2

Chemical Weapons Recycled for Agriculture

The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.

—Albert Einstein

Paul François’s story is exemplary because it points to evidence that the euphemistic language of the chemical industry as well as of the public authorities has sought to obscure: pesticides are poisons. As Dr. Geneviève Barbier and the writer Armand Farrachi show in their book La Société cancérigène (Carcinogenic Society), “their use has become so commonplace that we forget they were designed to kill.”¹ They go on to say: “It is fruitless to look at the packaging of these products for the kinds of warnings found on cigarette packs intended to alert smokers: ‘Spraying weeds kills’ or ‘Spraying mosquitoes or cockroaches causes cancer.’”²

From “Killers of Plagues” to “Phytopharmaceutical Products”

Pesticides are even “unique in being the only chemicals designed and deliberately released into the environment by humans, to kill or damage other living organisms,” said the Pesticide Action Network (PAN), an international network against pesticides, in a brochure published in 2007 with financial assistance from the European Union.³ The broad family of pesticides is identifiable through their common suffix “cide” (from the Latin caedere “kill” or “cut down”), for, according to the word’s etymology, pesticides are killers of pests (harmful animals, insects, or plants; the word “pest” is itself derived from the Latin pestis meaning plagues or contagious diseases): weeds (herbicides), insects (insecticides), fungi (fungicides), snails and slugs (molluscicides), worms (nematicides), rodents (rodenticides), or crows (corvicides).

In the 1960s, when atrazine appeared on my ancestral farm, the promoters of chemical agriculture had no hesitation in pointing out the highly toxic, even fatal, nature of pesticides to justify their prevention programs. For example, in American audiovisual archives I found a television spot from 1964 showing a man in a white coat—the distinctive sign of a scientist—standing behind a table full of cans of chemical products, reciting in learned tones: “Always remember pesticides are poisons. Their safe use depends on you. Use pesticides safely!”4

A half century later, it is futile to look for such an explicit warning in the advertising of the major companies in the sector, as can be verified in France, for example, by visiting the website of the Crop Protection Industry Association (Union des industries de la protection des plantes, UIPP), now bringing together the “nineteen companies that market phytopharmaceutical products and agricultural services.” The words chosen to present the professional organization, which includes in its membership the French subsidiaries of the six global giants in the business—BASF Agro SAS, Bayer CropScience, Dow AgroSciences, DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta—are telling on the process of euphemization that gradually took hold from the 1970s on. In the small powerful world of industrial agriculture, people carefully avoid speaking of “pesticides,” preferring the term “phytosanitary products,” recently replaced by the no doubt even more reassuring “phytopharmaceutical products.” This is the definition provided on the UIPP website: “Phytopharmaceutical products play the role of protecting agricultural products against multiple attacks that may present obstacles to the proper development of plants: harmful insects, diseases (fungi), weeds. . . . They foster regular harvests of sufficient quality and quantity.”⁵

The shift from “pesticide” to “phytosanitary” or “phytopharmaceutical product” represents more than semantic mumbo jumbo: it is directly aimed at deceiving farmers—and consequently consumers—by passing off “products designed to kill” as medicines intended to protect the health of plants and hence the quality of food: a well-designed obfuscation that might be considered anodyne, typical of companies’ advertising manipulation, if it were not echoed by government organizations at the highest level.

The home page of the Ministry of Agriculture’s website⁶ is very enlightening in this regard: the word “pesticide” does not appear at all. By way of contrast, it contains a section titled “Health and Protection of Plants,” where we learn that the ministry “carries out many activities for the prevention and management of health and phytosanitary risks inherent in plant production.” This is highly skilled evasiveness. Reading ministerial prose, one has the impression that the fact of producing plants in itself leads to “health and phytosanitary risks,” whereas it is obviously the poisons used—never mentioned—that are the source of those risks. And what follows provides no further clarification: “The services charged with the protection of plants have three goals: health and phytosanitary monitoring; oversight of the conditions of plant production; and the production of farming practices more respectful of health and the environment.”

The same orthodoxy is found on the Agricultural Social Mutual Fund (Mutualité sociale agricole, MSA) website, even though it is entrusted with the health of farmers. In an April 2010 article full of good intentions and presenting the “Phyt’attitude plan, a specific monitoring program for the risks connected with the use of phytosanitary products,”7 obfuscation is so well integrated into the text that the authors fall on their faces: “Phytosanitary products, also known as pesticides . . . are preparations intended to: protect plants or plant products from all harmful organisms or to prevent the action of those organisms; affect their vital processes, ensure their conservation; destroy undesirable plants or some of their parts.”⁸ The reader will have noted the surprising inversion, because in reality it is pesticides that are also known as phytosanitary products and not vice versa. The term imposed by the chemical industry to mask the harmfulness of its products has overridden the original term, now denounced by apostles of chemical agriculture as the sign of a retrograde obsession of ecologists and hippies.

But the message was long ago thoroughly assimilated in the countryside: in the village where I grew up I never heard “pesticides” mentioned, only “phyto products” that you got from the “phyto store,” like a drug from the medicine chest.

From Arsenic to Mustard Gas

As the biologist Julie Marc points out in a doctoral thesis on Monsanto’s Roundup, the most widely sold herbicide in the world, “the use of pesticides goes back to Antiquity,”⁹ but until the early twentieth century the “killers of plagues” were derivatives of mineral compounds or plants, of natural origin (lead, sulfur, tobacco, or neem leaves in India).¹⁰ The fact that they were natural did not mean some of them were not extremely dangerous, such as arsenic, recommended by Pliny the Elder in his monumental Natural History. Used in China and Europe as an insecticide as early as the sixteenth century, the well-known poison—more precisely its byproduct arsenite of soda—was banned in vineyards in 2001.11

Previously of limited use, pesticides went through a first surge with the advent of mineral chemistry in the nineteenth century. The symbol of this development is the well-known Bordeaux mixture, a blend of copper sulfate and slaked lime used on vines, starting in 1885, to counteract mildew, and later as a herbicide. In the same period, copper arsenite, better known as “Paris green” because it was used to kill rats in Paris sewers, had huge success in the United States, where it was used as an insecticide in orchards.¹² A little later, it was discovered that, spread on grain fields, copper sulfate destroyed weeds without harming the grain.

But it was World War I that laid the foundations for the massive production of pesticides, which profited from the development of synthetic organic chemistry and research on battlefield gases. Indeed, the history of most “phytosanitary products” in wide use today is intimately connected to the history of chemical warfare, whose paternity can be traced to the German Fritz Haber. Born in 1868, this chemist first achieved fame by inventing a procedure for manufacturing ammonia by synthesizing hydrogen with atmospheric nitrogen, which earned him the 1918 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. His work on the process of fixation of atmospheric nitrogen was used for the production of chemical nitrogen fertilizers (which replaced Chilean and Peruvian guano¹³ and went along with the development of industrial agriculture), as well as in the production of explosives. When the Great War broke out, he was the head of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, and his laboratory was asked to participate in the war effort. Heading a group of 150 scientists and 1,300 technicians, his mission was to develop irritant gases, intended to drive Allied soldiers out of their trenches, even though chemical weapons had been banned by the 1899 Hague Declaration.

The lab work was assigned to Ferdinand Flury, charged with testing the toxicological effects and mechanisms of all kinds of toxic gases on mice, rats, monkeys, and even horses. But only one really stood out from the others: chlorine gas. At the time, the industrial use of chlorine, abundant in nature, combined with other elements—such as, for example, sodium in salt form (sodium chloride)—was in its infancy. Since the well-received presentation in 1785 by the chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet, who had described the whitening property of Javel water (bleach)—a solution of chlorine and potassium invented in a factory in the Javel neighborhood of Paris—the element had dazzling success as a whitening agent (in the textile and then the paper industry) and later as a disinfectant. But its use had remained limited, because as an uncompounded element chlorine is a yellow-green gas—its name derives from chloros, meaning pale green in Greek—and is extremely toxic, with a very unpleasant suffocating odor that violently attacks the respiratory tract. Added to the fact that it is heavier than air and has a tendency to concentrate close to the ground—which is very useful in trench warfare—it was precisely the toxic properties of chlorine gas (also known as dichlorine) that interested Fritz Haber.

On April 22, 1915, the German army released 146 tons of gas at Ypres, at the scientist’s direction; he had no hesitation in going to the front to supervise chemical attacks. He was the one who organized the secret installation of five thousand barrels of chlorine over a distance of six kilometers and ordered that the valves be opened at five in the morning. Driven by the breeze, the gas drifted over the Allied trenches. Taken by surprise, the French (mainly Algerian), British, and Canadian troops fell like flies, while trying to protect themselves with urine-soaked handkerchiefs. “I shall never forget the horrible agony of surprise in the eyes of the men who got that first dose,” a Canadian survivor recalled. “It was the look of a dog being suddenly beaten for a thing it hadn’t done. . . . They began gulping and coughing, and then fell down with their faces in their hands. . . . I had rolled and writhed, with the agony of the gas in my lungs, in a pool of slush in the bottom of the trench.”14

Fritz Haber, who had the rank of captain, paid a heavy price for this first victory: a few days after the Ypres trenches were gassed, his wife Clara Immerwahr, also a chemist, committed suicide by shooting herself in the heart with her husband’s service revolver. It was reported that she strenuously opposed his work on poison gas.

But Haber did not give up his work. Learning that the Allies had equipped their troops with gas masks, which made chlorine ineffective, he perfected phosgene, a mixture of two extremely toxic gases, dichlorine and carbon monoxide. Less irritating to the eyes, nose, and throat than chlorine gas alone, it was nonetheless the deadliest of the chemical weapons concocted in the laboratories of Berlin, because it violently attacked the lungs, filling them with hydrochloric acid. The few infantrymen who survived attacks died of the aftereffects in the years following the great slaughter. It is noteworthy that phosgene is still used today as a chemical ingredient in the pesticide industry. It is one of the ingredients in Sevin (carbaryl), the insecticide that produced the December 1984 disaster in Bhopal (see Chapter 3).

Toward the end of the war, after tens of thousands had been gassed, the German army released Haber’s latest find: mustard gas, also known as yperite because, like chlorine gas, it was used first in the Ypres trenches. Its effects are terrible: it produces huge blisters on the skin, burns the cornea, causing blindness, and attacks bone marrow, causing leukemia. Few soldiers survived mustard gas attacks.

While poison gas was unquestionably first used by the Germans, finally all the belligerents mobilized their chemical industries to produce and use it. The Great War was in general a boon for industrialists, who took advantage of the war effort to lay the foundations for veritable empires, whose heirs today are multinationals specializing in the production of pesticides or transgenic seeds. For example, Hoechst (which merged with the French company Rhône-Poulenc in 1999 to produce the biotechnology giant Aventis) supplied the German Army with explosives and mustard gas. In the same period the American company DuPont (now one of the world’s largest seed producers) supplied the Allies with gunpowder and explosives. Likewise, Monsanto (the world leader in genetically modified organisms [GMOs]) that had been established at the beginning of the century to produce saccharine, centupled its profits by selling chemical products used to manufacture explosives or poison gas, including sulfuric acid and the deadly phenol.

Haber’s Law and Zyklon B

“During peace time a scientist belongs to the world, but during war time he belongs to his country.” A zealous patriot, it was in these terms that Fritz Haber justified his work on poison gas, which, after the armistice, earned him a place on the roster of war criminals whose extradition the Allies demanded. He took refuge in Switzerland until the demand was officially withdrawn in 1919. A year later in Stockholm, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the industrial process for the synthesis of ammonia. His nomination caused an uproar in the international scientific community, and the French, English, and American laureates of previous prizes boycotted the prestigious ceremony. In their eyes, Haber embodied precisely what Alfred Nobel, the fabulously wealthy inventor of dynamite, had denounced in his will: the alliance between science and war.

But although his role as father of chemical warfare has been lost in the annals of science, his name is well known to toxicologists, who still use Haber’s law as a reference for assessing the toxicity of chemical products contaminating our environment, in particular pesticides. “Fritz Haber was not a toxicologist but a physical chemist,” notes Professor Hanspeter Witschi of University of California, Davis, in Inhalation Toxicology, “but he profoundly influenced the science of toxicology.”15 In fact, as he was developing fearsome chemical weapons, he simultaneously applied himself to comparing the toxicity of gases to derive a law making it possible to assess their “effectiveness,” that is, their lethal power. “Haber’s law” expresses the relationship between the concentration of a gas and the exposure time necessary to cause the death of an individual. This is the definition Haber provided: “For each war gas, the amount (c) present in one cubic meter, of air is expressed in milligrams and multiplied by the time (t) in minutes necessary for the experimental animal inhaling this air to obtain a lethal effect. The smaller this product (c × t) is, the greater the toxicity of the war gas.”¹⁶

While carrying out the observations that led him to formulate his terrible law, Haber also noted that exposure to a weak concentration of poison gas over a long period often had the same fatal effect as exposure to a high dose for a short period. Curiously, as we shall see, the regulatory agencies that make ample use of Haber’s teachings to assess the toxicity of pesticides seem to have forgotten this part of his conclusions. Indeed, although they have little trouble acknowledging that phytosanitary products may have severe, even fatal, effects in a case of acute poisoning, they often deny the long-term effects caused by chronic exposure to weak concentrations.

In the meanwhile, one thing is certain: Haber’s law “is often used in setting exposure guidelines for toxic substances,” as David Gaylor, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) toxicologist, acknowledges.¹⁷ Indeed, it directly inspired the creation of one of the basic tools for the assessment and management of chemical risks: “lethal dose, 50%” or LD₅₀. Officially invented by the Briton John William Trevan in 1927, this indicator of toxicity measures the dose of a chemical substance necessary to kill half the animals—usually mice and rats—exposed to it, generally by inhalation, but also by ingestion, or cutaneous application. It is expressed as units of mass of the substance per unit of body mass of the test subject (mg/kg). An example: if a pesticide has an LD₅₀ of 40 mg/kg, then 3,200 mg (3.2 g) is calculated to kill half the humans who weigh 80 kg.

According to a World Health Organization (WHO) document, it is estimated that a chemical product with an LD₅₀ lower than 5 mg/kg of body weight (solids) or lower than 20 mg/kg (liquids) can be considered “extremely hazardous.” It is “slightly hazardous” if its LD₅₀ is over 500 and 2,000 mg/kg respectively.18 As examples, the LD₅₀ of vitamin C is 11,900 mg/kg, of table salt 3,000 mg/kg, cyanide from 0.5 to 3 mg/kg, and dioxin 0.02 mg/kg (0.001 for a dog).

What about Zyklon B? It is 1 mg/kg.¹⁹ It is a tragic irony of history that Fritz Haber, who was of Jewish ancestry, was also the inventor of the deadly Zyklon B, used by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews in the gas chambers of the death camps. In the 1920s he was contacted by the German pesticide company Degesch, which asked him to resume his work on hydrocyanic acid to develop an application as an insecticide. Haber was familiar with the gas: according to the criteria of Haber’s law, it is so toxic that it is extremely hazardous to handle, which explains the decision not to use it as a chemical weapon. Regardless, Haber developed a formulation enabling it to be safely transported and sprayed on crops. It is noteworthy that Zyklon B was authorized in France in 1958 for the treatment of cereal seeds and the protection of stored grain. Marketed by the Eden Vert company, it was banned in 1988.²⁰ The French subsidiary of Degesch continued to use a product derived from Zyklon B as a disinfection agent for storage sites until 1997.²¹

Meanwhile, the life of this zealous patriot, a Protestant convert for pragmatic reasons, came to a sad end. After Hitler came to power in 1933, the National Socialist Party asked him to fire all his Jewish associates. Seeing that it was impossible to resist, Haber decided to resign. “You cannot expect that a man of 65 years will change the way he thinks, a way that guided him so well during the past 39 years in his academic life, and you will understand that the pride with which he served Germany, his country, during his entire life, now requires him to ask to be relieved from his duties.”²²

Suffering from chronic angina, Haber went into exile in Switzerland, thinking he would restore his health before going to Palestine, at the urging of his friend Chaim Weizmann. But the journey never came. He died on January 29, 1934, unaware that members of his family would be asphyxiated by Zyklon B in the death camps.

DDT and the Beginning of the Industrial Age

“Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life?” Rachel Carson posed this question in Silent Spring, published in 1962, considered the founding work of the ecological movement. “They should not be called ‘insecticides’ but ‘biocides.’” She went on: “This industry is a child of the Second World War. In the course of developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals developed in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects. The discovery did not come by chance: insects were widely used to test chemicals as agents of death for men.”23

Fritz Haber’s work on chlorinated gases did indeed open the way to the industrial production of synthetic insecticides, the most well-known of which is DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), one of the large family of organochlorines. An organochlorine is an organic compound in which one or more hydrogen atoms have been replaced by chlorine atoms, forming an extremely stable chemical structure that is therefore resistant to environmental degradation. Some are considered “persistent organic pollutants” (POPs), because they accumulate in animal and human fatty tissue and because their extreme volatility enables them to move through the atmosphere to contaminate the remotest areas of the planet. I will return to the damaging effects of POPs, several of which—known as the “dirty dozen” (from the 1967 Robert Aldrich film)²⁴—were banned by the Stockholm Convention adopted on May 22, 2001, by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), but still pollute the environment and even mothers’ milk. Among them are Monsanto’s polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs),²⁵ along with nine pesticides, including DDT, the “miracle insecticide” that began its brilliant career during World War II, bringing in its wake many molecules developed between the wars.

Synthesized by the Austrian chemist Othmar Zeidler in 1874, DDT was left in a laboratory drawer until 1939, when the Swiss chemist Paul Müller, who was working for the Geigy company,²⁶ identified its properties as an insecticide. His discovery had such great success that, only nine years later (record time) he won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Appearing in solid form, insoluble in water—to be used it has to be dissolved in an oil—DDT was first used by the U.S. Army in Naples in 1943, to contain a typhus epidemic; the disease, transmitted by lice, was decimating Allied troops. The massive operation was repeated in the South Pacific to eradicate the anopheles mosquito, the carrier of malaria, and later as an antiseptic for death camp survivors, Korean prisoners, and the German civilian population when the defeated country was occupied.

Yet the organochlorine pesticide was never used for military purposes during World War II, because it seems all high commands had learned the lessons of the Great War. In any event, this is what Major William Buckingham suggested in a book published in 1982 by the U.S. Office of Air Force History, where he notes that “the Allies and Axis in World War II abstained from using the weapon either because of legal restrictions, or to avoid retaliation in kind.”27 But in the aftermath of the war, DDT was universally celebrated as a “miracle insecticide” able to defeat any harmful insect. I have been able to consult some hallucinatory audiovisual archives in which one can see entire cities in the United States treated with DDT in the 1950s. Sprayers go up and down the streets spewing huge white clouds, while housewives are asked to disinfect their cupboards with sponges soaked in the insecticide. Authorized in agriculture in 1945, DDT was later used massively in the treatment of crops, forests, and rivers, in an impressive expenditure of resources.

In 1955, the WHO launched a vast campaign against malaria in many parts of the world—Europe, Asia, Central America, and North Africa. But initial successes, sometimes accomplishing complete eradication of the disease, were followed by disillusionment, because the mosquitoes carrying the parasite that causes the disease very rapidly developed resistance to DDT, resulting, in particular in India and Central America, in a spectacular resurgence of the scourge.²⁸ But for the chemical industry, with Monsanto and Dow Chemical in the lead, it was a jackpot: from 1950 to 1980 more than forty thousand tons of DDT were sprayed around the world every year, with production reaching a record of 82,000 tons in 1963 (making for a total of 1.8 million tons between the early 1940s and 2010). In the United States alone, some 675,000 tons were sprayed before the agricultural use of DDT was banned in 1972.²⁹

As Rachel Carson pointed out in Silent Spring, “the myth of the harmlessness of DDT rests on the fact that one of its first uses was the wartime dusting of many thousands of soldiers, refugees, and prisoners, to combat lice.”³⁰ In addition, there is its low acute toxicity in mammals: classified as “moderately hazardous” by the WHO, its LD₅₀ is only 113 mg/kg (for rats). On the other hand—I will come back to this in Chapters 16 and 17—its long-term effects are terrible: acting as an endocrine disruptor, it leads to cancer, birth defects, and reproductive disorders, in particular for those subject to prenatal exposure.³¹

Boosted by the success of DDT and other organochlorine pesticides, a second category of insecticides appeared in the wake of World War II. These were the organophosphates,³² whose development was directly connected to research on new poison gases, but which, for the same reasons as for DDT, were never used for military purposes. As the official site of the French Observatory for Pesticide Residues (Observatoire des résidus de pesticides, ORP), established by the French government in 2003, soberly states: “not having been used during hostilities, they were used against insects.”33 Designed to attack the nervous system of insects, these molecules have a much more elevated acute toxicity than organochlorines, but they degrade more quickly. In this family are highly hazardous insecticides like parathion (LD₅₀: 15 mg/kg), used as early as 1944, malathion, dichlorvos, and chlorpyrifos, as well as carbaryl (responsible for the Bhopal disaster), and sarin (LD₅₀: 0.5 mg/kg), a highly toxic gas developed in 1939 in the IG Farben laboratories and now considered a “weapon of mass destruction” by the United Nations.³⁴

The Precursors of Agent Orange

Launched at top speed thanks to synthetic insecticides, the green revolution also involved the marketing of chemical herbicides developed in British and American laboratories during World War II.³⁵ In the early 1940s, researchers succeeded in isolating the hormone that controls plant growth, and synthetically reproduced the molecule. They observed that, injected in small doses, the artificial hormone strongly stimulated plant growth, while, in contrast, high doses caused the death of plants. This led to the creation of two highly effective weed killers that initiated a veritable “agricultural revolution and laid the corner stone of present-day weed science,” in the words of the American botanist James Troyer.³⁶ The two herbicides were 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T), two chemical molecules in the chlorophenol family.³⁷

Researchers soon recognized the wartime potential of these extremely powerful weed killers, because they made it possible to destroy crops and thereby starve enemy armies and populations. In 1943, the UK Agricultural Research Council launched a secret testing program that bore fruit in Maylasia in the 1950s where, for the first time in history, the British army used herbicides to destroy the communist insurgents’ harvests. At the same time in the United States the Fort Detrick, Maryland, Biological Warfare Center was testing Dinoxol and Trinoxol, mixtures of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, the ancestor of Agent Orange, the defoliant used massively by the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War.

Indeed, although the Allies had renounced the use of chemical weapons, fearing above all an escalation that would have produced a terrible backlash, the emergence of the Cold War lifted this circumstantial taboo; for the White House any means were justified to combat the communist threat. So, from January 13, 1962, the launch date of Operation Ranch Hand, to 1971, some 80 million liters of defoliants were dumped on Vietnam, contaminating for decades more than 8 million acres and three thousand villages; 60 percent of the products used were Agent Orange, which is still causing birth defects thirty-five years after the end of the war.

The extreme toxicity of this chemical weapon is principally due to 2,4,5-T, a dreadful poison that is characteristically polluted by very small quantities of dioxin or TCDD.38 Considered the most toxic substance ever created by man—a by-product of industrial processes, it does not exist in nature—the molecule was isolated in a Hamburg laboratory in 1957.³⁹ It is now known that its LD₅₀ is 0.02 mg/kg (for rats) and that, according to a Columbia University study published in 2003, dissolving 80 grams of dioxin in a drinking water system could eliminate a city of 8 million people.⁴⁰ And estimates agree that in Vietnam 400 kilograms of pure dioxin were dumped in the southern part of the country.⁴¹

For the general public, TCDD emerged from the secrecy of laboratories on July 16, 1976, with a serious industrial accident known as the Seveso disaster. On that day, a reactor explosion in an Italian 2,4,5-T factory owned by the multinational Hoffmann-La Roche caused the release of an extremely toxic cloud in the Seveso region of Lombardy. Cattle died en masse, and officially 183 people contracted chloracne, an extremely serious condition resulting from dioxin poisoning, which manifests itself by an eruption of pustules all over the body, lasting several years and sometimes permanently.⁴²

The characteristics of this human-created disease had been widely discussed in the medical literature beginning in the late 1930s, after the entry onto the market of pentachlorophenol, a cousin of 2,4,5-T, made by Monsanto and Dow Chemical and used as a fungicide in the treatment of wood as well as in the whitening of paper pulp. For his 2007 book, How Everyday Products Make People Sick, Paul Blanc, professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of California, consulted the archives of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA),⁴³ where he found many letters from doctors asking for advice on the treatment of patients suffering from this dreadful skin disease, which was then unknown. “Nowhere in the literature have I found any case of caustic or chemical burn which lasted over several years unless the patient was in constant contact with the agent,” reported a baffled Dr. Karl Stingily of Mississippi in a paper presented at a conference of the Southern Medical Association.44 At the same conference, where this “new epidemic” was discussed at length, Dr. M. Toulmin Gaines of Alabama reported the case of a patient who worked in a lumber factory, a father of two young children: “He had acne . . . with comedones [medical term designating the specific lesions of acne] all over his face and back and shoulders and arms and thighs. His two children were a girl about five years old and a little boy about three. They had comedones all over their faces. They had a typical acne on the face. The boy had an indurated acne on the back of his neck such as you would see on a man about thirty years old. . . . I diagnosed it as chlorine acne and the children got it from the patient’s clothing. He said that when he came home with his overalls on, the children would grab him around the legs and hug him and he would take them up in his lap.”⁴⁵

The same symptoms were secretly observed by Monsanto after an explosion in a 2,4,5-T factory in Nitro, West Virginia, on March 8, 1949. Victims of dioxin poisoning, the workers present for the accident or called on to clean up the site, experienced nausea, vomiting, and persistent headaches, and developed a severe form of chloracne. On November 17, 1953, a similar accident occurred in a BASF factory producing the herbicide that was then flooding the fields of Europe and America. Followed just as secretly at the firm’s request by Dr. Karl Schultz, the exposed workers developed the same skin disease, which the Hamburg physician named chloracne. Throughout the 1950s many cases of this extremely disfiguring disease were recorded in the four corners of the United States, while an “amazing rain of death” fell upon the surface of the earth.⁴⁶