Study calls for ALL organophosphate pesticides to be banned (OPs are linked to ME/CFS and GWI)

[Hip]

Ouch! Well I can understand how you'd have a strong reaction to o-phosphates. They don't belong on residential property, much less indoors. But you had an exposure of millions of times higher than what you might get by, say, living in a town near farms, which is still more than the vanishingly small traces that may make it into food.

Yes that may be true, but such massive exposure is by no means uncommon. In the developing world, where pesticide supplier companies often do not provide sufficient education and instruction to the farmers using these pesticides, let alone protective equipment to use during application, exposure levels to the farmer and his family and his children can be high enough to cause major illness.

But even with the low-level organophosphate exposures that people routine get from foods or garden or home use of pesticides, the systematic review study referred to in this thread says there is compelling evidence that prenatal exposure at low levels is putting children at risk for cognitive and behavioral deficits and for neurodevelopmental disorders.

There are also studies finding that use of gardener's pesticides in the home to spray on houseplants (which again is a low level exposure) increases the risk of autoimmune conditions by a factor of 2.

If you start with the assumption that X is guilty of Y, you can construct enough reasons to convince yourself or an audience that it is true.

Sure, but it is a two-way problem: if the scientists employed by pesticide companies start with the assumption that their products are safe, they may become blind to any evidence that indicates otherwise.

Since large corporates have lots of money to spend on their own scientific studies, on lawyers that in court will ridicule the plaintiffs made ill by pesticide exposure, these corporates can distort the truth in their own favor.

Some decades ago in the UK, Professor Peter Behan, one of the major researchers on viral etiologies of ME/CFS, found good evidence of organophosphates playing a role in triggering ME/CFS. Indeed, one investigation at that time found Scottish sheep farmers using organophosphate-based "sheep dip" to treat their sheep had 4 times the national average prevalence of ME/CFS. When Behan acted as an expert witness in court cases of ill farmers with organophosphate-associated ME/CFS, clever lawyers and scientists in the pay of these companies successfully ridiculed Behan's arguments.

 

[Hip]

The new, improved pesticides which replace whatever a jury objects to may turn out to be worse than the old ones. You'll also have more mold, fungus, insect and animal damaged food,

This is the issue. I remember reading once that if we globally stopped using all pesticides, we would lose around 30% of our crop production to insects. So we are in a bit of a bind. Nevertheless, we should not allow the corporates to sweep the ill health effects of pesticides under the carpet.

It's possible that pumping research funding into biological controls may lead to solutions. Biological control is the cultivation specific insects which eat the insects that damage crops. Biological controls are used for growing organic food, but to my knowledge not much scientific research has gone into making biological controls more efficient and effective. If a total ban on organophosphates were looming on the horizon, I bet there would be a sudden major interest in researching and developing biological controls.



In terms of new improved pesticides, the neonicotinoids class of pesticides were developed to replace the more harmful organophosphates and carbamate insecticides. They are now the most widely used pesticides. Although they are not without their own problems, as they may cause endocrine disruption in humans, altering estrogen production in humans (could that perhaps be the cause of the recent increases in gender dysphoria, I wonder?).

Neonicotinoids have also been linked to bee colony collapse, and have already been mostly banned by the EU for that reason. Which I am not sure is a good thing: if we ban neonicotinoids which are thought safer to humans, we may end up using more organophosphates. Bees are wonderful creatures, but I'd put the safety children first.

 

[Abha]

[QUOTE="Hip, post: 1009969,


Malathion has since been banned in the EU, but not yet in the US.[/QUOTE]

Hip,back in 2014 I wrote re salmon farming on this thread...

Ethoxyquin/Fish Farming(salmon mainly)/BBB
This article below re Ethoxyquin in foodstuffs, animal feeds, petfood etc is probably very important for those affected by ME/CFS(causes?) and...
Thread by: Abha, Mar 16, 2014, 2 replies, in forum: General ME/CFS Discussion

Malathion was being used(probably still is ,as security around such places is so tight.What are they hiding?) by salmon farmers in Norway(documentary on rt.com/also now in you tube re Green Warriors)).as far as I recall the Minister of Fisheries and her family were all involved in the salmon industry.She also ran a Finance Company tied up with the salmon Farming Industry.

Farmed salmon is probably the most polluted food on the planet.Another American scientist too wrote about the state of the British salmon fishing industry(shocking too).The governments of course deny all of these allegations.I wrote to various governments(Camerons then?) including Obama's and to other political parties too..The Americans never replied but I did get some replies from the major government parties in UK/Ireland..

Ethoxyquin (a terrible product)was already banned then worldwide(as far as I recall) but it was being used in Norway on salmon farms(see my other thread).I'm sure the same practices were employed elsewhere too to prevent sea lice etc

 

[SilverbladeTE]

as said from what I recall and my memory is not what it was, I THINK they used that chemical in jet engine lubricant to deal with viscosity issues under the extreme conditions (kind of like antifreeze)

Pesticides are chosen to be more toxic to arthropods (insects) than Mammals
but they are still EXTREMELY poisonous to mammals (especially so since they are "contact" poisons)
if you flew a crop sprayer over a city with high concentration you'd kill hundreds or even a few thousand, rather than the tens or hundreds of thousands Sarin etc would cause


as an example of why in general pesticides need banned completely for agriculture except for emergency use,
consider California fruit growing:
there the stupid idiots grow orchards in places like San Joaquin Valley that have very low rainfall, they rely almost totally on irrigation for water
this means poisons are not naturally flushed form the soil/plants because there is so low rainfall and poisons build up
when you use pesticides, they build up, too....
when you have a drought things get even worse and the salt pans etc can be blown into the air in high winds

 

[Hip]

I was just looking to find the latest news on bee colony collapse disorder (CCD), and found this article which says not only is CCD on the wane in recent years, it was not really that much of a problem in the first place, being over-hyped by environmental groups.

Also the link of CCD to neonicotinoids is not proven, and other factors like the Varroa mites that attack honey bees are implicated.

France has recently banned all the neonicotinoids linked to CCD, so it will be interesting to see if CCD disappears or not in France.

 

[pattismith]

This is the issue. I remember reading once that if we globally stopped using all pesticides, we would lose around 30% of our crop production to insects. So we are in a bit of a bind. Nevertheless, we should not allow the corporates to sweep the ill health effects of pesticides under the carpet.

I heard that 30 % of agriculture products (plants) are lost in the time/space between productor to consumer, don't know if it is true and if it apply to every product, probably not.

 

[Abha]

I was just looking to find the latest news on bee colony collapse disorder (CCD), and found this article which says not only is CCD on the wane in recent years, it was not really that much of a problem in the first place, being over-hyped by environmental groups.

Also the link of CCD to neonicotinoids is not proven, and other factors like the Varroa mites that attack honey bees are implicated.

France has recently banned all the neonicotinoids linked to CCD, so it will be interesting to see if CCD disappears or not in France.

@Hip
I used to attend beekeeping classes in UK/S.Africa but I don't keep bees.Re CCD I have watched many films on this and though nothing can be proven 100% I do feel that chemicals play a large part in CCD.It is so bad in the USA now that they have to get plane loads of bees from Australia and elsewhere to pollinate their almonds and other crops in California.I havent looked at this much in recent times but I have found this....

Large-scale study 'shows neonic pesticides harm bees'(2017)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-40382086

The most extensive study to date on neonicotinoid pesticides concludes that they harm both honeybees and wild bees. The results are published in Science.

A second study published in the journal Science looked at commercial corn-growing areas of Canada.The scientists found that worker bees exposed to neonicotinoids had lower life expectancies and their colonies were more likely to permanently lose queens.

 

[Hip]

I do feel that chemicals play a large part in CCD.

Neonicotinoids do cause some harm to bees, but whether exposure to neonicotinoids alone is sufficient to cause CCD is open to question.

The US continues to use neonicotinoids, but if you look at the graph below of bee colony numbers in the US, there was a slight dip during the years when CCD first hit, in around 2006, but populations seems to have returned to normal in the last few years, in spite of the continued use of neonicotinoids.

Number of honey bee colonies in the US by year

Source: here​

I hope neonicotinoids are not primarily responsible for CCD, as assuming that neonicotinoids are actually safer for humans, we would be better off using them than organophosphates.


I found this article interesting: it seems that bees get addicted to food containing neonicotinoids, just as smokers get addicted to cigarettes (neonicotinoids are nicotine-like substances).

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