It's the left who got DDT banned, using little to no evidence of harm to the wildlife.
Our eagle almost went extinct. I have a friend who still spends her summers climbing very tall trees to peek in eagles' nests to count the eggs, thanks to the effects of DDT. It has been correlated with breast cancer and damage to a lot of other species, including accumulating in vegetation which is then consumed and accumulates in critters and people. I wouldn't say there is no evidence it harmed wild life. There are other answers to protecting babies from Zika, and they are working on them post haste.
Like I said, based on very little evidence.
The Truth About DDT and Silent Spring
Claim #1: DDT Causes Cancer in Humans.In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the average American could be expected to ingest DDT in food and drink at levels of around 30 micrograms per day.
[28]
R. E. Duggan and P. E. Corneliussen, “
Dietary Intake of Pesticide Chemicals in the United States (III), June 1969-April 1970,”
Pesticides Monitoring Journal 5, no. 4 (1972): 331–341. This comprehensive multi-year study, conducted by scientists working for the Food and Drug Administration, was cited by EPA reports well into the 1970s. My figure of 30 micrograms per day is an extrapolation from their data, assuming an average weight of around 68 kg (150 pounds) and working from the fact that the study assumed a diet “almost twice the ‘average’ intake of the ‘average’ individual.”
(Note: 1 gram = 1,000 milligrams = 1,000,000 micrograms.) Numerous studies of workers with intense exposure to DDT in the workplace, sometimes by factors of thousands more than the average dose — either in factories or in the field using DDT to combat malaria — have failed to show any “convincing evidence of patterns of associations between DDT and cancer incidence or mortality,” according to the World Health Organization.
World Health Organization,
DDT in Indoor Residual Spraying: Human Health Aspects (Geneva: WHO, 2011), 71.
The thousands of individuals in these studies were regularly exposed to hundreds or perhaps thousands of times the amount of DDT that the average American would have been exposed to, but cancer rates seem not to have been elevated.
D. Ditraglia
et al., “
Mortality Study of Workers Employed at Organochlorine Pesticide Manufacturing Plants,”
Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health 7, no. 4 (1981): 140–146; Wong
et al., “
Mortality of Workers Potentially Exposed to Organic and Inorganic Brominated Chemicals, DBCP, TRIS, PBB, and DDT,”
British Journal of Industrial Medicine 41, no. 1 (1984): 15–24; H. Austin
et al., “
A Prospective Follow-Up Study of Cancer Mortality in Relation to Serum DDT,”
American Journal of Public Health 79, no. 1 (1989): 43–46; Cocco
et al., “
Proportional Mortality of Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane (DDT) Workers: A Preliminary Report,”
Archives of Environmental Health 52, no. 4 (1997): 299–303; P. Cocco
et al., “
Cancer Mortality and Environmental Exposure to DDE in the United States,”
Environmental Health Perspectives 108, no. 1 (2000): 1–4; Cocco
et al., “
Cancer Mortality Among Men Occupationally Exposed to Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane,”
Cancer Research 65, no. 20 (2005): 9588–9594; Purdue
et al., “
Occupational Exposure to Organochlorine Insecticide and Cancer Incidence in the Agricultural Health Study,”
International Journal of Cancer 120, no. 3 (2007): 642–649.
A great many studies of specific cancers — breast cancer, lung cancer, testicular cancer, liver cancer, prostate cancer, and more — over many decades have failed to show significant evidence of cancer as a result of exposure to DDT.
World Health Organization,
DDT in Indoor Residual Spraying, 71–83. There is, however, some evidence that exposure to DDT before puberty may be linked to breast cancer later in life; see
ibid., 71–75.
There is scientific evidence that ingesting DDT or its byproduct DDE can cause mice to develop tumors, but only if they are fed at least ten times the amount per day (by body weight) that a person would normally expect to ingest.
Ibid., 52–61.
Cancer studies of other mammals have been less conclusive.
Ibid., 61–64.
In other studies of the effects of DDT on mammals, rats fed with large doses of the substance were found to have their reproductive lifespans increased by 65 percent (from 8.91 months to 14.55 months).
Alice Ottoboni, “
Effect of DDT on the Reproductive Life-Span in the Female Rat,”
Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology 22, no. 3 (1972): 497–502.
Heavily dosed dogs also experienced no ill effects, and in fact were found to be healthier than the control group, as DDT freed them of infestation by roundworms.
[35]
Alice Ottoboni, Glenn D. Bissell, and Alfred C. Hexter, “
Effects of DDT on Reproduction in Multiple Generations of Beagle Dogs,”
Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology 6, no. 1 (1977): 83–101.
Summarizing all of the relevant research, the U.S. government reported in 2002 that
“there is no clear evidence that exposure to DDT/DDE causes cancer in humans.”
ATSDR, “Toxicological Profile for DDT, DDE, and DDD,” 2002, 25.
That assessment is a vindication of the legal conclusion of Judge Edmund Sweeney’s 1972 report on DDT for the EPA: “DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man.”
