ChildrenHere are just a few of the highlights from Beyond Pesticide's factsheet
Children and Pesticides DON'T MIX:
* The National Academy of Sciences reports that children are more susceptible to chemicals than adults and estimates that 50% of lifetime pesticide exposure occurs during the first five years of life.
* Studies show that children living in households where pesticides are used suffer elevated rates of leukemia, brain cancer and soft tissue sarcoma.
* A study of 210,723 live births in Minnesota farming communities finds children of pesticide applicators have significantly higher rates of birth defects than the average population.
* Scientific studies show that 2,4-D applied to lawns drifts and is tracked indoors where it settles in dust, air and surfaces and may remain for up to a year in carpets.
In light of the current local controversy, you may be interested in the Beyond Pesticide's new factsheet on
PESTICIDES AND PLAYING FIELDS Are we unintentionally harming our children?and the
The ChildSafe School, a program of Grassroots Environmental Education.
Links to these reports and others are found in the Hazards of Chemical Lawn Care section of this
Beyond Pesticides webpage, along with other useful information.
(And, of course, pesticides aren't healthy for human adults either!)
PetsFrom
Beyond Pesticides:
* Studies find that dogs exposed to herbicide-treated lawns and gardens can double their chance of developing canine lymphoma and may increase the risk of bladder cancer in certain breeds by four to seven times.
Companion animals are more vulnerable to pesticides for several reasons. They walk through chemically-treated areas unknowingly, absorb pesticides through their mouth, nose, and eyes, and can absorb through their skin any powder that sticks to their fur.
Cats are particularly vulnerable because of their grooming habits, because they lack enzymes that decontaminate pesticides, and because they eat prey that have a high toxic load.
WildlifeFrom the
American Bird Conservancy:
One well known estimate suggested
that more than 670 million birds are directly
exposed to pesticides
each year on U.S. farms alone, 10% of which - or 67
million
birds - die as a result.
Repeated exposure to some
pesticides can
also lead to sub-lethal effects such as decreased
breeding
success. These effects are hard to detect but
nevertheless
can produce dramatic species declines over time.
And there's a great factsheet from the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center:
When it comes to pesticides, birds are sitting ducks.In the past dozen years, three new diseases have decimated populations of amphibians, honeybees, and--most recently--bats. Increasingly, scientists suspect that low-level exposure to pesticides could be contributing to this rash of epidemics.
Read more about this Yale Environment 360 report...
Coming in the next newsletter: Alternatives to conventional lawn care.
