In coordination with their ground forces, the Americans deployed airborne crop dusters, as well as truck dusters and infantry DDT spray teams. Within days, the city’s vast population of typhus-transmitting lice was virtually exterminated by month’s end, the epidemic was over. The effects were little short of miraculous. Other spray teams prowled the town, dusting public buildings and shelters. Stations were set up in the palazzos of Naples, and as the people walked by in lines, military police officers with spray guns dusted them with DDT. īy January 1, 1944, the first shipments of what would eventually amount to sixty tons of DDT reached Italy. Without delay, first Geigy’s Cincinnati factory and then the giant DuPont chemical company were given contracts to produce the new pesticide in quantity. On Guadalcanal, and elsewhere in the South Pacific, the Marines were losing more men to malaria than they were to the Japanese, with the entire 1st Marine Division rendered unfit for combat by the insect-borne disease. Examining Müller’s data, the OSRD’s experts immediately realized its importance. Acquainted with Müller’s work, Victor Froelicher, Geigy’s New York representative, disclosed it to the American military’s Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) in October 1942. Müller while working for the Swiss company Geigy during the late 1930s. First synthesized by a graduate student in 1874, DDT went unnoticed until its potential application as an insecticide was discovered by chemist Paul H.

It was called DDT, a pesticide of unprecedented effectiveness.

Fortunately, the brass had a new secret weapon ready just in time to deal with the emergency.

Silent spring ddt