The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began
an ongoing study in 1999 in an effort to calculate the public?s
exposures to environmental contaminants, including mercury,
tobacco smoke, and certain pesticides. By taking blood and
urine samples, scientists can monitor the population?s contact
with chemicals present in the air, water, dust, food, and soil
over time.
?So far, the results of the initial CDC National Report on
Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals confirm what
many people already suspected,? says Susan Kegley, staff
scientist at Pesticide Action Network North America
(PANNA). ?The general population has contaminant levels
exceeding those set by the Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) as safe.?
If you want to limit your exposure to pesticides, you need to
become familiar with the ways you come into contact with
them. ?Residues on food and home-and-garden insecticides
are well-known ways for people to be exposed to pesticides,?
says Jay Feldman, executive director of Beyond
Pesticides. ?But laundry and bathroom products, such as
sanitizers and mildew removers, also contain pesticides. The
chemicals commonly used to keep backyard swimming pools
clean and clear are laced with pesticides.? Institutions and
businesses use these products too. At least 21 neurotoxins
are used in schools.
People often forget to consider the pesticides not under their
direct control. ?Spraying of nearby agricultural fields or
monthly applications by the neighbor?s lawn service cause
drift that can be a significant source of pesticide exposure,?
says Kegley.
Diet has a huge effect on the amount of pesticides people
ingest. Researchers at the University of Washington analyzed
the urine of 100 children. ?Ninety-nine of the kids had
detectable levels of pesticides in their systems,? says
Kegley. ?The only participant with no evidence of exposure
ate organic food.?
?Pesticides have become omnipresent in our rain and air,?
says Steve Tvedten, president of Get Set, a company
specializing in nontoxic pest control. ?Chemicals used in Africa
find their way to Florida in a short amount of time. And our
generation has been exposed to more than 500 toxins that
our grandparents weren?t. Even if pesticides were safe,
they?re not always effective. If they were, we wouldn?t
continue to need them. And already, more than one-half of
the pests are resistant to poisons.?
The same herbicides and pesticides many people spray on
their own gardens have been linked to the onset of
Parkinson?s Disease, a disorder that turns movement into a
battle between the brain and the nerves.
The first connection was made in the early 1980s, when
young people illegally taking an impure form of Demerol
(MPTP) exhibited symptoms of an advanced form of
Parkinson?s. The chemical structure of MPTP resembles the
herbicide paraquat. During the past two decades, researchers
have continued to explore the associations between
pesticides and Parkinson?s.
?I was surprised at how accurately rats developed the signs
of Parkinson?s,? says Dr. J. Timothy Greenamyre, a researcher
at Emory University. The rats in the study were given the
pesticide rotenone. Because it is often labeled as a ?natural?
pesticide, many home gardeners feel safe using it. Rotenone
is also used to kill nuisance fish in lakes and reservoirs and
fleas and ticks on pets.
A recent Stanford study showed that Parkinson?s patients
were twice as likely to have been exposed to in-home
insecticides than people without the disease. People exposed
to herbicides also were more likely to develop it. A study at
the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit confirmed that
people exposed to insecticide were 3.5 times more likely to be
diagnosed with Parkinson?s disease than people with no
history of pesticide exposure.
?Contact with herbicides gave people a four times greater
chance of developing Parkinson?s,? says Dr. Jay M. Gorell,
head of the Movement Disorders Clinic in the Neurology
Department. ?The study also searched for a relationship
between Parkinson?s disease and farming and found it.
Farmers were 2.8 times as likely to have PD as the general
population.?
More than 1 million Americans have Parkinson?s, and every
nine minutes another person is diagnosed with the disease.
It?s second only to Alzheimer?s disease as the most common
neurodegenerative disorder in the United States. It was first
described by the English physician James Parkinson in 1817
and kills the nerve cells in the brain that release dopamine, a
chemical necessary for controlling movements. Normal
everyday tasks, such as buttoning a shirt, rising from a chair,
or writing a letter, eventually become impossible.
??People may or may not be aware of their lifetime history of
contact with pesticides,? says Gorell. ?Experts are searching
for ways to quantify past exposures.? Heredity is another
important factor to gauge when studying this disease,
although only10 percent of Parkinson?s cases are attributed
directly to heredity. Most researchers agree that a
sophisticated interrelationship between genetic susceptibility
and environmental exposures may cause Parkinson?s.
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Scientists at Liverpool University in the U.K. have discovered
that more than one pesticide in food may increase the
potential for harm.
Many of the different items in our weekly diet have been
exposed to some form of pesticide at some point in their
production, and although the majority of these chemicals
have disappeared by the time the food reaches the
consumer, residues can remain.
Government estimates suggest that 40% of food contains
some kind of pesticide residue.
Some scientists blame increasing pesticide use in modern
agriculture for a variety of modern health problems, such as
an increase in particular cancers and a decrease in male
fertility over recent years.
Researchers found that combinations of different pesticides
were far more toxic to human cells than similar quantities
applied individually. Unborn babies are vulnerable to brain
damage from pesticides in their mothers? diet.
Dr. Vyvyan Howard, who headed the research team,
says, ?Pesticides are tested one at a time but virtually
nothing is known about taking pesticide A and pesticide B,
putting them together and seeing what happens then. If you
consider that each one of us is walking around with hundreds
of chemicals in our bodies, that couldn?t have been there 50
or 60 years ago because they didn?t exist on the planet, you
can see the level of complexity of the problem.?
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