Where did DDT get its dirty name?
The whole matter boiled over in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson’s blockbuster Silent Spring. Carson’s writing raised the dark suspicion that DDT was upsetting the balance of nature. Nowhere did she acknowledge that the chemical had saved millions of lives. Nor did she make it clear how judiciously and selectively the public-health community deployed DDT. Her criticism was based almost entirely upon the fact that in agriculture DDT was being sprayed indiscriminately. One of DDT’s biggest assets, its inability to be broken down quickly, created the suspicion that it adversely affected the environment. It was for this reason that it was named as one of the persistent organic pollutants (or POPs) and included in a list of vilified organic substances known as the dirty dozen. However, the quantities involved in IRS are minimal: 2 g per square metre. Donald Roberts noted in 1997 that: “treating a 4 square kilometre cotton field which is the size of a single farm in some locations
