We humans have managed to eradicate a large amount of insect pests with our modern chemicals – but at what cost? Since Rachel Carson first sounded the alarm about pesticides back in the 1950s, we may have banned DDT, but other substances are just as dangerous.

As we watch disturbing numbers of animals die off before our eyes – specifically bats, amphibians and honeybees – scientists suspect that pesticides are playing a major role.

Science journalist Sonia Shah shares the details at Yale E360:

In the past dozen years, no fewer than three never-before-seen diseases have decimated populations of amphibians, bees, and — most recently — bats. A growing body of evidence indicates that pesticide exposure may be playing an important role in the decline of the first two species, and scientists are investigating whether such exposures may be involved in the deaths of more than 1 million bats in the northeastern United States over the past several years.

For decades, toxicologists have accrued a range of evidence showing that low-level pesticide exposure impairs immune function in wildlife, and have correlated this immune damage to outbreaks of disease. Consumption of pesticide-contaminated herring has been found to impair the immune function of captive seals, for example, and may have contributed to an outbreak of distemper that killed over 18,000 harbor seals along the northern European coast in 1988. Exposure to PCBs has been correlated with higher levels of roundworm infection in Arctic seagulls. The popular herbicide atrazine has been shown to make tadpoles more susceptible to parasitic worms.

And therein lies the basic problem. The pesticides we ‘innocently’ use to destroy annoying bugs don’t just affect the intended target.

Case in point: honey bees. While a number of factors are believed to contribute to colony collapse disorder – like poor nutrition, immune dysfunction from industrial beekeeping practices and even parasites – many scientists believe that a new class of pesticides called Neonicotinoids is the real culprit. These systemic pesticides weren’t designed to kill bees, but they end up in the pollen and nectar of plants.

As hard as mega-corporations like Monsanto might try to convince us that we need chemical pesticides, there’s got to be a better way, even for mass use in agriculture. Clearly, the price of current methods is far too high.

Link [Yale E360]
Photo credit: Flickr user orangeacid

“Many of the people being trained today aren’t trained to understand and apply science to patients out in the real world, so patients aren’t getting the treatments most likely to help them,” says Timothy Baker, a psychology researcher and professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and co-author of the report. Clinical psychology continues to depend on outdated, ineffective strategies of diagnosis and treatment–and surveys show individual practitioners often value their own experience or a “hunch” over scientific evidence, ultimately hindering their ability to effectively help patients. “We’re simply not taking advantage of what is known in scientific research,” Baker says.

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