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by skim_milk 2471 days ago
When my father was a child, he would bike behind the trucks that sprayed DDT all over the neighborhood because the DDT mist kept him cool. I hope you'll be fine, because people have done much worse!
5 comments

Ha I remember doing the same thing when I was ~6 years old in South Korea. There would be these trucks that went around spraying mosquito killing fog in the apartment complexes and all the little kids from the neighborhood would run behind them.

Well now I'm 30 and so far things seem to be ok! Fingers crossed

Yup, this has been my experience growing up outside of the US.

Watching this video made me facepalm really hard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2NmuQW8cjE

The description on that video is hilarious.
Meanwhile I’m out walking my dog and one of these trucks turns the corner. I immediately turn and run, it’s always futile.. the truck passes me and I’m left standing there holding my shirt over my face. Doesn’t matter; inhaled DEET.
FYI DDT and DEET are completely different chemicals, one is an insecticide, the other is a repellent. Some people in this thread seem to confuse them. I don't think they would spray DEET at scale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEET

My grandmother talked about playing in piles of fresh asbestos when she was a child, because it was soft and fun to jump in.
Yep. We did this in the deep south when I was growing up. Good times.
Same here, in rural south Louisiana in the 90s. Whelp, uh, I think I'm fine ...
I drank lots of Coca-cola for decades, thinking it's only sugar, what could go wrong?
Please, what is your additional concern here?
What is yours?
Omg I hope your dad is alright?
As scary sounding as the anecdote was, DDT is known for relatively low human (and mammal) toxicity. They did absolutely insane human studies with it in the 1950's, and dosages of up to 380mg/kg were tolerable. There was also no evidence that it produced cancer at commonly exposed dosages: http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/carbaryl-dicro... < some more info here.