To see how safe or unsafe it is, the Minnesota Department of Health has picked the popular insect repellent ingredient as the first of seven "chemicals of emerging concern" to assess during the next year.
Comment: DEET is NOT safe to spray on the skin and is a chemical of concern, according to the following article:
Finally Deet Exposed as a Neurotoxin
New research shows that the insect-repelling chemical deet actually functions in the same way as deadly nerve gases and dangerous pesticides, by attacking the nervous systems of both insects and mammals.
A new study, published in the journal BioMed Central Biology, suggests that deet may function by interfering directly with insects' nervous systems.
"We've found that deet is not simply a behavior-modifying chemical but also inhibits the activity of a key central nervous system enzyme, acetylcholinesterase, in both insects and mammals," the researchers said.
"We shower, it goes down the drain, and it ends up in waste water that goes into rivers," said state toxicologist Helen Goeden.
Like many compounds, there are no state or federal standards for DEET, yet it has been detected in water samples nationwide, including Minnesota.
Examining DEET is part of a broader state effort to track dozens of chemicals in the environment, such as synthetic hormones, pesticides, pharmaceuticals and personal care products. Little is known about their potential effects on the environment or human health, so researchers must piece together whatever information is available, chemical by chemical.
For DEET, they will assemble data about where it has turned up in Minnesota waters and at what concentrations.
Goeden said there's no evidence of DEET in drinking water here, but it may be only a matter of time.
"It meets our definition of a potential chemical of concern," she said, given how frequently it's used and how often it shows up in rivers, especially downstream of waste water treatment plants.
Researchers will also review what's known about the toxicity of the chemical from laboratory exposures. The main objective is to calculate a "safe" level of exposure - usually in the low parts per billion in concentration - in case DEET shows up in drinking water supplies. That's the level "that could be ingested on a daily basis and would not result in adverse health effects," Goeden said.
40 years of use
She expects the Health Department report on DEET to be ready within a year. Research money comes from the Clean Water Fund, established by a special tax that voters approved in 2008 as a constitutional amendment.
© Renee Jones Schneider, Star TribuneNatalie Muoa, 8, of St. Paul watched as her brother Vincent took a fish off her line Wednesday at Hyland Lake Park Reserve in Bloomington. DEET has shown up in area groundwater and there is no clear understanding of what effect it might have on the environment or human health.
Moua said her family spends as much time as possible outdoors, "anything to get the kids away from electronics."
They use insect repellent when the bugs are out, usually on camping trips or hikes in woody areas.
"We try to use 100 percent DEET just to be on the safe side," she said. "It lasts longer and that way we don't have to keep applying it."
Moua said she would switch to different repellents if DEET proves to be a problem for groundwater.
Federal Environmental Protection Agency officials estimate that about a third of the U.S. population uses DEET products each year in a variety of liquids, lotions, sprays and impregnated materials such as wristbands. About 40 companies had registered 140 DEET products with the EPA in 2007.
The Centers for Disease Control and others say that DEET products have been available for more than 40 years, and are safe when used according to directions. Side effects are rare, and the chemical is effective in repelling biting pests like mosquitoes that can transmit West Nile Virus and ticks that may carry Lyme disease. Federal agencies have also approved repellents with natural products such as oil of lemon eucalyptus.
Comment: Safe when used according to directions? Side effects are rare?
The Center for Disease Control obviously overlooked the following data:
Insect Repellent DEET is Toxic to Brain Cells
Consider this worrisome statistic: each year approximately one-third of all Americans spray and slather on insect repellents containing central nervous system toxin DEET. And this is in spite of the fact that previous studies have warned of DEET's dangers. For example, earlier research by Duke University Medical Center pharmacologist Mohamed Abou-Donia, who has spent 30 years studying the effects of pesticides, found that prolonged exposure to DEET can impair functioning in parts of the brain and could result in problems with muscle coordination, muscle weakness, walking or even memory and cognition.
The Health Department study will not address DEET's use as a repellent, only whether it's a concern if ingested in drinking water.
Not from natural sources
In a 2004 study by the U.S. Geological Survey, DEET was one of the 10 most frequently detected compounds in water taken from 65 sampling sites across Minnesota. Scientists identified 74 compounds in all, including household, industrial and agricultural chemicals and their breakdown products. There are few aquatic or human health standards for the compounds, it concluded, and "the risks to humans or aquatic wildlife are not known."
Kathy Lee, one of the study's authors, said that DEET was also found in about a third of 43 sites sampled in 2006 as part of a broader study along the Mississippi River in Minnesota. Yet another study of 12 Minnesota lakes and four rivers, published last year by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, detected DEET in all of its samples.
"It showed up just about everywhere," said MPCA environmental research scientist Mark Ferrey.
Because DEET is a manmade chemical and does not occur naturally, Ferrey suspects that what's been found in the lakes comes from swimmers, or from homes.
The MPCA has begun another study to analyze DEET and more than 100 other chemicals in waters near 25 wastewater plants, Ferrey said.
The focus is on potential ecological effects, not human health, he said, and includes Geological Survey researchers and St. Cloud State University scientists.
"We're just trying to understand how widespread it is, where you find it and where not, and in what concentrations," Ferrey said. "Without that information we can't determine what kind of problem it is."
I was 16 and my friend and I found an ancient stack of Playboy magazines from the sixties/seventies rotting in his garage.
There was an article in one about a fellow named, "Dr. Death". (Who knew? Apparently dirty old men really did buy those magazines for the cutting edge journalism. Or at least the excuse was viable.) Anyway, the article was a long and detailed interview with a scary genius chemist/inventor who was able to whip up the most astonishing poisons and explosives and fulfill any imaginative request from the black-ops world. He claimed that the humble felt-tipped marker was his invention. He'd been asked to come up with a poison delivery system which could make it through customs as a common article and be used on an enemy agent during a flight without detection. The felt-tip marker was his solution; it could pass as a pen and also be a way to kill an enemy agent. You just touch the skin with the treated ink and the target would expire a number of hours later after the flight had landed.
This guy worked variously for a number of black ops and secret departments. Kind of like "Q" from James Bond, but dirty and foul and full of fear. -For me it was a humbling day altogether and I felt yucky afterwards for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that it was my first exposure to the idea that governments employed whole departments filled with soulless, vile people who treated each other and the world like dirt.
Anyway, at one point in the interview "Dr. Death" said it was stupifyingly easy to kill everybody in an entire building, no matter what the security. It was so easy that he wouldn't describe the method because it was just too dangerous for people to know. That stuck in my mind for years.
Then one day the answer to that puzzle struck me out of the blue. I'd figured out what his stupifyingly easy poison distribution system entailed, and I was both excited to have solved an old puzzle, but also horrified because he was right.
*People* are the best distribution method on the planet. If you put a spot of toxin on a door handle, or an escalator hand hold, it would spread to many other shared surfaces and then within a few hours, everybody in the building will have been in contact with it. According to the "Doctor", there did indeed exist poisons which are capable of killing slowly in microscopic quantities which could be distributed very easily in this manner.
The next logical steps came to mind relatively quickly...
-Ever wonder why all cell phones and laptop batteries just so happen to need replacing after a year or two of use? There must be a billion or more lithium cells rotting into water tables all over the world. And why lithium? There are hundreds of other electrolytes which work just as well as lithium. Heck, common sea water and pennies can make a 1.5 volt battery. Two nails and a potato make a 1.5 volt battery. The electrons don't come from the electrolyte; they come from the metal plates at each end. But they don't focus on that in all the marketing, do they?
As it happens, Lithium in trace quantities in the blood, when in combination with EM transmissions from 60 Hz wall socket power, causes test subject rats to become docile as if hit with a medicinal dosage of lithium drug. Isn't THAT interesting!
As for DEET. . . There are plenty of bug repellents which work just as well without being toxic. I know an herbalist who makes one of them. I've used it and it works wonderfully, and I'm not talking about that useless lemon based stuff which is marketed, I am certain, just to not work and thus better sell DEET products. In certain parts of the West, anyway, it is illegal for herbalists to label their bug repellents as bug repellents, thanks to pressure from lobby groups representing DEET companies. Thus DEET has been sold to us with heavy, fear-based marketing and even legislation in some areas. (Remember "West Nile"?).
My point is that if the secret black ops government agencies learned in the sixties how to distribute poisons super-effectively thanks to rogue geniuses like "Dr. Death", then you can be sure they have worked out how to scale up the process and apply it to the rest of the world.
DEET messes with our brains and cognition, does it?
That doesn't surprise me at all.