Does DDT Inhibit Cancers?
The workers in the Montrose Chemical Company, which produced DDT, used no gloves or protective clothing of any kind and they were inhaling the DDT dust all day. Dr. Edward R. Laws of the U.S. Public Health Service examined the Montrose workers and found that they had accumulated 38 to 647 parts per million of DDT and its isomers in their fat tissue, but experienced no ill effects. At that time, the level of DDT in the fat tissue of the general population was only 5 or 6 parts per million. Laws stated in a publication of the American Medical Association: “It is noteworthy that (after 10 to 20 years on the job) no cases of cancer developed among these workers, in some 1,300 man-years of exposure, a statistically improbable event.” [7] Laws later performed experiments feeding rodents DDT at 10,000 times the proportion ingested by humans and then transplanting malignant tumors directly into their brains. Without the DDT there was 100 percent mortality, but the cancers disappeared from the
