While Republicans are actively trying to bring back DDT to please big agriculture, concern is growing about other pesticides and fungicides that are already out there. In your food. In your body. In your brain.
… a team of University of North Carolina Neuroscience Center researchers led by Mark Zylka subjected mouse cortical neuron cultures—which are similar in cellular and molecular terms to the the human brain—to 294 chemicals "commonly found in the environment and on food." The idea was to see whether any of them triggered changes that mimicked patterns found in brain samples from people with autism, advanced age, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.
This is initial research, and obviously mouse brain samples in a test tube aren’t the greatest analog for what happens in a living human mind. Still, among the chemicals tested, eight showed up as triggering degenerative effects. And among those eight were a couple of brand-spanking-new fungicides introduced into the U.S. only within this century. One of those, BASF’s “Headline” (pyraclostrobin), is now widely used on everything from corn and beans to fruit. There’s also Bayer’s trifloxystrobin, which is used on pretty much everything from grapes down to grass grown for hay. Both of these new chemicals routinely appear in USDA food samples.
