One of the first things this administration did was to rescind a government proposal to ban a pesticide used on much of the fresh food we eat — a chemical compound, chlorpyrifos, found to be harmful to the brain and nervous system of children.
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I can hear my friends in the apple orchards of Eastern Washington saying a little whiff of chlorpyrifos isn’t going to hurt anybody. Of course, they would never spray it around their children, and certainly not pregnant women.
Tomato farmers stopped applying chlorpyrifos 17 years ago, and most citrus growers did the same, though it is still widely used on everything from brussels sprouts to berries. In 2015, alarmed by new studies linking chlorpyrifos to lower I.Q. in children, the government moved to ban it altogether.
The election changed everything. In came a gang that sees all this hyperventilating about poisons in our food, toxins in our water and carbon in our air as alarmist whining. From here on out, public health would take a back seat to Dow Chemical.
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Does Trump want to make American children a little dumber, a little more vulnerable to cancer, especially those in the regions that voted for him? No, of course not. But by being reflexively hostile to science that points out the hazards around us, he’s doing just that.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post: Poisons Are Us
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