Although DDT is dangerous when used in the environment it should not be banned worldwide due to its disease preventing abilities. DDT should be banned from places where the solely rely on it as an insecticide. DDT effectively prevents diseases in poorer countries. Although DDT prevents disease in poor countries it should not be their only choice to prevent malaria and other diseases.
DDT should not be used in the environment. DDT is not something we should be using in our earth. For one thing it does something called bioaccumulation. What this is is an increase in the concentration of a chemical over time in a biological organism compared with the chemical's concentration in the environment. The first stage of this is uptake. Now the way we uptake DDT is many. DDT is used to repel insects from the food we eat, it's all over our food. Another thing is they feed someone of those fruits to animals that are later sent to meat companies, and then served to the public. The second step is storage. This is when the DDT stores itself in our fatty tissues. Fatty tissues are hard to excrete making it hard for us to get the DDT out of our systems. There have been traces of DDT found in the breast milk of some women. DDT can cause quickly bioaccumulate.
DDT has a large effect on humans. DDT is a endocrine disruptor. What that means is that DDT can mimic hormones from our bodies and disrupt normal functions that we can do. When DDT breaks down It becomes DDE which is ranked in the top ten percent of most toxic chemical for human health by EPA. Ingestion or exposure to DDT have been known to cause excitability, tremors, seizures, rashes, confusion, convulsions, and parathesia of the tongue and lips. Lethal doses of DDT is about 30 grams. Long term exposure to DDT can cause a change in the level of liver enzymes, harmful effects on the reproduction system, and increased chances of liver tumors.
