10 ms·

Chlorpyrifos: Pesticide tied to brain damage in children

234 points by stareatgoats 3y ago

blackhaz 3y ago
It's always a cat and mouse game, isn't it? Industry thinking they can optimize nature's chemistry, then something else always pops out on the other end. When will we shift towards long-term, extensive trials before introducing another chemical in our life cycle? Is there a possibility that if things could have been more optimal for the delicate balance of different life forms on Earth, nature would have done it all by itself? Is there even a way to get back to natural state of things? Can the food we produce be considered "natural" at all, or we have altered the chemistry of the whole chain so much that we are now all doomed on this planet to shuffle diseases around different social classes and species ad eternum? Good morning, all!
- crq-yml 3y ago
  Whenever a politician says "we don't want to inhibit innovation", always call them out for being for sale to whoever lobbies them.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  > When will we shift towards long-term, extensive trials before introducing another chemical in our life cycle? Realistically, never, because these chemicals are solving real problems for us. We would need to be willing to leave problems unsolved for decades to do this.
- jenadine 3y ago
  > Is there even a way to get back to natural state of things? Back to when 75% of the population worked in the fields many of them as slaves? Surely you don't want that back.
  - Filligree 3y ago
    He did say “we are now all doomed on this planet to shuffle diseases around different social classes”.
- burnished 3y ago
  Yes 'We'? Maybe never, maybe a successor civilization will, maybe we'll figure out simulation and organ on a chip well enough to do those long term studies in only a year or two Not for the scale we operate at, at least for our current level of ecological mastery. I presume you're gesturing at different planting techniques that reduce reliance on pesticides. Not endorsing the paradigm. Yes and no. Yes, because we are in a state of nature - we are nature. No, because we've been modifying our environment for thousands of years, you might not even recognize the precursors as food. The chemistry isn't altered, the organism is. ..shuffling diseases.. around different social classes? Huh. What a suspicious thing to say
- lijok 3y ago
  It depends on what you see the objective of the human species to be
  - DinaCoder99 3y ago
    Easy! Maximization of index funds.
  - oven9342 3y ago
    The objective of the human species is the annihilation of any kind of life on the planet in the seek of profit. pesticides and insecticides play a crucial role in this task, together with PFAS, co2 and EMR in the form of light pollution, for example
- lukas099 3y ago
  Are you discounting the benefits of advances in agriculture? Such as producing more food on less land? (Granted, it would be better if more of the land were given back to Nature instead of suburban sprawl, but that’s a different problem and I digress)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - blackhaz 3y ago
    No, I advance a half-baked argument, don't take it as a maxim. All I am saying is that some developments in agriculture that may seem as advances today may not seem so if we take a longer time scale into consideration.
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  Nature is always evolving, and I think it's a mistake to consider human contributions as "unnatural." All kinds of plants produce a wide variety of pesticides as a natural defense without human intervention, and are cooking up new varieties to trial against the real world. Diseases are in a constant arms race with immune systems regardless of humanity. I'm not saying we can't get better at predicting the side effects of things we introduce into the system. But I do think regarding the cat and mouse game as "industry vs nature" is reductive dualism and shallow thinking. We are nature. Considering humanity as apart from nature was one of our more misguided ideas. Industry is a part of nature, an active participant, not in opposition to it. We were doomed to shuffle diseases around long before industry. There is an explosion of novel chemicals that we have introduced into the environment, and they will no doubt change things. Humans evolved in a world that is not the world we are creating, and we very well might not be fit for the future we're creating. But let's not call what we're doing "unnatural." That just serves as a kind of denial that we are active participants, and reinforces a subtle idea that we are Gods apart from "Nature."
  - skhunted 3y ago
    There is an explosion of novel chemicals that we have introduced into the environment, and they will no doubt change things. Humans evolved in a world that is not the world we are creating, and we very well might not be fit for the future we're creating. This is precisely what people mean by saying what we are doing is unnatural. But let's not call what we're doing "unnatural." But most people believe this is the right word to use. I don’t think they will change their minds.
  - thuuuomas 3y ago
    Regardless of what’s “natural”, widespread contamination from industry should reduce or remove the limits to industry’s liability. Externalities are real & must be accounted for.
    - IggleSniggle 3y ago
      Agreed, and this is exactly what I was trying to say. It's an ecosystem and we're a part of it.
- dauertewigkeit 3y ago
  Pesticides scale really well. The alternative would be to control the environment more, but that does not scale so well. Maybe with increased automation we could do some inroads in this direction. Consumers are to blame too. They won't accept blemished produce, but a potato with some insect larvae in it, is really not that much of an issue. You just remove around the larvae and cook as per usual, and that is much healthier than dosing your produce with pesticides, that cannot easily be washed off.
  - WhitneyLand 3y ago
    Aren’t many insect larvae are not bad for you containing proteins, fats, and other beneficial nutrients? So as long as the potato isn’t rotted you wouldn’t even have to remove it. Biggest risk might be, ironically, if the insect contained pesticides.
    - google234123 3y ago
      Yuck, ignoring all parasites and pathogens...
      - aszantu 3y ago
        can't eat potato raw anyways
        google234123 3y ago
        You can’t kill those without turning the potato to charcoal.
  - owenpalmer 3y ago
    Aigen is a robotics company working on scalable, clean, farming. https://www.aigen.io/ https://www.aigen.io/
    - azinman2 3y ago
- ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
  >Industry thinking they can optimize nature's chemistry That chemistry, like fertilizers, is why we can feed 8 billion people.
  - jajko 3y ago
    Yeah, with various poisons that will mess up some and kill others, and who knows what are long term consequences on genome. Not that great of an achievement if you ask me, since we know better, but its not as price efficient.
    - PoignardAzur 3y ago
      You say that like the health effects of pesticides are anywhere on the same scale as "starving to death".
      - jajko 3y ago
        Its not binary, it never was. West throw absurd amount of food away. West is getting progressively fatter with US firmly leading (I'd presume due to food lobbying getting extremely powerful there earlier than elsewhere and realizing for some breadcrumbs you can pass literally anything, like sugar is healthy). I am not saying not use anything. But have long term studies paid by producers of said things (with oversight of government) and then let it on your crops. Currently its exact opposite and government reacts after SHTF, utter stupidity if you care about more than just immediate profits.
- VoodooJuJu 3y ago
  You're living in a "move fast, break things" & "trust the science" world, posting on a forum filled with enginerds who subscribe to those philosophies with zealotry. They think like this: as long as there is an absence of evidence of harm in the initial science, then that means evidence of absence. Long-term, higher-order effects & unknown unknowns are ignored in Scientism, and this ignorance is status quo. It's the same mentality underpinning the approach to GMO foods & insects, dropping agent orange in Vietnam, and killing sparrows in Mao's China. It's the very spirit of modernity.
  - metabagel 3y ago
    > You're living in a "move fast, break things" & "trust the science" world, posting on a forum filled with enginerds who subscribe to those philosophies with zealotry. You're painting with far too broad of a brush. I personally see a lot of push back on HN against those "philosophies".
  - wizzwizz4 3y ago
    > It's the same mentality underpinning the approach to GMO foods & insects Genetically-modified foods are fine: the main problem is when GM plants are wind-pollinated. And even that's largely due to patent law[0]: the harms of wind-pollination from monoculture is there regardless of where the genes come from. Genetic modifications to insects are only to wipe out populations, as far as I can tell – it doesn't hugely matter what the long-term side-effects are, in that case, because there won't be any organisms around to experience them. There was a lot of research done into the effects of anti-mosquito gene drives before the (very recent) releases into the wild, because we have learned from the Four Pests campaign. [0]: https://www.iatp.org/news/monsanto-the-seeds-of-dispute https://www.iatp.org/news/monsanto-the-seeds-of-dispute
  - google234123 3y ago
    It's dumb to conflate an action done in war and what a tyrannical madman did to science based GMOs.
- manoDev 3y ago
  The problem is thinking in terms of optimization at all. There’s no optimum, only trade-offs. But under capitalism, the problems all reduce to “make more X with less”. If GDP is increasing, we’re doing great - doesn’t matter if life sucks. Everything is optimized until it all turns into shit.
- scotty79 3y ago
  > When will we shift towards long-term, extensive trials before introducing another chemical in our life cycle? It's a curious question, how many eff-ups humanity needs to learn what's the optimal way to do something that's fairly new. Do we need to introduce and be forced to withdraw tens of substances? Hundreds? Thousands? How many failures until we can learn from them how to do this properly? How long did it take for aerospace industry?
dappermanneke 3y ago
USRTK is by no means an impartial source to grab scientific summaries from
- Attummm 3y ago
  Could you elaborate why that would be the case?
  - piva00 3y ago
    I got curious and went checking a bit deeper USRTK, haven't found much to discredit their reporting. Don't think we will get a well thought out argument given the user's comment history, a bit of a loony with a taste for hot takes with weird hyperbole.
  - notthemessiah 3y ago
    As far as I can tell, there seems to effort to discredit USRTK citing how some major prior donors to USRTK (such as Organic Consumers Association) have become antivax organizations pushing conspiracy theories, but it seems the most this has resulted in is USRTK investigating lab leak theories of Covid-19's origin and a few events in collaboration with the antivax funders. All and all, it seems like some cause for scrutiny, but not anything close to discrediting the organization. > Dr. Kathleen Jamieson [professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a recent article on conspiracists’ exploitation of uncertainty in COVID-19 science] argued USRTK’s work deserved scrutiny because of its funding and affiliations. But she also noted that the organization’s published research stopped short of open conspiracy theorizing on the virus’ origins. https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-right-to-know-fave-mainstream-media-source-is-funded-by-anti-vaxxers https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-right-to-know-fave-mainstre...
    - 1234letshaveatw 3y ago
      Why are you conflating antivaxing with origin investigations? At best it seems like Dr. Jamieson is trying to do narrative shaping. I'd prefer to hear from experts in virology on that topic instead of a professor of discourse manipulation.
djakaitis 3y ago
Is this something easily avoided by eating more organic foods? Or is the prevalence of this make it unavoidable?
- weweersdfsd 3y ago
  Wikipedia claims that "Some states, including California, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, and Oregon, have banned chlorpyrifos on food grown and sold in their jurisdictions. Those bans remain in effect." It's also 100% banned in foods sold in EU area. So, not that hard to avoid depending on where you live. Apparently corn, soybeans, wheat, fruit trees are some of the most common crops it's used on.
  - athrun 3y ago
    Apparently it’s still allowed in Australia for agricultural uses. That might change this year. https://www.apvma.gov.au/resources/chemicals-news/chlorpyrifos https://www.apvma.gov.au/resources/chemicals-news/chlorpyrif...
  - lukas099 3y ago
    If it’s banned in all those places, does that have a knock-on effect of limiting its profitability thereby causing the market to produce less of it to sell elsewhere?
    - osivertsson 3y ago
      It still seems to be exported :( Europe shipping banned pesticide linked to child brain damage to Global South https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2023/03/28/eu-banned-pesticide-global-south/ https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2023/03/28/eu-banned-pestic...
  - osivertsson 3y ago
    Do you got a source that chlorpyrifos is banned in foods sold in EU? A quick search seems to indicate that imported food can still have been grown with chlorpyrifos: https://www.eurofins.de/food-analysis/food-news/food-testing-news/ban-of-chlorpyrifos-and-chlorpyrifos-methyl https://www.eurofins.de/food-analysis/food-news/food-testing... Since we import a fair bit of vegetables and fruit during winter, we may still consume it here in the EU area. Also, Ascenza Agro and Industries Afrasa that sell chlorpyrifos based products recently tried to overturn this ban, but luckily were not able to: https://www.env-health.org/victory-for-health-european-general-court-upholds-ban-for-chlorpyrifos-methyl/ https://www.env-health.org/victory-for-health-european-gener...
drtgh 3y ago
It is forbidden to use Chlorpyrifos in the EU, but in Morocco it's used. Recently, imports of olives contaminated with high levels of this chemical have been detected, but they have entered into the EU. Oftopic but related, In Morocco, too, strawberries are irrigated with sewage water, and several times this year consignments of strawberries contaminated with hepatitis virus have been detected, but unfortunately they have also entered the EU. The point is that if health is at risk, then it should be banned at each of its sources, importation included. Morocco is preparing a major import hub through the Canary Islands, which is expected to "un-label" the source of products, I guess. Is aware the EU about this?
- jiwidi 3y ago
  EU is aware, but are too afraid to enforce it that way. See all the protest from farmers in the last months, one of their main demands is that imported foods are also subject to same rules they are.
  - yard2010 3y ago
    Awareness !== Competency
- bone_frequency 3y ago
  What kind of leverage does Morocco have to get away with this?
  - pgeorgi 3y ago
    People like to buy cheap stuff. And if that fails, there's always Ceuta and Melilla.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      I doubt most of the savings are passed on to the consumer. Companies will typically charge consumers as much as they can get away with no matter what their costs are and will happily poison people with shitty contaminated fruit if the lower costs mean they can stuff their pockets with more money while continuing to keep consumer prices as high as possible.
Madmallard 3y ago
If you didn't think we were in the end-stages of population growth and decline, just know that in your standard organic chemistry textbook given to students in university, it says that there are over 500,000 unregulated chemicals in industrial use. Exponential growth and technology with an evolutionary preference toward short-sighted and near-future decision making are going to cull the human race down by a large % as peoples systems are not evolved to tolerate the extensive environmental changes. The largest culprits are changes to food chemistry (prioritizing addiction mechanisms for profit over health), air pollution (prioritizing transportation and other means to maintain and grow economically), chemical exposures in the environment (multifactorial), and internet technology (prioritizing addiction mechanisms for profit over social health and function) [in my opinion]. People will get weaker, sicker, and dumber. Chronic diseases will start sooner, fertility will decrease, and population growth will reverse. The humans to survive out the other side will be children of health-conscious wealthy and those that live in less toxic environments globally. It's really sad because it doesn't seem like there's anything any individual can do about it. I think these issues are honestly far more serious than global warming. They are causing serious problems RIGHT NOW everywhere. I think within the next 20 years even we're going to see many consequences related to these issues. I'd like to believe we can bioscience our way through this mess but I really think that won't be the case. Fundamentally, I think proactive decision making takes a lot of time, energy, and work both on the individual and collective scales. I think it almost boils down to a physics problem where that just ends up being overtaken by the negative trend caused by exponential growth + the environmental equivalent of technical debt.
- RamblingCTO 3y ago
  > It's really sad because it doesn't seem like there's anything any individual can do about it. You can't solve the big thing, but there's some control over lifestyle imho. Otherwise, I concur.
- svnt 3y ago
  Bayer has enough money to build a few biospheres and trial their inventions there, but it is expensive and hard and so they won’t unless we make them.
- 3y ago
cushpush 3y ago
[flagged]
- fransje26 3y ago
  Might be, but there are very few places in the world where it is better.
  - metabagel 3y ago
    Is that really the case? I think Europe has stronger food safety laws than the U.S.
    - tinco 3y ago
      As a European, I don't think that's true. Besides the fact that apparently in Europe we don't check imported goods as noted elsewhere in the thread, in the US eggs are washed so thoroughly they have to be kept in the fridge afterwards to keep them good. Chicken has to be chlorinated in the US. You're not allowed to sell cheese made from raw milk in the US. I bet there's more examples.
      - biorach 3y ago
        > As a European, I don't think that's true It's true. EU food safety standards are generally higher. The specific examples you've given are... controversial
      - ars 3y ago
        > in the US eggs are washed so thoroughly they have to be kept in the fridge afterwards to keep them good. That isn't actually true, you can keep them out, they'll be just fine. > Chicken has to be chlorinated in the US. It doesn't have to be, rather it's permitted. There is no chlorine left in the final result. And don't imagine the EU is against chlorine washer, vegetables are chlorine washed in the EU. > You're not allowed to sell cheese made from raw milk in the US That's not true either, the cheese just has to be aged more than 60 days. > I bet there's more examples. Your examples were quite poor, actually I doubt there are other examples.
myth_drannon 3y ago
My dream is a mobile device/app that can analyze chemicals in fruits/vegetables, but we are too far from the StarTrek world. I tried to build a vision system to at least identify wax on apples, but even that is too hard. There was an Israeli startup couple of years ago that built some device but it looks like it was a flop.
- akyuu 3y ago
  Not exactly what you describe, but there's Yuka for processed products (food and cosmetics). You scan a barcode and it gives you a score based on the product composition, it's quite helpful: https://yuka.io/en/ https://yuka.io/en/
sharpshadow 3y ago
It’s convenient and lucrative to use toxic patented pesticides and herbicides but there are definitely working alternatives which one could even mix themselves. Obviously the industry has no interest in cheap and available solutions. For a small example I questioned myself if DMSO a organic solvent would be useful to transport active ingredients into the plant and quickly found that just DMSO has a desired effect on plants, roots and seedlings.[1] Following the study adding H2O2 to DMSO should even increase the effect. Furthermore other ingredients can be added which impact the biochemistry of the plant. The point which I want to make is that many effective chemicals have been discovered long ago but are not in the interest of the industry because the patents expired already. 1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13762-015-0899-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13762-015-0899-6
- scotty79 3y ago
  Time for open source pesticides catalogue?
  - sharpshadow 3y ago
    That would be great. For people not for profit.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
aszantu 3y ago
Just dived in and found this one, highly interesting. EU tracker for contaminated imports https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/rasff-window/screen/search https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/rasff-window/screen/search
- s1gnp0st 3y ago
  This is very cool, but why doesn't it list the names of companies involved? (or did I miss it?)
  - aszantu 3y ago
    haven't checked, but I bet you could ask for a list or the documents to the cases
    - s1gnp0st 3y ago
      That's pretty inefficient if someone wants to avoid buying any of the products affected by the case.
      - aszantu 3y ago
        true, I'll see if I can find one with the cases
      - aszantu 3y ago
        wasn't lucky, sorry
tomcar288 3y ago
and these are just the chemicals you hear about. what about all the nonsense that never even makes the front pages? I don't trust industrialized agriculture, especially not here in the US. personally, I grow as much of my food as I can (lots of fruits trees and very large garden), especially from the dirty 15. and those that I can't grow, I buy organic though that doesn't always save you completely.
hinkley 3y ago
Any time I see “pyr” in a pesticide name I worry that it is being used on foods marked organic (since pyrethrins get a pass in some cases) > The chemical is not allowed on organic crops. Phew.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

234 points by stareatgoats 3y ago

It's always a cat and mouse game, isn't it? Industry thinking they can optimize nature's chemistry, then something else always pops out on the other end. When will we shift towards long-term, extensive trials before introducing another chemical in our life cycle? Is there a possibility that if things could have been more optimal for the delicate balance of different life forms on Earth, nature would have done it all by itself? Is there even a way to get back to natural state of things? Can the food we produce be considered "natural" at all, or we have altered the chemistry of the whole chain so much that we are now all doomed on this planet to shuffle diseases around different social classes and species ad eternum? Good morning, all!

crq-yml 3y ago
Whenever a politician says "we don't want to inhibit innovation", always call them out for being for sale to whoever lobbies them.
MattGaiser 3y ago
> When will we shift towards long-term, extensive trials before introducing another chemical in our life cycle? Realistically, never, because these chemicals are solving real problems for us. We would need to be willing to leave problems unsolved for decades to do this.
jenadine 3y ago
> Is there even a way to get back to natural state of things? Back to when 75% of the population worked in the fields many of them as slaves? Surely you don't want that back.
- Filligree 3y ago
  He did say “we are now all doomed on this planet to shuffle diseases around different social classes”.
burnished 3y ago
Yes 'We'? Maybe never, maybe a successor civilization will, maybe we'll figure out simulation and organ on a chip well enough to do those long term studies in only a year or two Not for the scale we operate at, at least for our current level of ecological mastery. I presume you're gesturing at different planting techniques that reduce reliance on pesticides. Not endorsing the paradigm. Yes and no. Yes, because we are in a state of nature - we are nature. No, because we've been modifying our environment for thousands of years, you might not even recognize the precursors as food. The chemistry isn't altered, the organism is. ..shuffling diseases.. around different social classes? Huh. What a suspicious thing to say
lijok 3y ago
It depends on what you see the objective of the human species to be
- DinaCoder99 3y ago
  Easy! Maximization of index funds.
- oven9342 3y ago
  The objective of the human species is the annihilation of any kind of life on the planet in the seek of profit. pesticides and insecticides play a crucial role in this task, together with PFAS, co2 and EMR in the form of light pollution, for example
lukas099 3y ago
Are you discounting the benefits of advances in agriculture? Such as producing more food on less land? (Granted, it would be better if more of the land were given back to Nature instead of suburban sprawl, but that’s a different problem and I digress)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- blackhaz 3y ago
  No, I advance a half-baked argument, don't take it as a maxim. All I am saying is that some developments in agriculture that may seem as advances today may not seem so if we take a longer time scale into consideration.
IggleSniggle 3y ago
Nature is always evolving, and I think it's a mistake to consider human contributions as "unnatural." All kinds of plants produce a wide variety of pesticides as a natural defense without human intervention, and are cooking up new varieties to trial against the real world. Diseases are in a constant arms race with immune systems regardless of humanity. I'm not saying we can't get better at predicting the side effects of things we introduce into the system. But I do think regarding the cat and mouse game as "industry vs nature" is reductive dualism and shallow thinking. We are nature. Considering humanity as apart from nature was one of our more misguided ideas. Industry is a part of nature, an active participant, not in opposition to it. We were doomed to shuffle diseases around long before industry. There is an explosion of novel chemicals that we have introduced into the environment, and they will no doubt change things. Humans evolved in a world that is not the world we are creating, and we very well might not be fit for the future we're creating. But let's not call what we're doing "unnatural." That just serves as a kind of denial that we are active participants, and reinforces a subtle idea that we are Gods apart from "Nature."
- skhunted 3y ago
  There is an explosion of novel chemicals that we have introduced into the environment, and they will no doubt change things. Humans evolved in a world that is not the world we are creating, and we very well might not be fit for the future we're creating. This is precisely what people mean by saying what we are doing is unnatural. But let's not call what we're doing "unnatural." But most people believe this is the right word to use. I don’t think they will change their minds.
- thuuuomas 3y ago
  Regardless of what’s “natural”, widespread contamination from industry should reduce or remove the limits to industry’s liability. Externalities are real & must be accounted for.
  - IggleSniggle 3y ago
    Agreed, and this is exactly what I was trying to say. It's an ecosystem and we're a part of it.
dauertewigkeit 3y ago
Pesticides scale really well. The alternative would be to control the environment more, but that does not scale so well. Maybe with increased automation we could do some inroads in this direction. Consumers are to blame too. They won't accept blemished produce, but a potato with some insect larvae in it, is really not that much of an issue. You just remove around the larvae and cook as per usual, and that is much healthier than dosing your produce with pesticides, that cannot easily be washed off.
- WhitneyLand 3y ago
  Aren’t many insect larvae are not bad for you containing proteins, fats, and other beneficial nutrients? So as long as the potato isn’t rotted you wouldn’t even have to remove it. Biggest risk might be, ironically, if the insect contained pesticides.
  - google234123 3y ago
    Yuck, ignoring all parasites and pathogens...
    - aszantu 3y ago
      can't eat potato raw anyways
      - google234123 3y ago
        You can’t kill those without turning the potato to charcoal.
- owenpalmer 3y ago
  Aigen is a robotics company working on scalable, clean, farming. https://www.aigen.io/ https://www.aigen.io/
  - azinman2 3y ago
ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
>Industry thinking they can optimize nature's chemistry That chemistry, like fertilizers, is why we can feed 8 billion people.
- jajko 3y ago
  Yeah, with various poisons that will mess up some and kill others, and who knows what are long term consequences on genome. Not that great of an achievement if you ask me, since we know better, but its not as price efficient.
  - PoignardAzur 3y ago
    You say that like the health effects of pesticides are anywhere on the same scale as "starving to death".
    - jajko 3y ago
      Its not binary, it never was. West throw absurd amount of food away. West is getting progressively fatter with US firmly leading (I'd presume due to food lobbying getting extremely powerful there earlier than elsewhere and realizing for some breadcrumbs you can pass literally anything, like sugar is healthy). I am not saying not use anything. But have long term studies paid by producers of said things (with oversight of government) and then let it on your crops. Currently its exact opposite and government reacts after SHTF, utter stupidity if you care about more than just immediate profits.
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
You're living in a "move fast, break things" & "trust the science" world, posting on a forum filled with enginerds who subscribe to those philosophies with zealotry. They think like this: as long as there is an absence of evidence of harm in the initial science, then that means evidence of absence. Long-term, higher-order effects & unknown unknowns are ignored in Scientism, and this ignorance is status quo. It's the same mentality underpinning the approach to GMO foods & insects, dropping agent orange in Vietnam, and killing sparrows in Mao's China. It's the very spirit of modernity.
- metabagel 3y ago
  > You're living in a "move fast, break things" & "trust the science" world, posting on a forum filled with enginerds who subscribe to those philosophies with zealotry. You're painting with far too broad of a brush. I personally see a lot of push back on HN against those "philosophies".
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  > It's the same mentality underpinning the approach to GMO foods & insects Genetically-modified foods are fine: the main problem is when GM plants are wind-pollinated. And even that's largely due to patent law[0]: the harms of wind-pollination from monoculture is there regardless of where the genes come from. Genetic modifications to insects are only to wipe out populations, as far as I can tell – it doesn't hugely matter what the long-term side-effects are, in that case, because there won't be any organisms around to experience them. There was a lot of research done into the effects of anti-mosquito gene drives before the (very recent) releases into the wild, because we have learned from the Four Pests campaign. [0]: https://www.iatp.org/news/monsanto-the-seeds-of-dispute https://www.iatp.org/news/monsanto-the-seeds-of-dispute
- google234123 3y ago
  It's dumb to conflate an action done in war and what a tyrannical madman did to science based GMOs.
manoDev 3y ago
The problem is thinking in terms of optimization at all. There’s no optimum, only trade-offs. But under capitalism, the problems all reduce to “make more X with less”. If GDP is increasing, we’re doing great - doesn’t matter if life sucks. Everything is optimized until it all turns into shit.
scotty79 3y ago
> When will we shift towards long-term, extensive trials before introducing another chemical in our life cycle? It's a curious question, how many eff-ups humanity needs to learn what's the optimal way to do something that's fairly new. Do we need to introduce and be forced to withdraw tens of substances? Hundreds? Thousands? How many failures until we can learn from them how to do this properly? How long did it take for aerospace industry?

dappermanneke 3y ago

USRTK is by no means an impartial source to grab scientific summaries from

Attummm 3y ago
Could you elaborate why that would be the case?
- piva00 3y ago
  I got curious and went checking a bit deeper USRTK, haven't found much to discredit their reporting. Don't think we will get a well thought out argument given the user's comment history, a bit of a loony with a taste for hot takes with weird hyperbole.
- notthemessiah 3y ago
  As far as I can tell, there seems to effort to discredit USRTK citing how some major prior donors to USRTK (such as Organic Consumers Association) have become antivax organizations pushing conspiracy theories, but it seems the most this has resulted in is USRTK investigating lab leak theories of Covid-19's origin and a few events in collaboration with the antivax funders. All and all, it seems like some cause for scrutiny, but not anything close to discrediting the organization. > Dr. Kathleen Jamieson [professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a recent article on conspiracists’ exploitation of uncertainty in COVID-19 science] argued USRTK’s work deserved scrutiny because of its funding and affiliations. But she also noted that the organization’s published research stopped short of open conspiracy theorizing on the virus’ origins. https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-right-to-know-fave-mainstream-media-source-is-funded-by-anti-vaxxers https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-right-to-know-fave-mainstre...
  - 1234letshaveatw 3y ago
    Why are you conflating antivaxing with origin investigations? At best it seems like Dr. Jamieson is trying to do narrative shaping. I'd prefer to hear from experts in virology on that topic instead of a professor of discourse manipulation.

djakaitis 3y ago

Is this something easily avoided by eating more organic foods? Or is the prevalence of this make it unavoidable?

weweersdfsd 3y ago
Wikipedia claims that "Some states, including California, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, and Oregon, have banned chlorpyrifos on food grown and sold in their jurisdictions. Those bans remain in effect." It's also 100% banned in foods sold in EU area. So, not that hard to avoid depending on where you live. Apparently corn, soybeans, wheat, fruit trees are some of the most common crops it's used on.
- athrun 3y ago
  Apparently it’s still allowed in Australia for agricultural uses. That might change this year. https://www.apvma.gov.au/resources/chemicals-news/chlorpyrifos https://www.apvma.gov.au/resources/chemicals-news/chlorpyrif...
- lukas099 3y ago
  If it’s banned in all those places, does that have a knock-on effect of limiting its profitability thereby causing the market to produce less of it to sell elsewhere?
  - osivertsson 3y ago
    It still seems to be exported :( Europe shipping banned pesticide linked to child brain damage to Global South https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2023/03/28/eu-banned-pesticide-global-south/ https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2023/03/28/eu-banned-pestic...
- osivertsson 3y ago
  Do you got a source that chlorpyrifos is banned in foods sold in EU? A quick search seems to indicate that imported food can still have been grown with chlorpyrifos: https://www.eurofins.de/food-analysis/food-news/food-testing-news/ban-of-chlorpyrifos-and-chlorpyrifos-methyl https://www.eurofins.de/food-analysis/food-news/food-testing... Since we import a fair bit of vegetables and fruit during winter, we may still consume it here in the EU area. Also, Ascenza Agro and Industries Afrasa that sell chlorpyrifos based products recently tried to overturn this ban, but luckily were not able to: https://www.env-health.org/victory-for-health-european-general-court-upholds-ban-for-chlorpyrifos-methyl/ https://www.env-health.org/victory-for-health-european-gener...

drtgh 3y ago

It is forbidden to use Chlorpyrifos in the EU, but in Morocco it's used. Recently, imports of olives contaminated with high levels of this chemical have been detected, but they have entered into the EU. Oftopic but related, In Morocco, too, strawberries are irrigated with sewage water, and several times this year consignments of strawberries contaminated with hepatitis virus have been detected, but unfortunately they have also entered the EU. The point is that if health is at risk, then it should be banned at each of its sources, importation included. Morocco is preparing a major import hub through the Canary Islands, which is expected to "un-label" the source of products, I guess. Is aware the EU about this?

jiwidi 3y ago
EU is aware, but are too afraid to enforce it that way. See all the protest from farmers in the last months, one of their main demands is that imported foods are also subject to same rules they are.
- yard2010 3y ago
  Awareness !== Competency
bone_frequency 3y ago
What kind of leverage does Morocco have to get away with this?
- pgeorgi 3y ago
  People like to buy cheap stuff. And if that fails, there's always Ceuta and Melilla.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    I doubt most of the savings are passed on to the consumer. Companies will typically charge consumers as much as they can get away with no matter what their costs are and will happily poison people with shitty contaminated fruit if the lower costs mean they can stuff their pockets with more money while continuing to keep consumer prices as high as possible.

Madmallard 3y ago

If you didn't think we were in the end-stages of population growth and decline, just know that in your standard organic chemistry textbook given to students in university, it says that there are over 500,000 unregulated chemicals in industrial use. Exponential growth and technology with an evolutionary preference toward short-sighted and near-future decision making are going to cull the human race down by a large % as peoples systems are not evolved to tolerate the extensive environmental changes. The largest culprits are changes to food chemistry (prioritizing addiction mechanisms for profit over health), air pollution (prioritizing transportation and other means to maintain and grow economically), chemical exposures in the environment (multifactorial), and internet technology (prioritizing addiction mechanisms for profit over social health and function) [in my opinion]. People will get weaker, sicker, and dumber. Chronic diseases will start sooner, fertility will decrease, and population growth will reverse. The humans to survive out the other side will be children of health-conscious wealthy and those that live in less toxic environments globally. It's really sad because it doesn't seem like there's anything any individual can do about it. I think these issues are honestly far more serious than global warming. They are causing serious problems RIGHT NOW everywhere. I think within the next 20 years even we're going to see many consequences related to these issues. I'd like to believe we can bioscience our way through this mess but I really think that won't be the case. Fundamentally, I think proactive decision making takes a lot of time, energy, and work both on the individual and collective scales. I think it almost boils down to a physics problem where that just ends up being overtaken by the negative trend caused by exponential growth + the environmental equivalent of technical debt.

RamblingCTO 3y ago
> It's really sad because it doesn't seem like there's anything any individual can do about it. You can't solve the big thing, but there's some control over lifestyle imho. Otherwise, I concur.
svnt 3y ago
Bayer has enough money to build a few biospheres and trial their inventions there, but it is expensive and hard and so they won’t unless we make them.
3y ago

cushpush 3y ago

[flagged]

fransje26 3y ago
Might be, but there are very few places in the world where it is better.
- metabagel 3y ago
  Is that really the case? I think Europe has stronger food safety laws than the U.S.
  - tinco 3y ago
    As a European, I don't think that's true. Besides the fact that apparently in Europe we don't check imported goods as noted elsewhere in the thread, in the US eggs are washed so thoroughly they have to be kept in the fridge afterwards to keep them good. Chicken has to be chlorinated in the US. You're not allowed to sell cheese made from raw milk in the US. I bet there's more examples.
    - biorach 3y ago
      > As a European, I don't think that's true It's true. EU food safety standards are generally higher. The specific examples you've given are... controversial
    - ars 3y ago
      > in the US eggs are washed so thoroughly they have to be kept in the fridge afterwards to keep them good. That isn't actually true, you can keep them out, they'll be just fine. > Chicken has to be chlorinated in the US. It doesn't have to be, rather it's permitted. There is no chlorine left in the final result. And don't imagine the EU is against chlorine washer, vegetables are chlorine washed in the EU. > You're not allowed to sell cheese made from raw milk in the US That's not true either, the cheese just has to be aged more than 60 days. > I bet there's more examples. Your examples were quite poor, actually I doubt there are other examples.

myth_drannon 3y ago

My dream is a mobile device/app that can analyze chemicals in fruits/vegetables, but we are too far from the StarTrek world. I tried to build a vision system to at least identify wax on apples, but even that is too hard. There was an Israeli startup couple of years ago that built some device but it looks like it was a flop.

akyuu 3y ago
Not exactly what you describe, but there's Yuka for processed products (food and cosmetics). You scan a barcode and it gives you a score based on the product composition, it's quite helpful: https://yuka.io/en/ https://yuka.io/en/

sharpshadow 3y ago

It’s convenient and lucrative to use toxic patented pesticides and herbicides but there are definitely working alternatives which one could even mix themselves. Obviously the industry has no interest in cheap and available solutions. For a small example I questioned myself if DMSO a organic solvent would be useful to transport active ingredients into the plant and quickly found that just DMSO has a desired effect on plants, roots and seedlings.[1] Following the study adding H2O2 to DMSO should even increase the effect. Furthermore other ingredients can be added which impact the biochemistry of the plant. The point which I want to make is that many effective chemicals have been discovered long ago but are not in the interest of the industry because the patents expired already. 1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13762-015-0899-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13762-015-0899-6

scotty79 3y ago
Time for open source pesticides catalogue?
- sharpshadow 3y ago
  That would be great. For people not for profit.
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aszantu 3y ago

Just dived in and found this one, highly interesting. EU tracker for contaminated imports https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/rasff-window/screen/search https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/rasff-window/screen/search

s1gnp0st 3y ago
This is very cool, but why doesn't it list the names of companies involved? (or did I miss it?)
- aszantu 3y ago
  haven't checked, but I bet you could ask for a list or the documents to the cases
  - s1gnp0st 3y ago
    That's pretty inefficient if someone wants to avoid buying any of the products affected by the case.
    - aszantu 3y ago
      true, I'll see if I can find one with the cases
    - aszantu 3y ago
      wasn't lucky, sorry

tomcar288 3y ago

and these are just the chemicals you hear about. what about all the nonsense that never even makes the front pages? I don't trust industrialized agriculture, especially not here in the US. personally, I grow as much of my food as I can (lots of fruits trees and very large garden), especially from the dirty 15. and those that I can't grow, I buy organic though that doesn't always save you completely.

hinkley 3y ago

Any time I see “pyr” in a pesticide name I worry that it is being used on foods marked organic (since pyrethrins get a pass in some cases) > The chemical is not allowed on organic crops. Phew.

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