break her legs in a high jump. But hens are an exception. They lay nearly every day. Birds of prey will lay two to four eggs a year. Wild birds were destroying their eggs in the process of moving their feet around them and turning them as they incubated.
The birds they used in the study were quail. Which are fairly close to chicken.
The odd thing is that feeding the birds a regular diet that included DDT did not reduce the number of eggs the bird laid, did not result in thinner shells and actually more eggs hatched then was normal.
It was not until they hit on the low calcium diet that they could "prove" that the problem was DDT
Supposedly there were discussions at high levels on how to deal with the exploding Third World population due to advances in/availability of Western medicine (at a time when libs honestly believed we would fill the earth). I wouldn’t be surprised if the war on DDT was to balance out the lower infant mortality and longer lifespans that resulted from that Western medicine. Our overlords today make no secret of reducing the Third World birthrates; why would this be shocking?
I was surprised to recently read (I believe it was in the WSJ) about the problems caused by low birthrates throughout the world today; Japan’s collapse is heading elsewhere now (and in the West we try to head it off by importing scads of Third Worlders). I’ve posted ad nauseum that our open borders were to keep whole areas populated (including my own state of NJ); without these imports whole towns would be devoid of people.
Rachael the killer.
Who was “they” and what was their motive?
That’s very true, underpopulation is expected to be a big problem in the near future. That’s why the Germans are bringing in Muslims...they don’t have enough young Germans even to maintain their country.
Underpopulation has happened at various times in scattered places after a crisis (for example, in Europe after the Black Death, when entire villages and districts were empty) and has always brought massive long-lasting economic disaster.
To have an economy, you need people. But one of the unstated ideas of the WWII generation of eugenicists (not the Boomers, but their predecessors such as Carson) was that their generation would be the last or next to last. So they really didn’t care.
It isn’t in the near future - it is now. I’m surprised Germany wants Muslims because they welcome EU workers from member states with high unemployment. They have requirements (language & skills) that many EU citizens can’t meet, but they MUST be closer than the Muslims. Then again, by refusing other EU citizens, they are probably preventing an accelerated collapse of those countries (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Greece).
All those countries have population dearths too. This year in Spain, for the first time, deaths exceeded births.
It was alleged that osprey in CT were laying eggs with shells too fragile to survive brooding. At the time the wildlife people were stealing eggs from nests in Maryland to take to CT, and losing about half of those to breakage on the way.
The motive was the banning of DDT.
It turns out that argument was fraudulent. A scientist conducted a series of experiments on chickens, adding DDT to their diet but reducing the proportion of calcium. He reported in Science that their egg shells were thinner than normal. He then ran another experiment, feeding the chickens DDT and the normal amount of calcium. The eggs had the normal thickness, but Science refused to publish the paper.
That's the origin of the "thinner eggshell" story. Just more junk science.
“I bet the eggs they lay have thin shellsâ€
You didn’t say it all. DDT’s effect on the eggs of birds was the reason it was banned, wasn’t it? Not that it was harmful to people.”
Ha haa, my comment was about the eggs laid by the people who were taking the DDT tablets. Note: most people don’t lay eggs. Now I may be wrong here, but I have never seen a couple of Hollywood 1960’s vintage hippy weirdos laying eggs. Even after taking DDT capsules, or doing LSD, egg laying was not involved.
I’m surprised Spain only reached that point now; wasn’t there a news story a couple of years ago that more white people were dying in the US than were being born? I assumed Spain, Italy, and Germany had all reached that point (though of course those numbers would be skewed by immigrants’ births - especially Muslims).
Me too in the late 60’s. Next to the ice cream truck the fogger was the best show in the neighborhood!
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