Pesticides Make Us Dumb

If you stack all these studies end to end you have pretty overwhelming evidence of the toxic nature of chemicals & America in general ... It's almost like someone is trying to kill us huh ?? Strange ...


When the women were pregnant, the researchers tested their urine for several chemical by-products of organophosphates -- a standard means of gauging exposure. The mothers with the highest levels of by-products (known as metabolites) had children whose IQs at age 7 were seven points lower, on average, than the children whose mothers had the lowest levels of exposure. (The average score is 100.)

"That's not unlike the decreases we see in children with high lead exposure," says the senior study author, Brenda Eskenazi, Ph.D., a professor of epidemiology and maternal and child health at the University of California, Berkeley. "It's equivalent to performing six months behind the average."

The children's own metabolite levels were not linked to their IQs, however, which suggests that prenatal -- rather than childhood -- exposure is largely responsible for the trend, Eskenazi says. Organophosphates, which pass from the mother to fetus through the placenta and umbilical cord, may be more damaging to developing fetuses than to children, the study notes.

Similar trends are likely to be found outside farming communities, the researchers suggest. While the average metabolite levels of the pregnant women in the study were substantially higher than the national average, as many as 25 percent of pregnant women in the general population have levels above the study average.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/23/pesticides-pregnancy_n_852785.html