Women exposed in the womb to high levels of the pesticide DDT have a nearly fourfold increased risk of developing breast cancer, according to new results of research conducted on California mothers and daughters for more than half a century.
The legacy of the insecticide, so ubiquitous that most people still carry traces of it in their bodies, continues more than four decades after it was banned in the United States. DDT is still used to fight malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, where people are highly exposed inside their homes.
“If the results of this study are real, it’s possible that DDT could be responsible for raising the risk of breast cancer for a whole generation of women,” says Shanna Swan, an environmental health scientist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. She is not involved in the new research.
Some environmental scientists have long suspected, based on lab studies, that prenatal exposure to DDT—which can mimic estrogen and might turn key genes on and off—could fundamentally alter the way a woman’s breast tissue grows, making her more susceptible to breast cancer decades later.
Nearly everyone between the 1940s and early 1970s was exposed to DDT, which was widely sprayed on crops and vegetation to kill an array of insects. It was banned in the United States in 1972, a decade after Rachel Carson sparked outrage by documenting its effects in her classic book Silent Spring.
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