A recent article in New Scientist notes that "Agricultural pesticides are the most common means of suicide worldwide, resulting in more than 250,000 deaths each year," and that "certain pesticides were far more toxic to humans than the WHO ranks them based on animal studies."
Guess this makes it clear that the battle isn't yet won, and this is an issue that still needs work.
Hello Cathy,
ReplyDeleteI'm curious about this post and the connection you see between "Silent Spring," these suicides, and the prevalence of agricultural pesticides all over the world. In posting, are you suggesting that these 250,000 lives would be spared if there were no more pesticides? Or are you suggesting that pesticides somehow contribute to bleak living conditions where someone would want to take their own lives.
Laurel
Oh, I guess what I was focusing on was the fact that pesticides are still in such widespread use despite the fact that no one even knows how toxic they are to people. The suicides point to the fact that pesticides can be lethal to humans, but despite that the WHO only judges them based on toxicity to animals and seems to make no attempt to see if they react similarly in humans (an outside group found the correlation, not the WHO).
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