Word: ddt
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...medical men fought the epidemic. The Army sprayed with DDT (to cut down disease-bearing flies). The Navy gave free immunizing injections to thousands of Chinese. U.S. doctors have tried to stop the local practice of bleeding, which reduces body fluids already depleted by the disease. (All U.S. troops and officials going to potential cholera areas are immunized and none have caught cholera in Chungking. The Norwegian ambassador, Alf Hassel, caught it, but is recovering.) UNRRA dispatched seven experts, tons of water-purifying and other equipment to Chungking...
Many a civilian would give red points to get his hands on a little DDT, the Army's high-priority insecticide. Recently citizens of Media and Swarthmore, Philadelphia suburbs, were astonished: two of the towns' hardware stores offered bottles of DDT for sale across the open counter. The solution was just right for killing flies and mosquitoes. The stores did a land-office business at $1 per pint. Then WPB heard about it and asked grimly: where did the stuff come from...
...answer: a Swarthmore chemist named Walter Steuber (of Houdry Process Corp.) had decided that the easiest way to get DDT was to make it himself. He was turning it out by the gallon in his cellar. Said Steuber: any competent chemist can figure out the formula and make DDT out of non-priority materials. The ingredients are: chloral hydrate (better known as "Mickey Finn"), monochlor benzine, and concentrated sulfuric acid...
...solemnly ruled: "Anybody can make DDT, provided he uses non-priority materials or materials for which he has obtained a priority rating. But you can't sell it except for military or experimental purposes...
...Office. Over 300 other C.O.s have volunteered for a wide variety of special projects "to help science save lives." In New Hampshire a group of 35 did road work for three-week stretches in louse-infested clothes, to permit studies which played a part in the development of DDT, the powder which saved bombed Naples from a typhus epidemic (TIME, Jan. 10, June 12, 1944). Five other C.O.s spent days on a life raft off Cape Cod, to determine, among other things, the effects of drinking sea water under shipwreck conditions...