The Toxin That Will Not Die 2001
Distributed by Filmakers Library, 124 E. 40th St., NY, NY 10016l; 212-808-4980
Produced by P. Heilbuth and H. Bulow
Director n/a
VHS,
Adult
Environmental Studies, Biology
Date Entered: 11/09/2018
Reviewed by Buzz Haughton, Shields Library, University of California at DavisDDT was one of the first commonly used pesticides, developed by the Swiss chemist Paul Muller in 1948. Although widely touted as a panacea when first distributed, DDT's persistent environmental damage manifested in widespread animal dieoffs and human poisoning and deaths, especially in Third World countries, has resulted in its prohibition in many countries, the US among them. India is a major exception. Although it is well established experimentally and in practice that mosquitoes can be controlled through biological means (an example cited in the film is fish that live on mosquitoes and their larvae), India continues to employ widespread application of sprayed DDT to control its mosquitoes, which are bearers of the parasites that cause malaria. Longstanding use of large quantities of DDT and other pesticides has resulted, through natural selection, in mosquitoes and other disease-bearing insects that are resistant to these chemicals.
The DDT industry in India is a billion-dollar-a-year business, and its lobbyists are active in the Indian state and federal governments pressing their financial interests. Superficially, their objections to banning DDT are impressive: 3 million Indians a year contract malaria. Yet, many Indian mothers now have more than forty-two times the WHO recommended ceiling of DDT in their breast milk. In 1986 India outlawed sale of DDT to private individuals, but the law is commonly ignored; one of the scenes in the video is that of a person posing as an investigative plant approaching a streetside vendor and buying a large quantity of DDT over the counter.
This video suffers from its brevity (28 minutes); the argument against DDT could have been strengthened with more statistics and fewer generic scenes of men spraying pools of mosquito-infested water. However, it broaches a timely topic that has application to everyone, since environmental pollutants ignore national boundaries, and humans at the top of the food chain are suffering from unsafe DDT concentrations in countries far removed from India. Recommended for large libraries with nonbook environmental sciences collections.