From
September 1960 to June 1964, I was an investigator for the US Food and Drug
Administration. One of my more macabre assignments was the result of a book by
Rachel Carson titled Silent Spring (1962)
that raised public awareness of the dangers inherent with the use of DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane).
This book grabbed the public's attention like few other non-fiction books have.
People began organizing to ban the use of DDT, not unlike the organized public
outcry against the use of Monsanto's Glyphosate (Roundup). One of my
most interesting college courses was the study of a brand new (at the time)
concept—Ecology. Since Carson's book dealt with the impact of DDT and other
agricultural poisons on the environment, it caught my interest and I read it
almost as soon as I could get a copy. Interesting, scary, troubling, but I
didn't see any direct application of her thesis to my immediate life.
About
the time I was hired, the FDA had begun gathering evidence about effects of
using antibiotics in animal feed to prevent disease and to enhance growth, the
result of research done in the 1950s that showed that this use, especially in
quantity, was creating antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. A set of laws to
monitor antibiotic use by farmers was promulgated and the responsibility for
enforcing these laws fell to the FDA and its investigators. As a result, I
spent several months talking with farmers about antibiotic use and also
checking feed mixers for cross contamination—antibiotics getting into animal
feed where it wasn't intended. I also was inadvertently made aware of farmer
complaints that DDT was useless for controlling the thousands of flies that
infested free stalls and milk parlors, and some thought that it was making
themselves and family members sick.
Two
main questions formed the basis for my assignments—how was DDT getting into the
human food chain, and how prevalent was DDT contamination in the population.
Beside direct contact with the poison, milk was found to be an important source
of contamination. Within my jurisdiction were several large apple products
producers. One of the byproducts of production was tons of peels, cores, stems and
seeds called pomace. This pomace was discarded onto large, fermenting and odiferous
piles behind the plants, clearly useless until a local farmer decided to feed
some to his dairy cattle. The results were amazing; apple pomace increased milk
fat production from ten to twenty percent. This discovery proved to be a major
windfall for local dairy farmers who began hauling pomace away from the
producers by the truckload, and for the producers who were now rid of a
nuisance at no cost to them. The caveat—the fat in apple skins concentrated the
DDT that the growers used to control pests that infected their trees and passed
unaltered through the cows into their milk and then into people.
The
other question: What was the prevalence of DDT in humans? Related to this
question was my assignment to collect samples of liver tissue from cadavers.
For four months I visited pathologist within my jurisdiction and at the end of
that time I had packaged seventy chunks of liver from recently deceased humans
in dry ice and express freighted them back to our lab in Baltimore. Six months
later I received a copy of the results of my work and that of several hundred
other investigators nationwide. Ninety percent of all the liver samples
contained some DDT, the quantity dependent on several factors such as diet and
occupation. Similar investigations are currently ongoing regarding Glyphosate
and GMOs that are now suspected of causing a host of serious problems such as
several forms of cancer, infertility, stillbirths, fetal abnormalities and
other morbid health issues. A poison is a poison; there is no escaping that
reality.
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