Well, this is a thread I never expected to find.
DDT is lethal to the genetic code of animals and tends to cause the extinction of birds through the thinning of the shells of their eggs, which causes them to break easily. DDT stays in the environment for decades and can travel right through the food chain.
I remember when everyone carried a bag of DDT in their homes for use on all types of pests and that chemical was sold by the ton! It was good at what it did but they did not discover the down side until several species of birds started dying out, ecologists started finding nests abandoned with lots of unhatched eggs in them and lots of dead animals in the wilds.
I think banning DDT back then happened so fast with our congress that they must have already known more about it than they let on.
Chlordane was examined shortly after and not banned but restricted because that was being used about as much as DDT and turned out to be much more poisonous than people thought.
Naturally, the American manufacturer of DDT promptly took advantage of the open foreign market and the loophole that Congress left in the law; that DDT is illegal to use in the US but not illegal to make and export. It was not OK to poison Americans and American ecology, but it was just fine to sell this ‘nuclear bug poison’ to other nations and poison them and their animals.
DDT’s very problem is that it is so good to use and it can take years before the accumulative effects show up. In some developing nations, they are less concerned over loosing some species than finding farm land, building things and water blast mining. In South America they like to use mercury by the ton to mine and process gold with and, regardless of it’s human and environmental lethality, keep on using it. Currently they have a couple of thousand miners poisoned, have poisoned most of a river and around a thousand acres or more of land. They are too poor and too uninformed to care.
Sometime around 15 or so years ago, when the imports of cheap, foreign vegetables started showing up in stores, I took note and so did others because many came from Mexico, a great buyer of American DDT. We were getting our banned DDT back in the form of vegetables sprayed with DDT! Then South America got into the act with exotic fruits and they use DDT by the ton.
There was a movement back then to force the stop of importing vegetables grown with the use of DDT, but it flopped. You know the process; we produce scientific evidence saying DDT soaked goods are bad and the importers produce similar scientific evidence saying DDT soaked goods are harmless.
DDT washes into rivers and into the sea. Guess you can’t figure out what happens then? Yes! Fish start to die or get odd tumors, shellfish start to die or absorb so much of the stuff that they almost glow in the dark and people dependent on them get to eat DDT.
Like I said, it goes through the food chain. When it hits the sea, vital reefs start dying, along with plankton and assorted needed sea creatures.
Your question might be better phrased as ‘how many millions have been killed because of DDT, and how many millions have been deformed because of the stuff.’
I watch medical TV and it seems to me that in certain nations, like India, Taiwan, Vietnam and such, nations which use DDT, there are major cases of birth defects, far above what would be expected as normal. Most consist of physical deformities. So many that America sends over medical teams to provide surgical repairs at no cost and the doctors find it a good training ground.
The thing of it is, there are far too many patients for these teams to get to them all and there are several teams, including those from other advanced nations, working there. These people have deformities that, over here, have been reduced tremendously in the last 30 years.
People scream about nuclear power plants as being dangerous and so on, but ignore that white powder that has caused more environmental destruction than any nuclear power plant ever has.