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WE HAVE learned in recent years that spraying with modern insecticides is doing more and more damage to our food and to our bodies. I cannot emphasize too often that our food production represents our external metabolism. Whoever is interested in this field may read the Hearings Before the House Select Committee to Investigate the Use of Chemicals in Food Products, House of Representatives Eighty-First Congress, Second Session.161 There is clearly described in the hearing of Dr. Biskind what he observed in this field and what he recommended ought to be done.
The following is a brief survey of this hearing: "The introduction for uncontrolled general use by the public of the insecticide DDT, or chlorophenothane, and the series of even more deadly substances that followed, has no previous counterpart in history. Beyond question, no other substance known to man was ever before developed so rapidly and spread indiscriminately over so large a portion of the earth in so short a time. This is the more surprising as, at the time DDT was released for public use, a large amount of data was already available in the medical literature showing that this agent was extremely toxic for many different species of animals, that it was cumulatively stored in the body fat and that it appeared in the milk. At this time a few cases of DDT poisoning in human beings had also been reported. These observations were almost completely ignored or misinterpreted."
"In the subsequent mass use of DDT and related compounds a vast amount of additional information on the toxicity of these materials, both in animals and in man, has become available. Somehow a fantastic myth of human invulnerability has grown up with reference to the use of these substances. Because their effects are cumulative and may be insidious and because they resemble those of so many other conditions, physicians for the most part have been unaware of the danger. Elsewhere, the evidence has been treated with disbelief, ignored, misinterpreted, distorted, suppressed or subjected to some of the fanciest doubletalk ever perpetrated."
"Early last year I published a series of observations on DDT poisoning in man. Since shortly after the last war a large number of cases had been observed by physicians all over the country in which a group of symptoms occurred, the most prominent feature of which was gastroenteritis, persistently recurrent nervous symptoms, and extreme muscular weakness. The condition was of unknown origin and, following an outbreak in Los Angeles in 1947, was thereafter widely attributed to a `virus X'. As with all other physicians, a large number of my patients had this condition."
"I, like others, found it extremely puzzling; it resembled no infectious process I was acquainted with, and it had features strongly suggesting some kind of intoxication. I had known that DDT was far more toxic than current mythology admitted, but it was only when I came across an item in the literature indicating the vast amount of DDT already in use in our agricultural economy that the possibility that this agent was involved occurred to me. I immediately consulted available textbooks and found that the signs and symptoms of known DDT poisoning were sufficiently similar to the cases I had seen to warrant further investigation. In fact, in 1945 two British authors had described with great accuracy part of the disorder following exposure to DDT in three human subjects."
"The syndrome consists of a group of or all of the following: Acute gastroenteritis occurs, with nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, and diarrhea. A running nose, cough, and persistent sore throat are common, often followed by a persistent or recurrent feeling of constriction or a lump in the throat: occasionally the sensation of constriction extends into the chest and to the back and shoulders and may be associated with severe pain in either arm and may easily be confused with a heart or gall-bladder attack. Pain in the joints, general muscle weakness, and exhausting fatigue are usual; the latter are often so severe in the acute stage as to be described by some patients as paralysis. Sometimes the initial attack is ushered in by dizziness and fainting. Insomnia, intractable headache, and giddiness are not uncommon. Disturbed sensations of various kinds occur in most cases; areas of skin become exquisitely hypersensitive and after a few days this disappears, only to recur elsewhere, or irregular numbness, tingling sensations, itching or crawling sensations, or a feeling of localized heat may take place. Erratic twitching of voluntary muscles is common. Usually there is diminution of ability to feel vibration in the extremities. Loss of weight is not uncommon."
"Disturbances of equilibrium may occur. There may be attacks of rapid pulse and palpitation associated with contraction of blood vessels in the skin, sweating of the palms and a sense of impending loss of consciousness, followed by slow pulse, flushing of the skin, relaxation and cessation of palmar perspiration."
"The subjective reactions tend to recur in `waves', as numerous patients have described them. Some have actually been able to clock the reaction with considerable precision from day to day. The reactions appear most likely to occur during periods of low blood sugar. Additionally, consumption of alcoholic beverages or acute emotional stress may provoke a severe exacerbation."
"Often, patients with this disorder complain of a `hollow feeling' in the epigastrium which bears no constant chronologic relation to the ingestion of food, and in fact may take place immediately after a full meal. Attempts to eat further may provoke sharp repugnance for food and occasionally may lead to an attack of hiccups or nausea. In other patients, actual overeating indistinguishable from the compulsive types seen in certain psychogenic disturbances may result."
"Hardly a single sensory nerve appears to be immune to involvement in this disorder: disorders of vision, smell, taste and hearing may occur. Pain of varying intensity and duration may involve any area of the skin and may localize in a joint or even in a tooth. Severe peripheral neuritis involving intense, protracted pain in one or more of the extremities is frequent. Pain in the groin, usually bilateral, is a frequent complaint. In the acute stages, mild convulsions involving mainly the legs, may occur."
"After subsidence of the acute attack, irregular spasm throughout the gastrointestinal tract often persists for weeks or months, associated with increased fatiguability, which only gradually regresses. Fever occurs occasionally during the initial stages but is not the rule. Except for a tendency for anemia, and in some cases a relative increase in certain white blood cells, no constant changes are observable in the blood. Many of the patients have an acute bout of apprehension associated with the foregoing symptom complex and rarely is this relieved by reassurance as to the absence of physical findings sufficient to account for the severity of the disturbance."
"Most striking about the syndrome is the persistence of some of the symptoms, the tendency to repeated recurrence of others over a period of many months - some patients fail to show complete recovery even after a year - and the lack of detectable lesions sufficient to account for the severity of the subjective reaction."
"The high incidence, the usual absence of a febrile reaction, the persistence and erratic recurrence of the symptoms, the lack of observable inflammatory lesions, and the resistance even to palliative therapy, as I have already indicated, suggested an intoxication rather than an infection. The epidemic first appeared at about the time DDT came into widespread use by the civilian population. The signs and symptoms described in the pharmacologic and toxilogic literature as characteristic of DDT poisoning turned out to be identical with those appearing in patients with the affliction described."
"By far the most disturbing of all the manifestations are the subjective reactions and the extreme muscular weakness. In the severe, acute cases, patient after patient has used identical words, `I felt like I was going to die.'
"I found similar descriptions in reading about the so-called `Iceland disease', the most characteristic symptom of which is extreme muscular weakness, which begins in the legs, then spreads to both arms and hands; patients even have difficulty in swallowing." (Newsweek, May 1957)
"The sensation can perhaps best be described as one of unbearable emotional turbulence. There are at various times excitement, hyper-irritability, anxiety, confusion, inability to concentrate, inattentiveness, forgetfulness, depression, and especially extreme apprehensiveness. These episodes can easily be confused with anxiety attacks having a psychiatric basis. The combination of apprehensiveness, confusion, and depression has led to suicidal impulses in a number of my patients. Several insisted after a week or two of a more or less continuous disturbance that they did not want to live if the reaction persisted. This reaction was the more difficult to bear because its source was unknown and, when the cause became apparent, explanation as to the etiology was usually of great help in tiding the patient over this difficult period. One such patient who had been heavily exposed to DDT was treated psychiatrically for his suicidal depression for months without success. This depression vanished within a few weeks when exposure to DDT was reduced to a minimum by removing it from the immediate environment and restricting the foods most heavily contaminated. Parenthetically, one cannot help but wonder how often exposure to the DDT group of compounds has been implicated in otherwise inexplicable suicides. Certainly in a person already mentally disturbed the additional stress of DDT poisoning could be disastrous. In addition, the mental effects of DDT may easily lead to accidents."
"A characteristic history is that of a person - and in a number of cases, an entire family simultaneously involved - who, previously well and able to make satisfactory emotional adjustment to his environment, suddenly is affected with the syndrome described and remains partially disabled for many months. Usually, the condition remains undiagnosed and frequently these patients make the rounds of doctor after doctor and institution after institution seeking at least a diagnosis, if not relief. The extent to which this can go is illustrated in the case of an exterminator who had used both DDT and chlordane."
"At the time I first saw this patient he had spent two and one-half years visiting various physicians and institutions seeking relief from his disabling symptoms, which consisted of pain and sense of constriction in the throat and chest, irregular headaches, and pain in his head, neck, and shoulders, muscular twitching all over his body, insomnia, inability to concentrate, forgetfulness and inattentiveness, disturbing sensations in various parts of the skin, repeated gastroenteritis and recurrent extreme muscular weakness. In the process of seeking a diagnosis he asked doctor after doctor whether the insecticides were responsible for his ailment and was repeatedly assured they could not be. He was subjected to virtually every test known to medical science and even had his skull opened for injection of air into his cerebral ventricles for X-ray purposes to make sure he had no brain tumor. None of the many tests and examinations could account for his symptoms. Finally one of the psychiatrists to whom he was referred recognized the ailment as having a toxic basis."
"When I saw the patient he had an enlarged liver, signs of nutritional impairment, reduced ability to feel vibration in his legs and a reduction in his pulse pressure. Under ordinary circumstances none of these signs, nor all together, could account for all his symptoms. When he was advised to give up his job and seek less toxic employment, to remove all traces of DDT and chlordane from his environment, was given nutritional therapy to alleviate the liver damage and put on a diet low in insecticide residues, he showed prompt improvement within a week. Four months later he was almost free of symptoms. He was then unknowingly exposed to DDT in a restaurant kitchen which had just previously been aerosoled with DDT. Within half an hour the entire syndrome returned and required more than a week to subside."
"Again, two months later he was inadvertently exposed to chlordane from an old kit he had previously used. This time there was a very severe exacerbation which required nearly two months for subsidence. Fortunately, this patient now is almost completely well for the first time since 1947."
The symptom of an enlarged liver is quite non-characteristic as we see it in many acute and infectious diseases, as well as in degenerative diseases, including cancer. I had not yet had the opportunity to study all different poisons present in a cancer body where they produce the destructive work most strikingly expressed in the liver, the visceral nervous system and the circulatory apparatus, particularly the capillaries. These are just the organs needed for healing purposes.
Especially interesting is an observation made in England. When wheat was milled about one-third of the DDT residue was found in the hour thus showing that the insecticide had quickly penetrated the grain husks. Rats fed with the bread made from this flour, like hens fed with the unmilled grain, showed wide and rapid distribution of the insecticide in their bodies.
We are especially interested here in the problem that, in association with liver damage, there often is an increased fragibility of the walls of the small blood vessels and the capillaries. Later they may have a tendency to rupture easily. Dr. F. M. Pottenger in California has repeatedly observed a rise in blood cholesterol in human beings, more frequently than he ever saw before. He has seen that syndrome in about one-third of his patients and assumed that it may be caused by DDT poisoning of the liver. Even if most of these observations are the personal work of Dr. Biskind, they are partly confirmed by a few other clinical workers in this field.
What has been done to date to prevent these unfavorable consequences, is not very encouraging. An article in the New York Times, February 1, 1952, stated that the Beechnut Packing Company spent about $668,000 in the past six years to keep residues of new pesticides out of baby food and peanut butter. I hope that in the following years more substantial and critical work will be done in this direction.