Hip
Senior Member
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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.