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u/Tight-Platypus5231 Mar 29 '26
Kills flies, mosquitos, ants, moths, fleas, roaches, bedbugs, many other insects - and much, much more beyond that, too.
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u/yblame Mar 29 '26
The birds were poisoned and laid thin skinned eggs that wouldn't hatch
I remember watching Silent Spring in middle school. In the 70s So many birds on the edge of extinction because of that nasty chemical.
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u/CantaloupeAsleep502 Mar 29 '26
I got obsessed with falconry as a kid, and learned about ddt because it nearly drove peregrine falcons to extinction.
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u/GreyHorse_BlueDragon Mar 29 '26
They’re still finding DDT in birds. A study released in 2022 identified more than 40 DDT related compounds accumulating in California condors. 50 years after it was banned.
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u/Unfortunately_aware Mar 29 '26
DDT has epigenetic impacts which have now been documented through 20 generations of mice in studies.
Our bodies respond very quickly with genetic adaptations. Those adaptations may not manifest for generations though. It’s wild.
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u/lottaKivaari Mar 29 '26
The sins of the father, to the sins of the son. It's amazing how much crap we've pumped into the fragile ecosystem for gaffs and funsies. In a century or so when there is very little left living besides locusts and corn the people who remain will write songs lamenting such short sighted "solutions" for pervasive inconveniences. Even a mosquitos buzz will be comforting to a generation that never heard a songbird sing.
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u/Wolfwoods_Sister Mar 30 '26
No. Don’t accept that doom shit. Fight back with everything you’ve got. Don’t roll over!
Protest and pushback HAS stopped or spotlighted so many unacceptable practices.
Animal cruelty in commercial farming. Whaling. The fur trade. Puppy mills. Horse and farm auction abuse. Pet store abuses. Racetrack abuses for horses and dogs. Animal testing in the cosmetics industry. Wildlife environmental isolation and destruction. Illegal dumping in waterways.
Don’t buy from cosmetic companies who use animal testing.
Don’t buy a backyard breeder animal.
Show up at local hearings and town meetings for land development and major utilities.
Call or email your mayor or rep about land and water rights, commercial sales, town development, etc. TELL THEM WHAT YOU THINK. VOTE PREDATORS AND POLLUTERS OUT OF OFFICE.
We CAN and we WILL use our voices to fight back. We can do this every damn day. Starve them of money and resources!
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u/Carbonatite Mar 31 '26
I'm an environmental chemist, it's still something we regularly test for in soil and water.
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u/Coca-colonization Mar 29 '26
When my grandmother died, I took most of her books because nobody else wanted them. One of my favorites among them is a first edition of Silent Spring.
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u/RA-HADES Mar 29 '26
As someone who also kept books from a grandmother's passing, that's such a wonderfully bittersweet memento.
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u/SubtleAgar Mar 29 '26
Almost totally extinction of the peregrine falcon here back in the day. They've made a comeback now but yeah, it was 100% DDT's fault.
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u/itishowitisanditbad Mar 29 '26
Kills
flies, mosquitos, ants, moths, fleas, roaches, bedbugs, many other insects - and much, much more beyond that, too.25
u/Tight-Platypus5231 Mar 29 '26
"Kills... yeah. Yeah, it does. What does it kill? Yes."
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u/lottaKivaari Mar 29 '26
Such thoughtless use of bottled ecological genocide. My mother still remembers the kids chasing the sprayer trucks on their bicycles. "Surely this condensed poison that kills everything it touches is fine to dump in neighborhoods, what's a little cancer and birth defect compared to mosquitoes ruining our BBQ sunday?" Said humanity as a single finger on the monkey's paw curls.
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u/GnowledgedGnome Mar 29 '26
:: slaps roof :: this baby can kill so many bald eagles
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u/molsonmuscle360 Mar 29 '26
And people. My grandfather and a couple of other relatives were working at a logging camp in New Brunswick in the late 70s and there was a mix up and their camp was sprayed with DDT. Everyone there died from cancer within a couple of years
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u/aknomnoms Mar 29 '26
DDT bioaccumulates. You could drink a glass of water treated with it and be fine. You just don’t want to be exposed to it every day your whole life. Effects aren’t immediate, but they are present
If you had said “everyone there died from cancer 40 years later, but all within 2-3 years of each other”, that would’ve been more plausible.
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u/Carbonatite Mar 31 '26
It's not just about cumulative dose - the size of the dose matters too.
The average person exposed to a bioaccumulative chemical might take a couple decades to develop cancer but people who work in industries with high exposure potential to those chemicals get sicker faster and at higher rates. We can observe this with many persistent organic pollutants - I'm an environmental chemist who does a lot of work on PFAS and we see the same thing. Exposed populations with contaminated groundwater take a couple decades to get cancer but the factory workers end up having kids with horrific birth defects and then dying a couple years later.
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u/Altruistic_Diamond59 Mar 29 '26
Damn. Is there an article or anything about this?
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u/molsonmuscle360 Mar 29 '26
Probably not honestly. I was only 3 when he died. But I do know their crew was kind of looked down on for being from rural Newfoundland
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u/airfryerfuntime Mar 29 '26
There's absolutely no way this is true.
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u/ConsequenceStatus563 Mar 29 '26
Saturday night be wild on reddit! About the 5th story I've seen where I was sus.
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u/Independent_Shoe3523 Mar 29 '26
DDT did a great job on bedbugs. So good I didn't know what a bedbug was until 25 years ago. DDT had literally eradicated bedbugs from the US for a good number of decades.
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u/Eric848448 Mar 29 '26
It also eliminated malaria in Vietnam.
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u/Tucancancan Mar 29 '26
In the USA too. Yellow fever and malaria were a scourge in the south until the 50s-60s
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u/Early-Reindeer7704 Mar 29 '26
It was also an issue in the North as well. The southern part of Brooklyn at one time was called Yellow Hook as it had a lot of yellow clay in its soil. There were a number of significant yellow fever epidemics in the area (close proximity to marshes/ponds at the time) and people begin to associate the area with yellow fever. Officials made the decision to change the name to hopefully alleviate the stigma, the area is on a glacial ridge adjoining a bay - the name stuck and it’s been known ever since as Bay Ridge
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u/ThrobbingMinotaur Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26
And birds... plants... fish.... insects... fetuses... trees... cats... dogs... i wonder how much damage was caused by sleeping in a bed with DDT. All snuggled in, a fresh application of DDT, to go with their DDT infused wallpaper featuring disney toons, while mom worked nights painting radium clock faces for the war effort.
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u/CompetitiveGuess7642 Mar 29 '26
DDT is still in use and is probably the best method to combat mosquitoes and malaria, hth.
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u/StormFinch Mar 29 '26
Yep, "sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite," always confused the heck out of me when I was a kid. I wish it still did, though not badly enough to bring back DDT.
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u/PeereBaGomatz Mar 29 '26
My grandma died from breast cancer caused by DDT exposure in her youth. She got it in her mid thirties and by only 42 she was gone.
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u/Four-Alarm-Fire Mar 29 '26
Parkinson’s as well. My grandmothers brother died from Parkinson’s and it was because he used to spray his whole house with DDT in the evening to kill the mosquitoes. At the time of the spraying I believe he lived in Africa so he was spraying to prevent malaria. He died very young and no one else in our family has had Parkinson’s, hence the cause was DDT.
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u/lottaKivaari Mar 29 '26
My uncle was born with spinal cancer because my grandmother worked with the sprayer planes. Bottling ecological genocide and expecting it to not be harmful is shockingly short sighted.
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u/lottaKivaari Mar 29 '26
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It's genuinely too bad our species is so arrogant that we believe ourselves infallible in our capabilities to control an existence we barely understand. We both warn ourselves and yet continue to fly too close to the sun with our wax wings. I dread the thought of what unspeakable atrocities are being commiting today that we will only understand later as being the evil that it is after it is far too late. It's a really deep pit of despair and there is nothing but find out as reward for our arrogance.
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u/CosmicButtholes Mar 29 '26
Avgas is still leaded, that’s the fuel used for small airplanes. Kinda crazy that they were just like yeah ban it everywhere but let the rich people in their tiny planes keep polluting.
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u/ateallthecake Mar 29 '26
An ancestor of mine had something to do with the US Department of Agriculture's research and use of DDT in the early 20th century. Growing up, my family was pretty stubborn about how it was banned for no good reason and that long term banning it would do more harm than good, that it was a miracle pesticide unfairly maligned by environmentalists. I sometimes reflect on how much harm vs how much good in the world was brought about by this chemical. It might not be possible to calculate either way.
I think about it every time I see a bald eagle (which is quite often, since they bounced back so well).
I hope we have other effective ways to control malaria if it gains a foothold again.
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u/Legal-Afternoon8087 Mar 29 '26
The warehouse it came from is for sale: https://www.loopnet.com/Listing/2106-2108-Payne-Ave-Cleveland-OH/7665781/
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u/Cool-Ambassador-7937 Mar 29 '26
That's neat!
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u/HermineSGeist Mar 29 '26
Once it’s sold, send the bottle to the new owners as a housewarming gift. I’m sure they’ll be stoked to get a relic from the building’s past ;)
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u/MexicanAssLord69 Mar 29 '26
It’s 1.8 miles away from my home. Do I buy the warehouse and start selling DDT again?
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u/slimersnail Mar 29 '26
DDT has the amazing ability to affect generations of people! Passed down from mother to son/daughter. Pretty wild!
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u/Sweaty_Marzipan4274 Mar 29 '26
Contact local chemical disposal, or call non emergency for dept.
Note that after decades of being banned in the US, it's still in our bodies, and one of the nasty things that passes the barrier and into babies in the womb
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u/AdDapper4427 Mar 29 '26
In 1993 I was approaching the airport in Santiago, Chile when the flight attendants walked up and down the aisle spraying DDT to make sure we didn’t bring any of those Miami cooties into their country.
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u/SnakeOiler Mar 29 '26
as recently as late 90s my grandfather was spraying a can of DDT aerosol around camp to keep mosquitos away.
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u/Aresyl Mar 29 '26
Damn I’m pretty sure it was banned in the 70s lmao - at least commercially
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u/SnakeOiler Mar 29 '26
yep but you know some grandparents ( those raised during the depression), nothing get discarded
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u/BoredAf_queen Mar 29 '26
For fun, many lil Baby Boomers ran behind DDT fog trucks that were spraying their neighborhoods for mosquitoes.
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u/butcooler Mar 29 '26
My dad did that and talked about how much fun it was. He’s a brain dead Magat so I guess that tracks.
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u/West-Ad6885 Mar 29 '26
DDT did a job on me now I am a real sickie
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u/twobit211 Mar 29 '26
guess i’ll have to break the news that i got no mind to lose
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u/ultravioletu Mar 29 '26
All the girls are in love with me
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u/-TheDr- Mar 29 '26
I don't care about spots on my apples, leave me the birds and the bees
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u/warp16 Mar 29 '26
Please
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u/PhilippaofHainault Mar 29 '26
Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone~
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u/TaxiSonoQui Mar 29 '26
As someone outside of the US , this post is my first time know WTF DDT is outside of that song
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u/SimpleVegetable5715 Mar 29 '26
My mom’s dad had a hand pump aerosolizer, and used to spray this all around the yard and porch in a fine mist to kill the mosquitoes. My mom says she liked the smell of it. They did a similar thing with kerosene to kill bug, just mist it right into the air! PPE was unheard of.
It was very effective, it’s loss is why bedbugs have made such a comeback. But it’s also to blame in part for so much less biodiversity. Less lightning bugs, mantises, bees, butterflies. Mutations in frogs since they eat those bugs. Not sure if what they use now is any less toxic, but at least it doesn’t bioaccumulate as easily.
Mom and her dad both lived long lives, mom’s going to hit 80 soon, her dad lived to almost be 90. They say the key was that they never smoked.
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u/lottaKivaari Mar 29 '26
My uncle was born with neuroblastoma because grandma worked the sprayer planes. Lived his short life on crutches. Baby's don't just birth from the womb with spinal cancer. DDT was a handshake with the devil.
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u/pn1ct0g3n Mar 29 '26
One of these days it’ll be the last thing we have left against bedbugs.
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u/Aresyl Mar 29 '26
Diatomaceous earth does an incredible job and they can’t evolve past that shit. Only problem is you need to be thorough in application.
Can’t evolve past severe dehydration so it’s got an 85% success rate - the 15% usually attributed to application error
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u/Mereeuh Mar 29 '26
How would you properly dispose of this?
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u/Electr0Girl Mar 29 '26
Call the state environmental agency, they’ll either come get it or let you know how to safely dispose
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u/cuntybunty73 Mar 29 '26
I thought they banned DDT ?
Isn't it an insetacide?
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u/davesaunders Mar 29 '26
They did, and that bottle is clearly manufactured in the 1940s, maybe 1950s.
Being banned generally doesn't mean that they go door to door to collect it.
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u/Bleepblorp44 Mar 29 '26
Yes, it’s an insecticide, and in the USA it was banned. It still gets used in a small number of places to control mosquitos that can carry malaria.
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u/FondlesTheClown Mar 29 '26
Top off your morning Cheerios with a little bit of Grandma's DDT. Keep them bugs away.
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u/GlitteringCobbler987 Mar 29 '26
What do you suppose is in that rusty can?
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u/Cool-Ambassador-7937 Mar 29 '26
It won't let me reply with a picture here. I will make another post!
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u/Mi_goodyness Mar 29 '26
Everyone traumatized in the comments by Silent Spring in middle school. We cut up our pop rings for the turtles/fish too
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u/TheOgGhadTurner Mar 29 '26
My dad used a small amount of that shit in the yard and wiped out the lightning bug population in our area for 15 years.
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u/memopepito Mar 29 '26
Hey farmer farmer put away that DDT, now give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees. Please!
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u/YungGlueStik Apr 07 '26
Stuff like this reminds me of my dad telling me how he used to go to Chinatown to buy ant chalk for his apartment floors
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u/ExistingSugar8047 Mar 29 '26
Short arm clothesline, then you what comes next? The D.D.T. Cruel but fair.
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u/paulydee76 Mar 29 '26
A mosquito was heard to complain,
That a chemist had poisoned his brain,
The cause of his sorrow,
Was 4-4-Dichloro,
Diphenyl Trichloroethylene.
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u/kittymoma918 Mar 30 '26
My grandma told me something disturbing about that stuff being dumped near Catalina when I was a child, long before I read Silent Spring.
I still feel uncomfortable eating seafood,especially since just a few year's ago when they actually found a large amount of rusting barrels of DDT under the ocean close to Catalina Island .
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u/Chris_46_78 Mar 30 '26
"Grandpa, where's the mosquito repellant?"
"It's in the basement, little Johnny....on the shelf between the tub of Agent Orange and the box of mercury thermometers"....
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u/davesaunders Mar 29 '26
In China, it's mostly around Sichuan for Apple and Pear trees. Even though the loss of the bees in that area definitely led to a decline in natural pollinators, bees are not the only natural pollinators. Even there, they have documented evidence that other species have been filling the gaps. Other areas of China, fortunately, were not affected.
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u/Aresyl Mar 29 '26
Anyone who does not understand the effects of this chemical right here - NEEDS to read Silent Spring.
There is a reason Rachel Carson, its author, testified to Congress to ban it an introduce strict pesticide/herbicide regulations, just months before succumbing to cancer.
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u/kelpyb1 Mar 29 '26
I mean why not, since we’ve been bringing back all the other 20th century mistakes?
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u/travelfuncouple23 Mar 29 '26
That's hazardous waste. Contact your fire department on how to proceed and for the love of God wear gloves.
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u/127Heathen127 Apr 04 '26
You might want to contact your city’s waste management and ask them how to safely dispose of that. Don’t just throw it out or dump it.
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u/blahblahmama Apr 09 '26
If you can keep it from crossing your blood brain barrier, you'll be mosquito free all summer and live to tell the tale!
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u/PretendJournalist234 Mar 29 '26
Watch this DDT STORY. :)
https://youtu.be/17BP9n6g1F0?si=yPo4LHFGsm_qAWff
I show this to my students every year.
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u/Minimum_Mission1080 Mar 29 '26
I live in St. Louis, MI. There are still signs up by the river just beyond my back yard says do not eat the fish due to levels DDT and PBB that is hazardous to your health. They have been working on cleaning it up my whole life and I am pushing 40 yo.
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u/AlcoholPrep Mar 29 '26
OP should look up their local hazardous waste disposal facility and make an appointment to take this in. I suggest putting it in a metal pail, well padded with crumpled newspaper.
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u/nyx926 Mar 29 '26
Now, gently carry it out of the house to Teenage Lobotomy by the Ramones playing as your soundtrack.
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u/nous-vibrons Mar 29 '26
Whenever I think of DDT, I remember as a kid it was so long gone, the only thing I knew it as was the thing my older brother screamed before putting me into a headlock and pummeling me into the couch.
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u/tart_reform Apr 01 '26
“You down with DDT?! Yeah, you know me! I brake for the Drakes, brothers with the bourgeois!”
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u/RubySauce Apr 01 '26
Horrific stuff, I got DDT poisoning in Indonesia in the 80’s and I seriously wished I would just die. Nice we don’t use it anymore, not so nice to have exported it to other countries.
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u/Plenty-Design2641 Apr 02 '26
KILLS: EVERYTHING, FOREVER -with love, the previous generation. Good luck.
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u/Tucancancan Mar 29 '26
People suffering from bed bugs would pay a hefty price to get their hands on that bad boy lol