the ying and yang of DDT
In her 2023 Earth Day discussion Heather Cox Richardson told the story of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. “A marine biologist and best-selling author, Carson showed the devastating effects of people on nature by documenting the effect of modern pesticides on the natural world. She focused on the popular pesticide DDT. It was widely used by farmers and was poisoning the natural food chain in American waters. After the chemical was sprayed on vegetation it washed into the oceans and concentrated in fish. They, in turn, were eaten by birds of prey, especially ospreys. The DDT caused the birds to lay eggs with abnormally thin eggshells that cracked in the nest when the parent birds tried to incubate them."
"In 1962 The New Yorker serialized Carson’s book and the publisher sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries. In 1967 a number of scientists in the U.S. organized the Environmental Defense Fund .and lobbied for a ban on DDT.” In 1972 the U.S. banned the agricultural use of the chemical.
To round out the pesticide’s odyssey I’d like to tell the tale of Typhus.
A little over a century ago, my six-year-old dad and his family lived in a small, wooden, dirt-floored cottage in a shtetl that straddled one of the main Ukrainian-Russian east-west highways. In 1914, the First World War started. The Russian army attacked Germany and fell into a trap. The Russian Second Army was virtually destroyed at the Battle of Tannenberg, and thousands of the surviving soldiers retreated. When they came through my father’s town, the fleeing Cossacks burned the family home to the ground. During the subsequent war years, the family crowded into one of the remaining cabins on the edge of the village. It was owned by an elderly Ukrainian who hadn’t left for mother Russia with his family. During the war, no one bathed or boiled their clothes. Everyone’s garments and bedding contained body lice. One winter there was a typhus outbreak. The infectious disease is caused by a tiny bacterium (ricketsia) that lives in the lice. When the creatures defecate, their droppings itch. People scratch, tear their skin, and bacteria enter their bodies. One to two weeks later, the aching starts. Many become quite ill. They have chills, high fevers, an unremitting headache, and exhaustion. When my grandmother became feverish, she was also confused. A Russian army nurse who was making the rounds came by. The family was unable to hide the sick woman and the nurse summoned a wagon. It took my grandmother to the schoolhouse, the large hall full of beds where most died. My grandfather watched and cried as they carted her away.
“During the eight years between 1917 and 1925, more than 25 million people living in Russia developed epidemic typhus, and three million died.” Some claim epidemic typhus has caused more deaths than all the wars in history.
In the 21st century, typhus is easily cured and prevented with the antibiotic Doxycycline, and in the 20th century many deaths were prevented by DDT, thanks in part to a French bacteriologist named Charles-Jules-Henri Nicolle and a Swiss chemist named Paul Müller.
Noelle was born in1866, studied medicine in Paris, and returned to his home in Rouen when he was 29. Rouen is a city that borders the Seine River and is 80 miles closer to the ocean than Paris. The capital of Normandy, the city houses the ancient marketplace where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake and is the location of the Gothic cathedral painted repeatedly by Monet.
After he returned to his home Nicolle married 21 year old Alice Avice, had two children, and got a job at the local medical school. His position was not tenured, his colleagues were reluctant to accept his “wonky” Parisian belief that germs caused disease, and he was unable to hear well enough to use a stethoscope. One day the French government came looking for doctors for the recently conquered colony called Tunisia. Jules’ brother, also a doctor, was offered a job in North Africa. When he declined 36 year old Jules applied for the position and was hired.
In Tunisia an illness called Typhus was a problem each winter. People in the “overcrowded prisons, asylums, and tent villages” ran fevers, became confused, and sometimes died. When Jules arrived an outbreak “was raging in a native prison 80 kilometers south of Tunis.” The doctor in charge of health care was planning to visit the area and Jules asked if he could accompany him.” The night before the trip Nicolle coughed up blood and he decided to stay behind. The chief doctor and his servant, visited the prison, spent the night, contracted typhus and both died.
Nicolle was now one of the senior physicians and he decided to learn more about the illness. He visited a hospital, and recalled stepping over the bodies of typhus patients who were awaiting admission to the hospital and had fallen exhausted at the door.” He noticed that sick people “spread the contagion “to others in the hospital waiting room but stopped contaminating others as soon as they bathed and dressed in a hospital uniform.” Nicole figured the clothes—more specifically the lice that lived in the clothes, had to be the vector that spread the disease.
He injected a chimpanzee with blood from an ill patient and a day later the chimpanzee was running a fever and was prostrate. “Nicolle then injected a toque macaque (Macaca sinica) with blood from the ill chimpanzee and two weeks later the macaque got sick.” He transferred the lice that were feeding on sick macaques to other macaques and they got sick. Nicolle was not able to culture the offending organism in agar or broth (the germ that causes typhus called Rickettsia replicates inside other cells but doesn’t grow on agar.) But Nicolle published his findings in 2009. Remaining in Tunis for many years, Nicolle became an important bacteriologist. Over the years his deafness got worse, it was hard to be social, and he spent much of his non research time writing and publishing three novels: The Two Thieves, The Pleasures of Boredom, and Marmouse and his Guests. He was also “Captivated by the town of Carthage” built near the ruins of a once influential and affluent city. Carthage was the home of Hannibal, the general who in 218 B.C. marched his troops and elephants across the Alps and almost reached Rome. The town was destroyed by the Romans after the third Carthaginian war.
At age 62 Nicolle was awarded a Nobel Prize for his discoveries.
In 1939, the year after Nicolle won the Nobel Prize, Paul Müller, a Swiss biochemist working for the pharmaceutical company Geigy, learned that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) was highly effective for killing lice and other insects, and it seemed to be safe for man. “The basic Swiss patent for the chemical was granted in 1940.” Muller had become interested in chemistry when he was a high school student. As a teenager he “was often mocked by his peers and called, "The Ghost," due to his thin and pale appearance” In later life he owned “a home in the alps, tended a small fruit farm, and took the children on early morning nature walks. In 1948 Muller was awarded a Nobel prize for his discovery.
https://www.uptodate.com/contents/epidemic-typhus
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2819868
Understanding Modern Healthcare the wonders we created and the potholes we dug by Steve Fredman M.D.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1948/muller/biographical/
http://www.faqs.org/health/bios/67/Paul-M-ller.html
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