Why ddt is good

Scientists find DDT in soil, water, and even in ice from the arctic to Antarctica. A blanket of DDT covers the earth, punctuated here and there with highly tainted areas where it was, or is still, in heavy use. Between and , Montrose Chemical Corporation, at the time the world's largest manufacturer of DDT, dumped thousands of tons of DDT into the ocean where California sea lions mate and birth their pups.

He regularly toured the sea lion breeding grounds and in the late s started seeing a strange and very disturbing trend. Le Boeuf and his colleagues counted all the pups born that year and fully half of them were dead. He suspected pesticides might be involved, partly because he knew Montrose dumped DDT right where the sea lions hunted for food.

There was already correlation between DDT and harm to wildlife. So Le Boeuf took some sea lion blubber samples back to the lab for analysis. What he found amazes him to this day. Each animal collected an incredible quarter-pound of DDE in their fatty tissues during the short time they spent in the Channel Islands each year.

Le Boeuf only took samples from male animals, who mate at the Channel Islands then head north again to cleaner waters at the end of summer.

Female sea lions winter further south, in areas more contaminated than northern waters, so Le Boeuf thought they might had been getting DDE-spiked fish the year around. Le Boeuf speculated that the amount of DDE the female sea lions were ingesting could be responsible for the huge number of aborted pups he saw. Biologist Robert Delong at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle, Washington answered that question in when he compared DDT levels in female sea lions who aborted their pups with those that carried their pups to full term.

He also took tissue samples from dead and living premature pups and normal, healthy pups. His findings confirmed what Le Boeuf and others suspected. The females who aborted their pups contained at least eight times more DDT than the ones who had full-term pups. Delong drew the first direct connection between levels of DDT and premature pupping in sea lions. DDT was, and still is, an attractive insecticide because it's cheap and effective. It's also persistent.

It kills bugs that land on sprayed walls for months or years after application, and there's no immediate toxic effects on humans. Its persistence is exactly what worries many scientists. Estimates of its half life--the time it takes half of it to degrade--vary from 5 to 20 years depending on the environmental conditions.

It still shows up in California's oceans and streams whenever sediments are churned up. DDT's quick success as a pesticide and broad use in the United States and other countries led to the development of resistance by many insect pest species. The U. Department of Agriculture, the federal agency with responsibility for regulating pesticides before the formation of the U. Environmental Protection Agency in , began regulatory actions in the late s and s to prohibit many of DDT's uses because of mounting evidence of the pesticide's declining benefits and environmental and toxicological effects.

The publication in of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring stimulated widespread public concern over the dangers of improper pesticide use and the need for better pesticide controls. In , EPA issued a cancellation order for DDT based on its adverse environmental effects, such as those to wildlife, as well as its potential human health risks. Since then, studies have continued, and a relationship between DDT exposure and reproductive effects in humans is suspected, based on studies in animals.

In addition, some animals exposed to DDT in studies developed liver tumors. As a result, today, DDT is classified as a probable human carcinogen by U. After the use of DDT was discontinued in the United States, its concentration in the environment and animals has decreased, but because of its persistence, residues of concern from historical use still remain. Thus, the harm will only fully emerge over the course of a number of generations. This is why DDT use is also an issue of intergenerational justice.

Consideration of intergenerational justice invites us to examine how our practices and activities will impose burdens and benefits on those who will inhabit the world 50 or or years from now [ 29 ].

We now have good reason to believe, based on the evidence discussed above, that the use of DDT will impose burdens on individuals in the next two or four generations, at least, while the current generation enjoys the benefits of its use. As we discuss below, questions of intergenerational justice differ from other kinds of decisions.

All the affected parties are not known in advance because some do not yet exist. Who comes to exist in the future, and what health deficits they might face, is determined by decisions, both individual and policy-level, made today.

Of course, the question of what the present generation owes future generations is greatly complicated by the non-identity problem and related issues [ 30 ]. We will directly address these complications in future work, though here we hope to limit our claims so as to avoid the most difficult questions raised by that problem. We characterize the ethical issues in terms of environmental injustice because those who might live in the future are the ultimate socially disempowered group.

They can have no input into or control over environmental conditions that will affect their well-being. The principle of nonmaleficence concisely expresses the widely-held moral conviction that it is wrong to harm another, other things being equal. Assuming that any offspring of individuals exposed to DDT will be harmed by the ancestral exposure, the principle of nonmaleficence applies, even to future generations.

Second, while many individuals might consent to undergo risk or actual harm, for some compensating benefit, the offspring cannot consent prior to the onset of the mechanism of injury. This violates respect for autonomy , which would otherwise be expressed, partially, in the ability to make an informed consent to assume risk or harm. Of course, those who do not exist yet do not have any autonomy to respect. Thus, they cannot consent to take on the epigenetic harm that will affect whoever comes to exist.

Finally, the principle of justice calls for the distribution of benefits and burdens including harms in some kind of principled manner. DDT use affecting future generations through epigenetic harm seems to be a good provisional example of an unfair imposition of harm without corresponding benefit.

One objection might say that if DDT had not been used in the current generation F0 , then members of a future generation F3 who are the progeny of F0 might not have come to exist Figure 1. Members of the F0 generation might have died of malaria before having children. Thus, the alleged cause of harm to the F3 generation, the use of DDT in F0, might actually also be part of what enables F3 to come to exist.

How might this affect the provisional claim that current DDT use in F0 is ethically suspect? First, that the objection exists does not immediately justify the status quo.

The objection is based on quite a few conditional claims. For example, if members of F3 never came to exist, they would not be harmed by not existing [ 30 ]. The non-identity problem raises notorious complex questions of why it would be wrong to bring into existence a person who suffers health deficits, but who would not exist if not for the mechanism that also caused those deficits. Here we lack the space to fully address this concern, but in future work we hope to develop an agent-based account of wrong action that can be used to address the counterintuitive implications of the non-identity problem.

Agents who act from moral vice or the absence of virtue might be ethically criticized even given the non-identity problem. We hope to develop this agent-based approach for dealing with actions that have transgenerational implications. While it is not clear to us that the current use of DDT is obviously wrong, it now requires, we think, a more elaborate justification given its epigenetic effects.

That deaths of members of F0 are avoidable, via malaria prevention, does raise an ethical concern in itself again, the principle of nonmaleficence would be relevant here. But if there are alternative ways to prevent malaria deaths in F0, we should obviously consider them. A number of organochlorine pesticides with shorter half-lives i. More recently developed pesticides such as bifenthrin [ 34 ], chlorfenapyr [ 35 ], and pirimiphos [ 36 ] have been shown to be effective as alternatives for DDT consideration.

Although the alternatives like methoxychlor may promote transgenerational disease [ 37 ], more recently developed pesticides such as nicotinoids are also alternatives to consider [ 38 , 39 ]. Clearly factors such as cost and half-life which would require more frequent distribution are factors, this consideration would have to be part of the decision making process [ 15 ]. Their lives and well-being cannot be discounted in the same way that economists discount future commodities [ 40 , 41 ].

Thus, any future health care costs caused by actions taken today need to be incorporated into a cost-benefit assessment. We do not claim to have worked out that decision making process, but we do argue that new concerns about epigenetic harm and transgenerational inheritance should reframe that process. Policy makers need to incorporate these considerations of transgenerational justice into their deliberation. Concern about the well-being of members of the F0 generation, as well as members of the F3 generation, appear to call for some sort of trade-off or balancing of benefits and burdens.

While we do not have space here to fully consider all the ramifications of this trade-off, we believe it is important to recognize that the decision to use DDT in the current generation has this implication. Very briefly, we note that the F0 generation might benefit from DDT use by the preservation of life and health freedom from malaria in the current generation. The F0 generation might also experience some burdens associated with its exposure to DDT [ 42 ]. And, F0 might experience harms if DDT is not used.

In a scenario where members of the F3 generation never come to exist because their great-grandparents died prior to reproducing, there can be no harm to those who do not yet, or never, come to exist. Members of F3 would be harmed, again by appeal to the recent epigenetic findings, if DDT is used.

On this admittedly brief analysis of the trade-offs, it is certainly not clear that the F3 generation would benefit more from current use of DDT than from not using it. If there are alternatives for preventing malaria in the F0 generation that do not cause epigenetic harm, then the case for using them would seem to be ethically superior to any trade-off scenario involving continued use of DDT.

We draw two conclusions from this analysis. First, because recent empirical findings show that DDT is likely to cause intergenerational harm, policies involving its use should be re-considered to incorporate these new concerns into the decision procedure to use DDT. We have tried to highlight some of those new concerns in ethical terms Table 1.

Second, the provisional case against DDT use is fairly strong. This further strengthens the call for alternative means of preventing malaria and for discontinuing DDT use.

But even if we lack a conclusive argument against current DDT use, we believe we have done enough to shift the burden of proof back to the advocates of its use. Perhaps our most important conclusion is that an unreflective continuation of the status quo with respect to DDT use is unacceptable.

It needs to be defended against concerns about the intergenerational effects it will cause.