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Global decline in male fertility linked to common pesticides
(www.nbcnews.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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Most of the studies were about people applying the insecticides, not the general public. And it's well known that insecticides are far from safe, if you aren't wearing PPE around them you're going to pay a price.
the male fertily and sperm count are skrinking on every male, not only the ones applying insecticides
the comment is saying our research is only done on people directly applying the spray. As in, tests for safe levels of exposure.
Yeah unfortunately it doesn't tell us if the level of exposure the everyday person gets is enough to be harmful
Imagine if your sperm count spiked from insecticide exposure haha, what a plot twist that would be
Even if this was 'only' an issue for the people that make all our food its an important issue and pesticide drift is a thing. so its also an issue for the people that live near where our food is made
Not necessarily. The level or concentration of it really matters.
Radiation is a good example of this. Standing next to a leaking nuclear reactor would be very, very bad for instance. But we also get hit with radiation everyday from naturally occuring sources. Radon is naturally in the air, and anything with carbon will have the teeniest amount of a radioactive carbon isotope too. Hell, even X rays with proper shielding still get you a dose. All of this background radiation though is benign. Everyday normal exposure isn't harmful.
The question is how much we need to be exposed to for it to be harmful, and that's the unanswered question about pesticides. Going back to radiation, being an X Ray technician is actually enough exposure to cause harm if you're always in the room when it goes off. We didn't realize this until they started showing notably higher rates of cancer. There's also some mercury compounds that are so toxic, a researcher followed all the proper procedures and still died from exposure because it turned out the little amount that got through all the protection was still a fatal dose. We literally had no idea.
So are pesticides causing a sperm reduction? We have absolutely no idea. That doesn't mean we can't cut back on it anyway though.