i would suggest to remove the passage about the mode of action of deet this is speculaton and not proven based on the NOR guidelines i ca nt say its wrong but my data suggest that it might be not correct blood substitute with ATP as sole attractant is also protected by DEET while there is no lactic acid Removed the natural alternatives or actually added a question mark Added refs to show that these alternatives do not work Also removed various distinctions between natural and synthetic There is no difference between a molecule synthesised chemically and naturally Last DEET is a repellant NOT an insecticide Made new page on DEET using material gleaned largely from the CDC and EPA pages and a couple of studies on health effects and insect repellant effectiveness from Google Although a bunch of the pages say one should be careful only to wear DEET when necessary not under clothing etc they don t spell out why they re concerned I m guessing DEET is chemically nasty is it an organo phosphate and so may have carcinogenic or other unfortunate properties If someone knows and ideally can show what these suspected effects might be I think a short hopefully rational addition to the DEET page is called for 15 03 20 Oct 2003 UTC What was Charlie Coll s contribution Some Canadians think he invented the stuff 22 13 18 Aug 2004 UTC Is it a poison If so what is the LD 50 Is it liquid or a gas or solid at room temp and standard conditions Thanks As mentioned in the article its effect on the human body is not yet fully understood it s gay eh Ed and not an organophosphate as seen from the chemical formula image but the effect seen with leeches provides a clue as to what might happen if enough of it entered the body The effect on leeches is added from my own experience using a concentrated DEET stick like a deodorant applicator and only needing to touch the leech for it to convulse off It s a liquid at rtp as far as I can tell 10 10 13 Jun 2005 UTC Be careful adding from your own experience That basically violates the Wikipedia No original research policy But that s simple to avoid since if you ve seen the effect most likely someone else has Wikipedia needs to be a secondary source citing other published sources So find a published source that finds the same thing and the addition would be much better Also it is liquid as long as the repellant product bottles that say they are 100 deet really are Also just eyeballing from it s structure liquid looks about right I read a bunch of studies on DEET and they all basically say it is safe as far as they can tell but avoid overexposure as much as possible A very small percentage of the time some people 12 if I recall the study correctly out of a large population have a reaction to DEET Basically the 60 years it has been used and the large amount of usage is strong evidence that at least the stuff is not really really nasty So the article looks pretty accurate in that respect Talk 12 00 Jun 13 2005 UTC Whoops didn t know about that Thanks I ll leave it in for the moment and will try to remember to do backup research when I get home if anyone believes that the information is unreliable enough please feel free to mark it out and I ll just have to find a better source than word of mouth from my parents at the time Later Researched Found a fair bit of anecdotal evidence but not enough hard evidence to keep my previous addition in Also a 1998 study shows DEET may actually accelerate absorption through the skin so going to revert the edit Putting in a link with lots of detail I found to make myself feel better 16 38 13 Jun 2005 UTC No worries Now you know and can make great contributions There are plenty of things to help out with so do some research and add what you can If you don t feel like doing that just fix formatting errors and help link all the related concepts etc Talk 17 37 Jun 13 2005 UTC I would change a couple of the wordings from pesticide to repellent or chemical so it does not imply that DEET functions as a pesticide There seems to be a lot of confusion about that on various sites so perhaps it would be