Fucked up Shit
Colorado company sprayed anon's friend's ranch, stock got sick and he was moving them when he passed out on his kitchen floor, woke up a week later in hospital - apparently the Dow chemical has a new pesticide introduced last year
Introduced by Dow Chemical in 1965, chlorpyrifos is the most widely-used pesticide on crops, including corn, soybeans, broccoli, and apples, and is also widely used in non-agricultural settings like golf courses
Looked into this new pesticide a bit:
"Scientists say there is no acceptable dose to avoid brain damage. Its use is banned in several European countries. Yet its residues are found in fruit baskets, on dinner plates, and in human urine samples from all over Europe. Now producers are pushing for a renewed EU approval – perhaps in vain.
The name is chlorpyrifos. Here is why the chemical and its risks are almost unknown to the public.
Thomas Backhaus, professor for ecotoxicology and environmental science at the University of Gothenburg, says that the substance took a long time to be recognized as one of the "nasty" ones.
"In comparison with glyphosate, the active substance in Roundup, chlorpyrifos has been flying under the radar. When we talk of herbicides like glyphosate that kill weed humans can cope because we don't have chlorophyll and don't get directly affected. When we talk about insecticides, you have the problem that they affect all developing animals, including humans," he says.
Backhaus' concerns are well known in academic circles and shared by other researchers.
In 2013, Swedish researchers reported findings of chlorpyrifos and other pesticides in urine from middle-aged women, a group with a high intake of fruits and vegetables.
Chlorpyrifos has never been registered for agricultural use in Sweden.
In 2016, studies for the Danish ministry of environment found chlorpyrifos in the urine from nine out of ten children and their mothers.
by Xindi (Cindy) Hu
figures by Lillian Horin
In March 2017, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decided not to ban Chlorpyrifos, a widely used pesticide. One year later, in February 2018, a bill was introduced in Hawaii to ban the manufacturing, distribution, and use of chlorpyrifos across all Hawaiian islands.
The most disconcerting effect of chronic exposure to chlorpyrifos is its potential to impair children’s developing brains. When the residential use ban went into effect in 2000, it just so happened that a team of researchers at Columbia University was in the middle of recruiting participants for a study on childhood development. The ban allowed the researchers to split the study group in two halves, forming a natural experiment where the two groups of pregnant women were identical in every way except that the earlier group was exposed to household chlorpyrifos during pregnancy, and the latter group was not. The researchers found that when children were exposed in the womb, they tended to be smaller, have poorer reflexes, and show higher risks of having ADHD and other developmental disorders years after being exposed. Another team of researchers in Berkeley made similar findings. Since then, peer-reviewed publications have provided strong evidence for the neurodevelopmental toxicity of chlorpyrifos. Only Dow Chemical, the inventor of chlorpyrifos, disagrees with this well-established scientific evidence, citing its own “40 years of high-quality animal research.
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/widely-used-pesticide-one-year-later/
https://euobserver.com/health/145146
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/insect-apocalypse-under-way-toxic-pesticides-agriculture