Pesticides and Pollution. Kenneth Mellanby
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any disaster infestation, and the risk from louse-borne typhus fever, grew. Persistent insecticides now control these insects, and properly applied to man and his clothing they present little danger to any other organisms.
Pest insects which attack man, but depend on his having a permanent home, include fleas and bedbugs. Fleas are not only a nuisance, but also carry plague, a disease which died out in Britain many years before effective insecticides were discovered to control the vectors. Improved hygienic conditions rather than chemicals have made fleas uncommon insects.
Human bedbugs are very similar to the species which attack bats and swallows, and primitive man may have become infested first when he also lived in caves. Bugs were common from the earliest times in the warmer parts of the world. However, Britain had no bedbugs before the sixteenth century, possibly because the houses were too cold. Bugs certainly existed in Italy in classical times. When bugs arrived in Britain, they soon spread through overcrowded slums, and before the 1939 war most houses in our cities, except detached surburban villas, harboured at least a few. However, they were only common in unhygienic and overcrowded dwellings, and improved conditions soon reduced their numbers. Modern insecticides, particularly those which put a persistent film in the cracks which the bugs haunt, control the insects effectively without seriously contaminating the environment.
When his numbers were few, pollution was not a serious problem to man. Many pests, both plant and animal, have become common only because man has produced suitable conditions. In some cases pests have been controlled with little harm to the environment, in others pest control has become a new and potent form of pollution. The great difficulty is to assess accurately just how much pollution affects the environment and the plants and animals it contains. We are seldom able to give simple answers. Sometimes an animal has obviously been killed, perhaps from the effluent from a factory, perhaps by accidental contamination with a pesticide. Generally, however, we have to depend on circumstantial evidence of damage, and this is the reason for the controversy which so often surrounds our subject.
Toxicology is difficult and complicated. The results of analyses of animals’ bodies, where traces of poisonous substances are found, are not easily interpreted. In the case of well-known poisons like arsenic, strychnine or cyanide the situation may be less mysterious if large amounts are found. We know, for instance, that if a man eats five grams of lead arsenate he is likely to be fatally poisoned. If the pathologist finds ten grams of lead arsenate in the stomach of a corpse, he will be almost certain that this poison caused death. If he finds only a few milligrams, he will be almost certain that death was due to some other cause. The finding of intermediate amounts makes diagnosis difficult. Consideration must be given to the site where the poison is found in the body, and to losses due to vomiting or excretion. The situation is even more complicated where poisons are broken down in the body, either as part of the process of damaging the victim, or due to post mortem changes. If we do not know accurately how toxic a chemical is to a particular animal, and if we are not fully familiar with these chemical changes, we cannot usually say for certain whether a small residue of poison in a live or dead specimen has any significance.
It is generally fairly easy to establish the acute toxicity of a substance, that is the amount which, in a single dose, is lethal. Experiments with rats, chicks or fish are commonly made. Groups of animals are given different doses, and the least amount of poison which kills is found. Usually different individuals of a species show a somewhat varied susceptibility, and instead of determining the amount which kills them all, the so-called LD50, that is the amount which kills half of a batch, is determined. In most instances few animals die from a single dose of half the LD50, and twice the LD50 is likely to kill almost every individual. However, this is not always the case. Sometimes a population contains a few individuals which can survive relatively large doses of certain poisons; under certain circumstances these may be selected out and may breed a strain which is more resistant than the normal to a toxic substance. Resistance or susceptibility to poisons is not necessarily correlated with unusual or subnormal “vigour,” and this type of chemical selection may leave a species less well adapted to normal environmental conditions.
Although acute toxicity is not difficult to determine in the laboratory, it can only be done with a limited number of species, and values for others (including man) can usually only be inferred. Also the effects of a specific poison may differ even with the same batch of the same species depending on how it is administered, e.g. neat, in suspension, in oily solution, on an empty stomach, through the skin, by inhalation and so forth. These difficulties have usually meant that, at least where man is exposed, a fairly large “safety factor” has been applied. Thus if work with rats suggests that the LD50 for substance “X” is 50 milligrams per kilogram, it could be assumed that half of a group of 50 kilogram men would probably die if they ate one gram each of “X.” It would generally be found that a single dose of one hundredth of this amount, i.e. of 10 milligrams, would be unlikely to be harmful. In many cases this assumption is quite justified but contamination of food to this extent would not normally be tolerated.
While there are sometimes difficulties in establishing the effects of single, large doses of poisonous substances, the study of the effects of repeated small doses, each of which would probably be harmless, spread over long periods, presents even more serious problems. Poisons which are unstable are unlikely to be very dangerous under these circumstances. Those which are stable, particularly if they are stored in the body, may present great risks even if they are not acutely poisonous in single doses. All these factors are borne in mind when, for instance, new insecticides are tested. Their action on a number of insects, particularly pests, is determined. Then long-term experiments, lasting over severa, years and a number of generations, are then made with rats, chickens and other animals. It is obviously impossible to include more than a few species in such trials, so it is not surprising that sometimes a desirable species of bird, or mammal, is found (too late) to be unexpectedly susceptible. The effects of chronic exposure to low-level industrial and urban pollution is even harder to study. Some, impressed by the complexity of the situation, fear that the ecological effects of pesticides may bear little relation to their gross toxicity.
Everyone wishes to abolish the damage which may be caused to man and to wild life by pollution from every source. As, however, we are not always agreed as to when damage is being caused, or how exactly some obvious damage arose, an easy solution will not be found. Man has always polluted his environment; he has always suffered from pests, but because of the “population explosion,” these problems have become more serious in recent years. The need for more research in these subjects is obvious, if irreparable damage to wild life, and to man, is to be avoided. Equally important, we must make sure that the results of such research are quickly and efficiently applied.
CHAPTER TWO AIR POLLUTION
Perhaps the most obvious way in which man has contaminated his environment is by polluting the air with smoke and with the waste products from industry. Everyone has seen the pall of smoke hanging over a city. He knows that many plants and animals are not found in the middle of a city. It is, however, difficult to find exactly how this pollution has affected wild life, notwithstanding much intensive study of the subject. Although some lichens and other plants seem to be particularly susceptible to the effects of atmospheric pollution, and their distribution may be correlated with it, nevertheless the position is far from simple. This is perhaps not surprising, as we seldom have a constant amount of any noxious substance in the air at any place over any long period of time. The smoke emitted from a domestic fire or from a factory is in bursts followed by periods of comparative inactivity; in some towns factories are only allowed to give out black smoke for five minutes in an hour. The weather has a profound effect; calm clear periods, particularly when temperature conditions prevent upward circulation, allow the pollution to concentrate, while strong winds ventilate the area though they carry the substances in detectable amounts to distant parts of the country.
As soon as man discovered fire, he made smoke and so polluted the atmosphere. The effects were local and slight until about the