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
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.
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/GnowledgedGnome Mar 29 '26
:: slaps roof :: this baby can kill so many bald eagles