What are persistent pesticides?
Persistent pesticides, which primarily consist of organochlorine pesticides, are considered persistent because they are stable in the environment and resist being broken down. The ability of organochlorine pesticides to persist in the environment made them highly effective and therefore widely used in agriculture and insect control efforts during the 1940s-1970s. The organochlorine DDT also was used to control typhus and malaria. The properties that made these chemicals such effective insecticides also made them environmental hazards: they are stored in human fat tissue and slowly broken down by the body. Some of the organochlorine pesticides have been banned for use in the United States, but others are the active ingredients of some home and garden products and some agricultural and environmental pest-control products.
