Thread by @elenaconis

I’ve got a book coming out soon, on the pesticide DDT & the history of science denial from 1950s chemical and tobacco campaigns to the January 6 Capitol riot.

I confess that when I first saw the cover, I wanted to reject it.

Looking at it, all I could focus on was her left breast, which seemed to pop off the page in high relief. Yes, she’s surrounded by DDT. And I know sex sells. But did I really need to sell my book with a babe?

I wanted to build an argument against the cover, so I tracked down the photo in its original context. Here it is.

The photo is from what appears to be an article in Life magazine, 1948. Today, we’d call it sponsored content—it’s an ad. It’s selling an industrial fogging machine, first designed to create smokescreens used in WWII.

In the late 1940s, the manufacturer wanted a new market for its machines. A series of devastating polio outbreaks provided a chance. Capitalizing on a then-popular theory that flies spread polio, they sold the foggers as a way to kill all flies in a town.

They promised it wouldn’t harm bees. They promised it wouldn’t contaminate food. They were wrong. Yet their promises helped make a cloud of DDT seem like one of the safest places to be.

But back to the breast. By the time of this photo—when this woman was fogged in DDT—FDA scientists knew DDT accumulated in fat and showed up in breastmilk. They didn’t know what that meant, and that worried them. They warned against DDT’s indiscriminate use.

The FDA’s counterparts at the USDA, however, insisted DDT was safe. So did scientists at the CDC.

Eventually, the FDA team would be vindicated—but not for decades. And by then, their warning was long forgotten (or rather, drowned out by a combination of Army imperatives, CDC and USDA scientists, and corporate PR).

By 1960, manufacturers were churning out roughly 100 million pounds of DDT annually. And DDT was only the most famous of a larger class of insect-killers, being produced at a rate of half a billion pounds a year.

All the while, cancer rates soared. Breast cancer rates rose more than 60 percent in the 1970s and an additional 30 percent in the 1980s. Women began asking scientists to look at the connection between the disease and environmental chemicals, including DDT.

In the early 1990s, new studies linked DDT to breast cancer. The link was contested for the next two decades. Today, it’s increasingly accepted. But some of the strongest evidence suggests the risk is greatest for women exposed to DDT when young.

That’s why Kay Heffernan’s left breast isn’t just a racy reminder of the ways companies use women’s bodies and the promise of youth and beauty to sell us everything—including literal poisons. It’s a cruel irony.

I'm not certain what happened to Kay Heffernan, the model fogged by DDT. Maybe she left modeling; maybe she married. Maybe she moved; maybe she had a family. Maybe she got breast cancer; maybe she escaped the disease.

No matter what became of the rest of her life, it’s impossible to look at her image now as anything but a young woman, surrounded by an ominous cloud of poison—as unaware as the rest of us about the danger it might be inflicting on her body.

Her story is our story. So I stuck with the cover. And the rest of the story is here. boldtypebooks.com/titles/elena-c…