Just another example how the US Government is more worried about the profits of the American Private Corporations than with the health of its own citizens.
"Chlorpyrifos is an inexpensive and effective pesticide that has been on the market since 1965."
Since 1965? So the US Government allowed profits to trump the health of its citizens for 55 years already?
Despite the ban on household use and the fact that chlorpyrifos doesn’t linger in the body, over 75% of people in the U.S. still have traces of chlorpyrifos in their bodies, mostly due to residues on food.
This number is not a joke. 3/4 of the population are infected because of pesticides in their food and several US Governments did nothing about it?
Researchers published the first study linking chlorpyrifos to potential developmental harm in children in 2003. They found that higher levels of a chlorpyrifos metabolite – a substance that’s produced when the body breaks down the pesticide – in umbilical cord blood were significantly associated with smaller infant birth weight and length.
Subsequent studies published between 2006 and 2014 showed that those same infants had developmental delays that persisted into childhood, with lower scores on standard tests of development and changes that researchers could see on MRI scans of the children’s brains. Scientists also discovered that a genetic subtype of a common metabolic enzyme in pregnant women increased the likelihood that their children would experience neurodevelopmental delays.
I don't agree with the way things are being done. We shouldn't allow Governments and Corporations to spread the use of chemical products until they are proven to be unsafe.
That's backwards.
Instead, we should be prohibiting the use of new products on a massive scale until they are proven to be safe.
That's what a logical human would do.
First, products should be tested and they should only be released for the general population after extensive tests have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that they are completely safe for our health as well as for the ecosystem.
Why do we allow Governments and Corporations to release the products so quickly, turning us all into lab rats?
Oh, that's right. For the Almighty Dollar. How could I forget?
Three new papers on prenatal exposures to chlorpyrifos, published in 2017 and 2018, broke the logjam. These were independent studies, conducted in rats, that evaluated subtle effects on learning and development.
The results were consistent and clear: Chlorpyrifos caused decreased learning, hyperactivity and anxiety in rat pups at doses lower than those that affected acetylcholinesterase. And these studies clearly quantified doses to the rats, so there was no uncertainty about their exposure levels during pregnancy. The results were eerily similar to effects seen in human epidemiological studies, vindicating health concerns about chlorpyrifos.
Oh, look. Independent studies didn't took too long to conclude that these pesticides were harmful to humans. If only the American Government wasn't so corrupt and followed real scientists instead of trusting fake scientists hired by Private Corporations, many Americans wouldn't be infected and poisoned right now.
Instead, this is what the US Government accepted as "science":
Scientists working under contract for Dow Chemical, which manufactured chlorpyrifos, published a complex model in 2014 that could estimate how much of the pesticide a person would have to consume or inhale to trigger acetylcholinesterase inhibition. But some of their equations were based on data from as few as six healthy adults who had swallowed capsules of chlorpyrifos during experiments in the 1970s and early 1980s – a method that now would be considered unethical.
So, this is the kind of testing that the American Government accepts? This is not a test at all. This is mocking with the public and with science. This is making fools out of us. This is turning citizens into lab experiments. It is completely immoral and it should be considered a crime against humanity.
In 2016 the U.S. EPA released a reassessment of chlorpyrifos’s potential health effects that took a different approach. It focused on epidemiological studies published from 2003 through 2014 at Columbia University that found developmental impacts in children exposed to chlorpyrifos. The Columbia researchers analyzed chlorpyrifos levels in the mothers’ cord blood at birth, and the EPA attempted to back-calculate how much chlorpyrifos they might have been exposed to throughout pregnancy.
On the basis of this analysis, the Obama administration concluded that chlorpyrifos could not be safely used and should be banned. However, the Trump administration reversed this decision in 2017, arguing that the science was not resolved and more study was needed.
Why am I not surprised that a populist president acted in the interest of the Private Corporations and against its citizens?
Most voters are so dumb that they can't even see when they are being stabbed in the back. Their unconditional love for a Political Party that keeps betraying them makes them blind. Voters are like a woman who's suffered from domestic violence for 20 years and still loves her husband and believes that is real love, no matter how many times she ends up in the ER.
Why do we keep upvoting for these guys, over and over again? Are we humans that dumb that we keep making the choices that hurt us the most? Are we simply a masochistic species?
Wake up America. Wake up World. It's time to take the power back.
Source: Why California is banning chlorpyrifos, a widely-used pesticide: 5 questions answered by Gina Solomon