19 ms·

High prevalence of diabetes among people exposed to organophosphates in India

268 points by aethertap 9y ago

salesguy222 9y ago
Neato, how do we avoid exposure to that pesticide?
- kanyewest_ 9y ago
  YOU AIN'T GOT THE ANSWERS, SWAY
  - sctb 9y ago
    Please don't create new accounts to violate the guidelines with. We ban the main account in addition to the throwaways if you do.
- PaulHoule 9y ago
  It is not just one pesticide, it is a whole family of pesticides that include Malathion, Parathion, Diazinon and more. These are related both in terms of chemistry and mechanism of action to nerve gases such as Sarin and VX. Don't use them on your lawn and garden, eat organic produce as much as you can, and beware of fruits and vegetables that are likely to expose you to pesticides, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3135239/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3135239/ Overall I would be much more afraid of occupational exposure than pesticide residues
  - salesguy222 9y ago
    Thank you for your helpful and thoughtful reply! Potatoes and spinach are two of my dietary staples, so it is alarming to see them on the "dirty dozen" list. Would scrubbing, washing, peeling, cooking, etc do something to the "pesticide residue" found on these vegetables? Occupational exposure is real and serious, and shows what might happen with chronic exposure. There are documentaries and videos that show the hands of field workers in California. They bubble and peel and blister and discolor, all from pesticides.
    - PaulHoule 9y ago
      Yes, all of those things will help.
    - efm 9y ago
      tl;dr The "dirty dozen" list is not backed up by evidence. If you read the conclusion of the paper: In summary, findings conclusively demonstrate that consumer exposures to the ten most frequently detected pesticides on EWG's “Dirty Dozen” commodity list are at negligible levels and that the EWG methodology is insufficient to allow any meaningful rankings among commodities. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3135239/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3135239/
    - rpenm 9y ago
      From the cited paper: "In summary, findings conclusively demonstrate that consumer exposures to the ten most frequently detected pesticides on EWG's “Dirty Dozen” commodity list are at negligible levels and that the EWG methodology is insufficient to allow any meaningful rankings among commodities."
- krona 9y ago
  Unsurprisingly, insect-resident crops. If you're in the US, there's a good chance you're already doing it. Farmers generally use less insecticide when they plant Bt corn and Bt cotton. Corn insecticide use by both GE seed adopters and nonadopters has decreased—only 9 percent of all U.S. corn farmers used insecticides in 2010. Insecticide use on corn farms declined from 0.21 pound per planted acre in 1995 to 0.02 pound in 2010. This is consistent with the steady decline in European corn borer populations over the last decade that has been shown to be a direct result of Bt adoption. --Fernandez-Cornejo and Caswell, 2006; NRC, 2010
  - clord 9y ago
    With bt, use is down but the plant itself is producing it! I think that's more likely to cause exposure.
    - krona 9y ago
      If you're talking about Bacillus thuringiensis or the toxin it produces, it occurs naturally in all kinds of things.
  - sebleon 9y ago
    I can't tell if krona is trolling. We're exposing people to more insecticides in their diet when the plant itself produces insecticides! At least spraying puts insecticides on the outside of the plant, which is somewhat washable. Making the kernels of corn that we eat produce insecticides makes it impossible to remove these chemicals from our dinner plates....
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      As a layperson, I'm pretty sure I'd rather eat corn laced with Bt than corn with organophosphates rinsed off.
      - sebleon 9y ago
        That's kind of a strawman argument - what about corn laced with organophosphates vs corn that's been genetically modified to generate organophosphates in the kernels?
- DanBC 9y ago
  Don't sell it or apply it to your fields. > Based on the survey executed among the pesticide users including pesticide applicators, farmers, and pesticide sellers
- notadoc 9y ago
  Eat organic food
porker 9y ago
Misread the title as "..linked to gluten intolerance". Was hoping it would shine a light on that increasing.
- salesguy222 9y ago
  Glucose intolerance is arguably much more serious :)!!!
- jawngee 9y ago
  Side note, gluten intolerance and diabetes type 1 often go hand in hand. When my kid was diagnosed, they tested both of us for a whole bunch of things. I came back gluten intolerant and he, luckily, did not. Celiac is another thing that often coexists with T1D.
yomly 9y ago
This headline explains my general aversion to "chemicals". This, despite the fact that everything is a chemical and that we are all little chemical machines. The human physiology is unfathomably complex and the advent of synthetic chemistry has meant that we are now exposed to new molecules which have arisen at a rate tens, hundreds of thousands of years too early for our bodies to evolve to accommodate for them. Our exposure to these chemicals is also incredibly opaque: even eating "clean" by eating fruit and veg exposes us to a multitude of chemicals that come along the pipeline including fertilisers, pesticides and preservatives. Nature is exquisitely sensitive to chemistry - I recall reading that natural systems have evolved to exploit and dispatch behaviour based on the isotopic composition of carbon-based molecules: naturally synthesised molecules also have a different isotopic profile to artificially synthesised molecules. For the record, Carbon-13 represents ~1% of the natural isotopic abundance. If something as granular as the isotopic distribution of elements is important to physiological systems, how can we be so complacent as to constantly pile chemicals into every aspect of our lives? Businesses will wantonly and irresponsibly use any method to increase their bottom lines and it falls to regulators to moderate this behaviour. As an example, I recall McDonald's doping their chip oil with a known toxic organic chemical to lower the rate of thermal decomposition of their oil. This is something they could as easily avoid by replacing their oil more often, but this is costly: they instead defer this cost onto our health by exposing us to unnecessarily dangerous chemicals. In my opinion the FDA's (or indeed global regulators') thresholds for the use of chemicals is not stringent enough - humans are living longer, how do we know that prolonged exposure to any of these individual chemicals (let alone the cocktail of all of them) over a 50-100 year period are worth the risk? For another anecdote of irresponsible chemical usage - the onset of lung cancer through smoking underwent a stepwise increase after the tobacco industry started using phosphate fertilisers to increase their crop yield: a side effect of the fertilisers was to enrich the soil in radium which would decay down to Pollonium-210, an alpha source of Russian-assassination fame. Studies have been done on characterising the sievert profile of tobacco leaves, highlighting the risk of this but no action on the tobacco industry has been taken to mitigate this.
- PaulHoule 9y ago
  Chemicals can be dangerous precisely because we are "chemical machines"!
firasd 9y ago
The mechanism they pinpointed is illustrated in "Figure 7": OPs (star) enter the human digestive system via food and are metabolized into acetic acid (trapezoid) by the gut microbiota (oval). Subsequently, acetic acid was absorbed by the intestinal cells and the majority of them were transported to the liver through the periportal vein. Eventually, acetic acid was converted into glucose (hexagon) by gluconeogenesis in the intestine and liver and thus accounts for glucose intolerance. So the pesticide is being eventually converted into glucose, which has the same effect as if you were eating too much sugar/carbs.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Wow. Does this mean that organophosphates aren't actually causing chemical damage, but are just a glucose source? On the one hand, that means that organophosphates are really not very toxic to humans. But also, it implies that exposures must be enormous.
  - manmal 9y ago
    I can't believe that organophosphates are ingested in amounts that would be a problem when converted to glucose. That would have to be tens of grams every day. Something else must be the culprit.
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      I would think the thing to investigate is the changes in the gut bacteria. What do they do differently after the chronic exposure?
    - tonmoy 9y ago
      A point to be noted is that the study was done in India, where regulations on the amount of pesticide used may not be as enforced as in other developed countries.
      - mirimir 9y ago
        Sure, but grams?
spencermountain 9y ago
to summarize, crop pesticides are converted to glucose internally, causing diabetes. a pretty big plot-twist for a delirious problem in global health, and a find that resembles a 21st century silent-spring.
- aftbit 9y ago
  For those who haven't heard of it: Silent Spring is an environmental science book by Rachel Carson.[1] The book was published on 27 September 1962 and it documented the detrimental effects on the environment of the indiscriminate use of pesticides. Carson accused the chemical industry of spreading disinformation and public officials of accepting industry claims unquestioningly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring Congrats on being one of today's lucky 10000[1], just like me. 1: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- ajross 9y ago
  That's maybe a bit oversold. The pesticides Carson was writing about, used at levels common in the 1950's, were toxic on levels basically incomparable to anything in this study. DDT was a terrible carcinogen to the consumer, a near death sentence to the agricultural worker, and nearly wiped out the entire california condor population in a few decades of use. In comparison this finding is of a diabetes correlation well underneath the levels we see due to diet. Well... I mean that's bad, but there's bad and there's bad, and this doesn't qualify. Doesn't mean it should be used, but let's be realistic about our criticism.
SCAQTony 9y ago
...and 36 of them are in use within the United States. Emphasis below on chlorpyrifos which Trump's EPA took off the EPA's banned list. EPA bulletin written before Trump took office: "...Thirty-six of them [organophosphates] are presently registered for use in the United States, and all can potentially cause acute and subacute toxicity. Organophosphates are used in agriculture, homes, gardens and veterinary practices; however, in the past decade, several notable OPs have been discontinued for use, including parathion, which is no longer registered for any use, and chlorpyrifos, which is no longer registered for home use. ..." https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/documents/rmpp_6thed_ch5_organophosphates.pdf https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/documents/rmpp_6t...
- benihana 9y ago
  Thank you for making this a partisan issue about Donald Trump instead of a human health issue. By pointing fingers at a person (who represents a different ideology) you basically guarantee people will be polarized into a "my team vs their team" mentality, instead of focusing on the actual health issues. But hey, at least my ego is satisfied and my worldview that Donald Trump and Republicans are evil is maintained. That's really what's important here.
curtis 9y ago
I wonder if the people in India most likely to be exposed to organophosphates in India are also the people most likely to be living almost entirely off of rice. Did the study do a sufficiently good job eliminating obvious confounding factors?
notadoc 9y ago
The primary reason most people I know who eat organic do so to avoid pesticides and herbicides.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- cmrdporcupine 9y ago
  Good luck finding organic staple crops such as rice, wheat, or maize.
  - notadoc 9y ago
    Good luck? There is no luck required assuming you have access to well-stocked grocery stores.
indogooner 9y ago
From conclusion: Hence, rather than searching for other chemical alternatives, promotion and development of traditional self-sustainable, nature-based agricultural practices would be the right approach to feed this world. Living off organic produce is not possible (at least in India as of now). The farmers do not earn much and have debts to pay-off. The only way they know of saving crops is using subsidised fertilizers provided by the government. Over the years indiscriminate use of pesticides has increased. In fact availability of Urea was a poll issue in National Election in some parts of India. [1] [1] http://www.financialexpress.com/opinion/neem-coated-urea-why-is-narendra-modi-govt-waiting-for-5-years-to-make-india-self-sufficient-in-fertilisers/454215/ http://www.financialexpress.com/opinion/neem-coated-urea-why...
tudorw 9y ago
Farmers working with Sheep Dip chemicals have been studied; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2078460/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2078460/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3366364/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3366364/ http://www.fwi.co.uk/livestock/op-sheep-dip-illness-new-details-emerge.htm http://www.fwi.co.uk/livestock/op-sheep-dip-illness-new-deta... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11561630/That-sheep-dip-poisoning-disaster-they-tried-to-keep-secret.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11561630/That-sheep-dip-p... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/20/revealed-government-knew-of-farm-poisoning-risk-but-failed-to-act https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/20/revealed... There is also 'Genetic variation in susceptibility to chronic effects of organophosphate exposure' http://www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrpdf/rr408.pdf http://www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrpdf/rr408.pdf Gulf War Syndrome has also been studied as a possible effect of close range exposure to organophosphates in pesticides and inset repellents.
mtw 9y ago
It's not just diabetes - exposure to pesticides increases risk of suicide, lymphoma, ALS. congenital anomalies and reduces fertility. There is a solid case in choosing organic foods. See summary of risks here http://outcomereference.com/causes/77 http://outcomereference.com/causes/77
mtdewcmu 9y ago
I was always suspicious of the diet/lifestyle explanation for diabetes. It's conveniently unfalsifiable, and it's obnoxiously paternalistic and moralizing.
jlebrech 9y ago
and of course the rise of the standard american diet in the 3rd world has nothing to do with it?
eni 9y ago
The original title of the article: "Gut microbial degradation of organophosphate insecticides-induces glucose intolerance via gluconeogenesis" Why is the title in HN edited to make this about "India"? Is this finding not applicable to people elsewhere? or id other parts of the world stop using organophosphates?

268 points by aethertap 9y ago

salesguy222 9y ago

Neato, how do we avoid exposure to that pesticide?

kanyewest_ 9y ago
YOU AIN'T GOT THE ANSWERS, SWAY
- sctb 9y ago
  Please don't create new accounts to violate the guidelines with. We ban the main account in addition to the throwaways if you do.
PaulHoule 9y ago
It is not just one pesticide, it is a whole family of pesticides that include Malathion, Parathion, Diazinon and more. These are related both in terms of chemistry and mechanism of action to nerve gases such as Sarin and VX. Don't use them on your lawn and garden, eat organic produce as much as you can, and beware of fruits and vegetables that are likely to expose you to pesticides, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3135239/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3135239/ Overall I would be much more afraid of occupational exposure than pesticide residues
- salesguy222 9y ago
  Thank you for your helpful and thoughtful reply! Potatoes and spinach are two of my dietary staples, so it is alarming to see them on the "dirty dozen" list. Would scrubbing, washing, peeling, cooking, etc do something to the "pesticide residue" found on these vegetables? Occupational exposure is real and serious, and shows what might happen with chronic exposure. There are documentaries and videos that show the hands of field workers in California. They bubble and peel and blister and discolor, all from pesticides.
  - PaulHoule 9y ago
    Yes, all of those things will help.
  - efm 9y ago
    tl;dr The "dirty dozen" list is not backed up by evidence. If you read the conclusion of the paper: In summary, findings conclusively demonstrate that consumer exposures to the ten most frequently detected pesticides on EWG's “Dirty Dozen” commodity list are at negligible levels and that the EWG methodology is insufficient to allow any meaningful rankings among commodities. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3135239/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3135239/
  - rpenm 9y ago
    From the cited paper: "In summary, findings conclusively demonstrate that consumer exposures to the ten most frequently detected pesticides on EWG's “Dirty Dozen” commodity list are at negligible levels and that the EWG methodology is insufficient to allow any meaningful rankings among commodities."
krona 9y ago
Unsurprisingly, insect-resident crops. If you're in the US, there's a good chance you're already doing it. Farmers generally use less insecticide when they plant Bt corn and Bt cotton. Corn insecticide use by both GE seed adopters and nonadopters has decreased—only 9 percent of all U.S. corn farmers used insecticides in 2010. Insecticide use on corn farms declined from 0.21 pound per planted acre in 1995 to 0.02 pound in 2010. This is consistent with the steady decline in European corn borer populations over the last decade that has been shown to be a direct result of Bt adoption. --Fernandez-Cornejo and Caswell, 2006; NRC, 2010
- clord 9y ago
  With bt, use is down but the plant itself is producing it! I think that's more likely to cause exposure.
  - krona 9y ago
    If you're talking about Bacillus thuringiensis or the toxin it produces, it occurs naturally in all kinds of things.
- sebleon 9y ago
  I can't tell if krona is trolling. We're exposing people to more insecticides in their diet when the plant itself produces insecticides! At least spraying puts insecticides on the outside of the plant, which is somewhat washable. Making the kernels of corn that we eat produce insecticides makes it impossible to remove these chemicals from our dinner plates....
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    As a layperson, I'm pretty sure I'd rather eat corn laced with Bt than corn with organophosphates rinsed off.
    - sebleon 9y ago
      That's kind of a strawman argument - what about corn laced with organophosphates vs corn that's been genetically modified to generate organophosphates in the kernels?
DanBC 9y ago
Don't sell it or apply it to your fields. > Based on the survey executed among the pesticide users including pesticide applicators, farmers, and pesticide sellers
notadoc 9y ago
Eat organic food

porker 9y ago

Misread the title as "..linked to gluten intolerance". Was hoping it would shine a light on that increasing.

salesguy222 9y ago
Glucose intolerance is arguably much more serious :)!!!
jawngee 9y ago
Side note, gluten intolerance and diabetes type 1 often go hand in hand. When my kid was diagnosed, they tested both of us for a whole bunch of things. I came back gluten intolerant and he, luckily, did not. Celiac is another thing that often coexists with T1D.

yomly 9y ago

This headline explains my general aversion to "chemicals". This, despite the fact that everything is a chemical and that we are all little chemical machines. The human physiology is unfathomably complex and the advent of synthetic chemistry has meant that we are now exposed to new molecules which have arisen at a rate tens, hundreds of thousands of years too early for our bodies to evolve to accommodate for them. Our exposure to these chemicals is also incredibly opaque: even eating "clean" by eating fruit and veg exposes us to a multitude of chemicals that come along the pipeline including fertilisers, pesticides and preservatives. Nature is exquisitely sensitive to chemistry - I recall reading that natural systems have evolved to exploit and dispatch behaviour based on the isotopic composition of carbon-based molecules: naturally synthesised molecules also have a different isotopic profile to artificially synthesised molecules. For the record, Carbon-13 represents ~1% of the natural isotopic abundance. If something as granular as the isotopic distribution of elements is important to physiological systems, how can we be so complacent as to constantly pile chemicals into every aspect of our lives? Businesses will wantonly and irresponsibly use any method to increase their bottom lines and it falls to regulators to moderate this behaviour. As an example, I recall McDonald's doping their chip oil with a known toxic organic chemical to lower the rate of thermal decomposition of their oil. This is something they could as easily avoid by replacing their oil more often, but this is costly: they instead defer this cost onto our health by exposing us to unnecessarily dangerous chemicals. In my opinion the FDA's (or indeed global regulators') thresholds for the use of chemicals is not stringent enough - humans are living longer, how do we know that prolonged exposure to any of these individual chemicals (let alone the cocktail of all of them) over a 50-100 year period are worth the risk? For another anecdote of irresponsible chemical usage - the onset of lung cancer through smoking underwent a stepwise increase after the tobacco industry started using phosphate fertilisers to increase their crop yield: a side effect of the fertilisers was to enrich the soil in radium which would decay down to Pollonium-210, an alpha source of Russian-assassination fame. Studies have been done on characterising the sievert profile of tobacco leaves, highlighting the risk of this but no action on the tobacco industry has been taken to mitigate this.

PaulHoule 9y ago
Chemicals can be dangerous precisely because we are "chemical machines"!

firasd 9y ago

The mechanism they pinpointed is illustrated in "Figure 7": OPs (star) enter the human digestive system via food and are metabolized into acetic acid (trapezoid) by the gut microbiota (oval). Subsequently, acetic acid was absorbed by the intestinal cells and the majority of them were transported to the liver through the periportal vein. Eventually, acetic acid was converted into glucose (hexagon) by gluconeogenesis in the intestine and liver and thus accounts for glucose intolerance. So the pesticide is being eventually converted into glucose, which has the same effect as if you were eating too much sugar/carbs.

mirimir 9y ago
Wow. Does this mean that organophosphates aren't actually causing chemical damage, but are just a glucose source? On the one hand, that means that organophosphates are really not very toxic to humans. But also, it implies that exposures must be enormous.
- manmal 9y ago
  I can't believe that organophosphates are ingested in amounts that would be a problem when converted to glucose. That would have to be tens of grams every day. Something else must be the culprit.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    I would think the thing to investigate is the changes in the gut bacteria. What do they do differently after the chronic exposure?
  - tonmoy 9y ago
    A point to be noted is that the study was done in India, where regulations on the amount of pesticide used may not be as enforced as in other developed countries.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      Sure, but grams?

spencermountain 9y ago

to summarize, crop pesticides are converted to glucose internally, causing diabetes. a pretty big plot-twist for a delirious problem in global health, and a find that resembles a 21st century silent-spring.

aftbit 9y ago
For those who haven't heard of it: Silent Spring is an environmental science book by Rachel Carson.[1] The book was published on 27 September 1962 and it documented the detrimental effects on the environment of the indiscriminate use of pesticides. Carson accused the chemical industry of spreading disinformation and public officials of accepting industry claims unquestioningly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring Congrats on being one of today's lucky 10000[1], just like me. 1: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
ajross 9y ago
That's maybe a bit oversold. The pesticides Carson was writing about, used at levels common in the 1950's, were toxic on levels basically incomparable to anything in this study. DDT was a terrible carcinogen to the consumer, a near death sentence to the agricultural worker, and nearly wiped out the entire california condor population in a few decades of use. In comparison this finding is of a diabetes correlation well underneath the levels we see due to diet. Well... I mean that's bad, but there's bad and there's bad, and this doesn't qualify. Doesn't mean it should be used, but let's be realistic about our criticism.

SCAQTony 9y ago

...and 36 of them are in use within the United States. Emphasis below on chlorpyrifos which Trump's EPA took off the EPA's banned list. EPA bulletin written before Trump took office: "...Thirty-six of them [organophosphates] are presently registered for use in the United States, and all can potentially cause acute and subacute toxicity. Organophosphates are used in agriculture, homes, gardens and veterinary practices; however, in the past decade, several notable OPs have been discontinued for use, including parathion, which is no longer registered for any use, and chlorpyrifos, which is no longer registered for home use. ..." https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/documents/rmpp_6thed_ch5_organophosphates.pdf https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/documents/rmpp_6t...

benihana 9y ago
Thank you for making this a partisan issue about Donald Trump instead of a human health issue. By pointing fingers at a person (who represents a different ideology) you basically guarantee people will be polarized into a "my team vs their team" mentality, instead of focusing on the actual health issues. But hey, at least my ego is satisfied and my worldview that Donald Trump and Republicans are evil is maintained. That's really what's important here.

curtis 9y ago

I wonder if the people in India most likely to be exposed to organophosphates in India are also the people most likely to be living almost entirely off of rice. Did the study do a sufficiently good job eliminating obvious confounding factors?

notadoc 9y ago

The primary reason most people I know who eat organic do so to avoid pesticides and herbicides.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
cmrdporcupine 9y ago
Good luck finding organic staple crops such as rice, wheat, or maize.
- notadoc 9y ago
  Good luck? There is no luck required assuming you have access to well-stocked grocery stores.

indogooner 9y ago

From conclusion: Hence, rather than searching for other chemical alternatives, promotion and development of traditional self-sustainable, nature-based agricultural practices would be the right approach to feed this world. Living off organic produce is not possible (at least in India as of now). The farmers do not earn much and have debts to pay-off. The only way they know of saving crops is using subsidised fertilizers provided by the government. Over the years indiscriminate use of pesticides has increased. In fact availability of Urea was a poll issue in National Election in some parts of India. [1] [1] http://www.financialexpress.com/opinion/neem-coated-urea-why-is-narendra-modi-govt-waiting-for-5-years-to-make-india-self-sufficient-in-fertilisers/454215/ http://www.financialexpress.com/opinion/neem-coated-urea-why...

tudorw 9y ago

Farmers working with Sheep Dip chemicals have been studied; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2078460/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2078460/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3366364/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3366364/ http://www.fwi.co.uk/livestock/op-sheep-dip-illness-new-details-emerge.htm http://www.fwi.co.uk/livestock/op-sheep-dip-illness-new-deta... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11561630/That-sheep-dip-poisoning-disaster-they-tried-to-keep-secret.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11561630/That-sheep-dip-p... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/20/revealed-government-knew-of-farm-poisoning-risk-but-failed-to-act https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/20/revealed... There is also 'Genetic variation in susceptibility to chronic effects of organophosphate exposure' http://www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrpdf/rr408.pdf http://www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrpdf/rr408.pdf Gulf War Syndrome has also been studied as a possible effect of close range exposure to organophosphates in pesticides and inset repellents.

mtw 9y ago

It's not just diabetes - exposure to pesticides increases risk of suicide, lymphoma, ALS. congenital anomalies and reduces fertility. There is a solid case in choosing organic foods. See summary of risks here http://outcomereference.com/causes/77 http://outcomereference.com/causes/77

mtdewcmu 9y ago

I was always suspicious of the diet/lifestyle explanation for diabetes. It's conveniently unfalsifiable, and it's obnoxiously paternalistic and moralizing.

jlebrech 9y ago

and of course the rise of the standard american diet in the 3rd world has nothing to do with it?

eni 9y ago

The original title of the article: "Gut microbial degradation of organophosphate insecticides-induces glucose intolerance via gluconeogenesis" Why is the title in HN edited to make this about "India"? Is this finding not applicable to people elsewhere? or id other parts of the world stop using organophosphates?