We used it all the time, no one had cancer. I can see grandfather next door, a physician, using it in a pump sprayer spraying chestnut and fruit trees, Chlorodane raining down all over him. He lived to be quite old, never cancer, diabetes, etc. Who knows...just lucky or did Laboratory rats drink 1/2 pint a day getting cancer after a few years?
Well, everybody is different. For most of the chlorinated organic chemicals, how a person's body responds often depends on which set of enzymes you have for degrading chlorinated organic chemicals (cytochrome P-450s). Different ones make the chlorinated organics more or less toxic.
The trouble with rat studies for human diseases is that human and rat/mouse metabolism is quite different, so it is hard to know in advance if the rodent result is informative. The data that I mentioned above comes from human exposure.
I worked for a guy that did studies on one chlorinated organic chemical. Lethal to rats at the part per billion level, so the feeding studies had to be done at the part per trillion level. The rats got all sorts of cancers. Then a DDT plant had some safety equipment fail, cooking up a big batch of the chemical in question, and then the pressure tank exploded, dosing the surrounding countryside. I expected everyone within miles to die instantly. Instead a few got chloracne and over the years they had a slightly higher than normal rate of certain cancers, but nothing like the rats, despite exposure levels thousand to millions of times higher than the rats. My moral of the story was that one has to be quite careful with animal studies if you want accuracy. (
Seveso disaster)
Penicillin is lethal to guinea pigs at low doses. Good thing penicillin wasn't tested in Guinea pigs until after it had been shown to work well in humans.
Not that I think that organic foods are entirely safe either, most organic foods contain more mycotoxins and phytotoxins than conventionally grown foods. Personally, I try to buy local organic when possible, but don't sweat it. I think either way there is some risk. I avoid roadside stalls that aren't selling local foods, or look like it fell of the back of the truck, but I digress.
Anyone remember carbon tetrachloride fire extinguishers?
All the best,
Peter
