[PIF]

“... urogenital and developmental abnormalities in animals and, presumably, also in humans.”

That must be the reason after being enveloped in the stuff for at least 15 summers, I have managed to live in excellent for an additional 58 years.

[Rockingham]

If one puts DDT as the search term into PubMed, it returns over 12,000 articles with detailed scientific evidence about the effects of DDT and DDE, its primary active metabolite. The weight of that evidence is that DDT and DDE are harmful, with the cumulative scientific case being somewhere between highly persuasive and compelling. I recommend spending at least an hour or two reading PubMed abstracts and medical journal articles as a counter to the view that DDT is harmless.

Wonder Warthog: As a boy in Orlando, Florida in the 1960s, I recall with fondness that the fire ant eradication effort used old B-17 bombers that buzzed the area in formation. They were spraying sweetened corn meal with Mirex though, not DDT. Contrary to belief at the time, Mirex was later recognized as widely toxic. The fire ant eradication effort not only failed, but it seems to have promoted fire ants by eliminating competing native ant species.

[Rockingham]

Unlike the immediate impact of say, drinking a dose of cyanide, the effects of trace amounts of DDT are variable and hard to connect to a specific case of illness. There is credible evidence though for DDT as having a role in thyroid problems, breast and liver cancer, hypertension, diabetes, and weight gain. Follow the PubMed link I already provided for details and additional information.