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Home > Portable Practical Pediatrics > Can Pesticides harm Your Children (Archived Pedcast)
Podcast: Portable Practical Pediatrics
Episode:

Can Pesticides harm Your Children (Archived Pedcast)
Category: Kids & family
Duration: 00:15:48
Publish Date: 2020-07-12 20:05:20
Description: News flash-the world that your children are growing up in is a world full of chemicals.  We are just beginning to understand what these chemicals do to your children's health. Pesticides, manufacturing chemicals, jet fuel, chemicals in sunscreens and cosmetics, household chemicals, flame retardants, plastic packaging, medicines etc etc.   The EPA requires that manufacturers log their manufactured chemicals in a database and by 2012; they had logged 82,000 chemicals being manufactured and used in the U.S.!  Very worrisome, since many of these chemicals have strong biologic effects on children, persist in the environment long after use, have potentially damaging effects on a child's nervous systems, have the potential to alter a child's delicate hormone balances that regulate much of their physiology, and can even triggered some cancers. Image by Pixabay More on all that in a moment. In today's pedcast you are going to hear a discussion about one family of chemicals that you definitely need to be familiar with, namely pesticides.  Your child's long-term health may be on the line from exposure to these chemicals so it is upon you to familiarize yourself with these chemicals.  Stay tuned and I am going to fill you in on some of the essential facts parents need to know about the adverse health effects of pesticides on children and how you can avoid your child's exposure to them. Stay informed, stay engaged, and of course, stay tuned.   How do pesticides work?  A Trip Down Science Drive. First let's define the type of products that make up the pesticide category; these include insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and fumigants- all meant to kill or keep pests away. To understand the damaging effects of pesticides, we are going to need to take a brief trip down Science Drive to understand how pesticides work. Let's start with a quote from the World health Organization's 2008 report on Toxicity of pesticides on children: "Pesticides are toxic by design – they are BIOCIDES, designed to kill, reduce or repel insects, weeds, rodents, fungi or other organisms that can threaten public health and the economy. Their mode of action is by targeting systems or enzymes in the pests which may be identical or very similar to systems or enzymes in human beings and therefore, they pose risks to human health and the environment. Pesticides are ubiquitous in the environment and most are synthetic. There is growing concern about children's exposure to pesticides and their special susceptibility. Children are not little adults, and may have higher exposures and greater vulnerability at both high and low levels of exposure." In other words, in order for pesticides to work, they need to be toxic to living things like insects, fungi, weeds, and rodents. Unfortunately, the biochemistry and cellular machinery of insects, fungi, weeds, and rodents, isn't all that different from that of you and your children. Your children can become collateral damage in our war against pests, mainly by three mechanisms: Mechanism #1-By interfering with critical enzymes in the nervous systems of pests. To see this in action, just spray some insect repellent on some ants and watch what happens... first they stop moving, then they start shaking with convulsions, and then they die. This all happens within minutes of exposure. The ant's nervous system has been short circuited by the pesticides, the pesticide interfering with neurons talking to neurons. News flash, these are the same enzyme systems that control your children's nervous systems. Mechanism #2- By interfering with the organism's critical enzyme function such as enzymes that are needed to produce and use chlorophyll or even cellular energy itself. A cell that can't produce energy, no matter what type of organism it lives in, is destined to be a dead cell. Mechanism #3- By causing oxidation within the cells of the targeted organisms. Remember that word oxidation from chemistry class?
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