Word: pyrethrum
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Dates: during 1942-1942
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...earth-is being used to protect the residents of Delhi, India's capital, and the U.S. troops quartered there from the epidemic now raging among the 100,000,000 people of northwest India. Gangs of trained workmen go from house to house all day spraying a mixture of pyrethrum insecticide (5%) and kerosene (95%) on the walls and rafters where the night-flying mosquitoes rest. The sprayers are all lads of good caste, so no highborn Hindu will be outraged by their attentions to his residence, outhouse and cowshed, each of which must be re-sprayed every week...
...Pyrethrum powder, a standard insecticide which is made from a certain chrysanthemum plant, used to be imported largely from Japan. In recent years coffeegrowers in Britain's Kenya Colony in Africa have cultivated the plant, now grow enough for their own use and the whole U.S. besides-if the U.S. can get it. Chemists, however, have discovered ways to stretch the pyrethrum supply by adding "synergistic" compounds-sesamin from sesame oil and asarinin from the southern prickly-ash bark-which make a more poisonous blend than pyrethrum alone...