On Immunity : An Inoculation (9781555973278) by Eula Biss Read Free Book Online

massacre of the shorebirds by the market gunners, the near-extermination of the egrets for their plumage,” Rachel Carson wrote in Silent Spring. She was writing in the late fifties, at a moment of acute atomic awareness, and the next of these black passages would be, she warned, a “new kind of fallout.” The pesticides and herbicides of postwar industry, some of them originally developed for war, were being sprayed from airplanes over acres of fields and forests. One of these, DDT, was making its way into groundwater, accumulating in fish, and killing birds. Over fifty years later, DDT persists in the bodies of fish and birds all over the world, as well as in the milk of nursing mothers.
    The publication of Silent Spring in 1962 led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and a ban on the production of DDT in this country. The book popularized the idea that human health depends on the health of the ecosystem as a whole, but Carson did not use the word ecosystem. She preferred the metaphor of an “intricate web of life,” in which a disturbance anywhere on the web sends tremors across the entire web. “ Silent Spring,” Carson’s biographer Linda Lear writes, “proved that our bodies are not boundaries.”
    Our bodies are not boundaries, but DDT is not exactly what Carson feared it was. DDT, she warned, was a widespread cause of cancer. This hypothesis was not supported by the decades of research on DDT that followed the publication of Silent Spring. Numerous studies on factory and farm workers with high DDT exposure failed to find an association between DDT and cancer. And studies of specific cancers found no evidence that DDT increased the incidence of breast cancer, lung cancer, testicular cancer, liver cancer, or prostate cancer. I mention this to my father, an oncologist, and he recalls the DDT sprayed all over his town from trucks when he was young. He and his siblings were kept inside during the spraying, but they ran out to play as soon as the trucks had passed, when the leaves of trees were still dripping DDT and the smell of the chemical was in the air. It does not bother him that Carson may have overstated some of the dangers of DDT, and that she got some things wrong, because, as he says, “she got the job done.” She woke us up.
    “Few books have done more to change the world,” the journalist Tina Rosenberg acknowledges. “DDT killed bald eagles because of its persistence in the environment,” she writes. “ Silent Spring is now killing African children because of its persistence in the public mind.” The blame for this may belong more to us, the inheritors of Silent Spring , than to the book, but either way malaria has resurged in some countries where DDT is no longer used against mosquitoes. One African child in twenty now dies from malaria, and more are left brain damaged by the disease. Ineffective treatments, toxic prophylactics, and environmentally damaging insecticides all remain in use because there is no viable vaccine against malaria.
    For now, DDT is, unfortunately, one of the more effective means of controlling malaria in some places. Applied to the interior walls of homes once a year, DDT has nearly eliminated malaria in parts of South Africa. Compared to spraying DDT across millions of acres from airplanes, as was done in the United States, the environmental impact of this application is relatively small. But DDT remains an imperfect solution. Few chemical companies produce it, donors are unwilling to finance it, and many countries are reluctant to use a chemical that is banned elsewhere. “Probably the worst thing that ever happened to malaria in poor nations,” Rosenberg writes, “was its eradication in rich ones.”
    Colonization and the slave trade brought malaria to the Americas, where it was once common as far north as Boston. Malaria never had quite as strong a hold in this country as it has in Africa, but it was difficult to eradicate here nonetheless.