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Recently, the American Bird Conservancy claimed to find “bird- and bee-killing pesticides in nearly every mouthful of food eaten by the nation’s Senators, Representatives, their staffs, and visitors who eat in the dining halls of the United States Congress.” Its paper is a textbook case of the “let’s scare people to death” playbook.
Equipped with many of the trappings of a bona fide scientific analysis — a sample collection “strategy,” a testing methodology, an equation, a table, a couple of pie charts and a bar graph–the paper reported that one…two…up to five neonicotinoid pesticides were detected in different fruits and vegetables purchased in Congressional cafeterias. Quelle horreur!
The trouble is that the amounts of neonic pesticides that the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) actually found in Congressional cafeteria food are so minuscule — so far below the government-established thresholds that could cause harm — that an individual would have to consume impossible quantities of the foods tested by ABC in order to have an adverse effect. The key word is impossible.
Read full, original post: Are Members of Congress Being Poisoned By Pesticides?