DDT has not been a factor in American life since 1972, when the
federal Environmental Protection Agency banned the pesticide mostly
because of its effects on wildlife. Or has it?
DDT has not been a factor in American life since 1972, when the federal Environmental Protection Agency banned the pesticide mostly because of its effects on wildlife. Or has it?
This question is now open following a landmark study by University of California-Berkeley researchers who found that babies and toddlers of California farmworkers exposed to DDT in their home countries suffer slowing of mental and physical development.
That’s a completely new side effect never before detected from DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane), better known for effects like thinning the eggshells of species including the California brown pelican to the point of making them almost extinct.
DDT was also known to build up in the bodies of humans exposed to it either through the anti-mosquito fogging programs common in the 1950s and ’60s or by consuming either fruits and vegetables sprayed with the insecticide or eating fish and other animals which contained large quantities of it. Large internal buildups of DDT were also suspected of causing breast, liver and kidney cancer.
Public health concerns over DDT disappeared from American discourse after it was banned here and in Canada. But the pesticide remains in use in many countries whose citizens often immigrate here, Mexico and other Latin American countries among them. In some locales, DDT remains the insecticide of choice in the constant war against malaria-bearing mosquitos. There is even a United Nations agreement (the so-called Stockholm Convention) permitting use of DDT against malaria mosquitos.
And there’s the rub for this country, especially immigrant-magnet California. Good as it was to ban DDT use in America, the Berkeley study makes it clear Americans – and Californians in particular – are still paying for its use elsewhere.
That federally-funded research, published in the peer-reviewed journal Pediatrics and conducted among recent immigrants working in the Salinas Valley, suggests DDT might be far more harmful than anyone previously guessed. Yes, it was known in the 1960s that the pesticide could cause neurological and testicular damage to persons heavily exposed, but no one thought to look for birth defects.
Health has always been a factor in legal immigration into this country, as applicants known to have chronic problems are often rejected for fear they might become public burdens.
But what about immigrants – legal and illegal – who have no history of health problems, but might have been exposed to DDT without even knowing it? That certainly describes many thousands of immigrants who enter as farm workers critically needed to keep crops from rotting in fields or on trees, as about 20 percent of this year’s Florida orange crop did because of a labor shortage.
If their children are affected in the ways the Berkeley study suggested, those kids will inevitably pose problems for public schools as long as they remain here.
And what of persons who enter this country as visitors but stay to have babies, who automatically become citizens with rights to emergency health care?
The most spectacular recent instance of this came at midsummer, when surgeons in a 22-hour operation at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles separated tiny twins who had been conjoined at birth.
Their mother and father, Mexican nationals Sonia Fierros and Federico Salinas, entered this country last year on tourist visas and had those permits extended after Fierros suffered a urinary tract infection during a visit with relatives and learned from doctors she was carrying conjoined twins.
The couple stayed on long after their visas expired, they said, because “We thought (the babies) would be able to get better medical care here,” the 23-year-old mother said after the successful operation, which cost an estimated $900,000, a cost shared by Childrens Hospital and the Medi-Cal program.
No one knows if either parent had been exposed to DDT or whether the insecticide caused the babies’ problem.
But two things are known for sure: One is that as long as the tide of immigrants continues at its current hot pace, American schools and health programs will have to deal with the after-effects of DDT use in the countries where it has not yet been banned. That will be true whether the immigrants arrive illegally, via a new guest worker program or on tourist permits.
The other certainty is that the longer this country remains passive about pushing a complete worldwide ban on DDT, the worse the problem will get.
Tom Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated second edition. His email address is td*****@ao*.com
