Elena Conis is a writer and historian of medicine, public health, and the environment. She is the author of various books, including How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Return of Toxic DDT, which is what was primarily focused on during the seminar. Conis has also written pieces on vaccinations, gender, culture, and pediatrics; most of her work relates to and focuses on scientific controversies, science denial, and the public understanding of science. She is an affiliate of UC Berkeley and the University of California in San Francisco. As a writer, Conis is an award-winning health columnist for The Los Angeles Times.
In How to Sell a Poison, it discusses “the endless game of catchup we play when we pollute first and regulate later.” The main focus is the history of the chemical DDT.
In 1999 the West Nile Virus came to the United States, arriving first in the northeast; specifically, it developed much in New York due to all the birds, as the infectious virus had both human and avian hosts. Birds were not directly infecting humans – insects were. Due to the transmission from insects, politicians wanted to control this with pesticides, but it continued to spread. People began to say that DDT should be brought back in order to control the endemic. It not only killed bad insects, but beneficial ones as well; insects also built a tolerance to the chemical’s effects as time went on. DDT did nothing to stop the spread of the West Nile Virus and polio which was another virus that emerged later. The only thing that DDT did was make people feel at peace that there was something trying to be done to prevent the spread of diseases. It wasn’t until the 1960s after Rachel Carson’s publication of Silent Spring that people started seeing the negative effects of DDT.
The discussion of viruses relates to what we learned earlier in the semester about pathogens and their effects. We also learned about the spread of things through the food chain, in this case the spread of DDT traces.
Before this seminar, I never really knew what DDT was aside from a chemical; however, I learned that it was used to help crops prosper in the 1930s due to its “non-toxicity.” I did not know what it looked like, but apparently it is either a dust or a dust dissolved in another compound to be sprayed; I figured it was a spray but did not know of the dust component. I also did not realize that war refugees would spray it on themselves to protect from lice and ticks.
Something that I definitely am curious about is how it was okay for such a powerful chemical to be sold to the public. In my opinion, I feel that strong pesticides like that should only be accessible to exterminators, as they are really the ones who are educated in how and when to use them. DDT should never have been used for public health.
