As a child they sprayed our village with a concentration that had DDT in it. I will bet you the Cancer and death rate per capita was nowhere near what it is today.
DDT reduces the incidence of cancer.http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/Fall02/Mosquitoes.html
To control Anopheles mosquitoes, DDT was sprayed on inside walls once or twice a year. In 1959, spraymen applied 60,000 tons of DDT to the inside walls of 100 million houses. There was never any need to wear masks or protective clothing while doing DDT spraying. No adverse effects were ever experienced by the 130,000 spraymen or the 535 million people living in the sprayed houses.8
In house spraying, the amount applied was 2 grams of DDT per square meter of wall, every 6 months.9 Also, no wildlife was injured by DDT in those areas. The World Health Organization Director concluded, “The discontinuation of the use of DDT would be a disaster to world health.”
Montrose Chemical Company workers in California, who wore no masks or goggles, were never harmed by their constant exposure to DDT. When their fatty tissues were analyzed, they were found to contain up to 647 parts per million (ppm) of DDT residues. The fatty tissues of the general population at that time contained only 5 or 6 ppm of DDT.10 There were no cancer cases in those workers, even after 1,300 man-years of heavy daily exposure to DDT. Dr. Edward R. Laws, of the U.S. Public Health Service, found that those Montrose workers still were healthy after 10 to 20 years of that exposure.
In addition to its effectiveness, DDT is inexpensive. The cost of spraying in 1959 was $205,000, but if substitutes had to be used, malathion would have cost $637,000, and propoxur would have cost $1,762,000 for the same control. A 1.5 oz. whisky jigger full of 70 percent wettable DDT covers 144 square feet of wall surface, killing all mosquitoes that land there during the next six months.
In the 1960s, the World Health Organization tested more than 1,300 pesticides, seeking effective substitutes for DDT in mosquito control. Only four approached DDT’s effectiveness: Malathion, Aprocarb (Baygon), fenthion, and fenitrothion, but all were more hazardous to humans than DDT and were 4 to 20 times more expensive than DDT.11
Because, over the years, I kept hearing propagandist claims that DDT is toxic to people, I studied all of the relevant scientific and medical literature. Here I mention only some details on DDT’s safety:
Evidence That DDT Fights Cancer
• Drs. Charles Salinskas and Allan E. Okey reported that DDT in rodent diets inhibited development of induced mammary cancers and leukemia.13
• A.E. and E.K. McLean determined that after animals had ingested DDT, the highly toxic aflatoxins they had been fed were not fatal, perhaps because they were converted to non-toxic metabolites by the liver.14 DDT was also known to induce the formation of hepatic microsomal enzymes which, in turn, inhibited the growth of tumors and cancers.