about nine years later a fatal leukemia developed. Where pesticides are involved, the chemicals
that figure mos t promi nently in the cas e his tories are DDT, lindane, benzene hexachloride, the
nitrophe nols , the common moth crys tal paradichlorobe nzene, chlordane, and, of cours e, the
s olvents in which they are carried. As this phys ician emphas izes , pure expos ure to a s ingle
chemical is the exception, rathe r tha n the rule. The comme rcial product us ually contains
combina tions of s everal chemicals , s us pended in a petroleum distillate plus some dispersing
agent. The aromatic cyclic and uns aturate d hy drocarbons of the vehicle may themselves be a
major factor in the damage done the blood-formi ng organs. From the practical rather than the
medical s tandpoint this dis tinction is of little importance, howeve r, becaus e thes e petroleum
solvents are an inseparable part of mos t common s praying practices.
The medical literature of this and other countries contains many s ignificant cas es that s upport
Dr. Hargraves’ belief in a caus e-and-effect relation between these chemicals and leukemia and
othe r blood dis orders. They concern s uch every day people as farmers caught in the ‘fallout’ of
their own s pray rigs or of planes , a college s tudent who s prayed his s tudy for ants and remained
in the room to study, a woman who had installed a portable lindane vaporizer in her home, a
worker in a cotton field that had been s prayed with chlordane and toxaphene. They carry, half
concealed within their medical terminology, s tories of s uch human tragedies as that of two
young cousins in Czechoslovakia, boys who lived in the same town and had always worke d and
played together. Their last and most fateful employment was at a farm cooperative whe re it
was their job to unload sacks of an insecticide (benzene hexachloride). Eight months later one
of the boys was s tricken with acute leukemia. In nine days he was dead. At about this time his
cous in began to ti re eas ily and to run a te mpe rature. Within about three months his s ymptoms
became more severe and he, too, was hos pitalized. Again the diagnosis was acute leukemia,
and again the disease ran its inevitably fatal course.
And then there is the cas e of a Swedis h farmer, s trangely re minis cent of that of the Japanes e
fis herman Kuboya ma of the tuna ves s el the Lucky Dragon. Like Kuboya ma, the farmer had been
a healthy man, gleaning his living from the land as Kuboyama had taken his from the sea. For
each man a pois on drifting out of the s ky carried a death s entence. For one, it was radiation-
pois oned as h; for the other, chemical dus t. The farmer had treated about 60 acres of land with
a dus t containing DDT and benze ne hexachloride. As he worke d puffs of wind brought little
clouds of dus t s wirling about him. ‘In the evening he felt unus ually tired, and during the
s ubs equent days he had a general feeling of weakness , with backache and aching legs as well as
chills, and was obliged to take to his bed,’ says a report from the Medical Clinic at Lund. ‘His
condition became wors e, howe ver, and on May 19 [a week afte r the s praying] he applied for
admis s ion to the local hospital.’ He had a high fever and his blood count was abnormal. He was
transferred to the Medical Clinic, where, after an illness of two and one half months , he died. A
pos t-mortem examination revealed a complete wasting away of the bone ma rrow....
How a normal and necessary process such as cell division can become altered so that it is alien
and des tructive is a problem that has engaged the attention of countles s s cientis ts and untold
s ums of money. What happe ns in a cell to change its orderly multiplication into the wild and
uncontrolled proliferation of cancer? When ans wers are found they will almos t certainly be
multiple. Just as cancer itself is a disease that wears many guises, appearing in various forms
that differ in their origin, in the cours e of their development, and in the factors that influence
their growth or regres s ion, s o there mus t be a corres ponding variety of caus es. Yet underlying
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