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Pete Myers
1. Internalizing the externalized public
health costs of industrial agriculture
Pete Myers, Environmental Health Sciences
Environmental Health Sciences
2. What do we know?
The costs are real
But what we now „know‟ vastly underestimates true costs
Only the tiniest fraction of ag chemicals have been
studied for health effects by independent scientists
Only a small fraction of plausible health
endpoints have been assessed
Only a handful of studies have tried to connect
those health effects with economic costs
Environmental Health Sciences
3. What do we know?
But there is an even larger
elephant in the room
A revolution in science has
unfolded over the past 20
years indicating health
consequences far bigger and
more common than
traditional estimates even
hinted.
Environmental Health Sciences
6. Revolution in science
Low doses matter a lot
Events in the womb don‟t stay in the womb
The tools we have used to assess safety are
profoundly misguided
Environmental Health Sciences
2.5 parts per billion of atrazine
8. Low doses matter
1 part per billion
1000 ppb causes weight loss
Newbold et al. 2005, 2007
Same strain of mice
Same caloric intake
Same activity levels
Environmental Health Sciences
The use of agricultural chemicals has public health consequences that are not incorporated into the price we pay on supermarket shelves.
Pimental in 2005 estimated public health costs of pesticide use in the US to be $1.2BPeople die.People get cancer.Babies are born with birth defectsChildren grow up with IQ points significantly beneath their genetic potentialFertility is impairedElder lives are diminished with pesticide related diseases like Parkinsons.Families and society are burdened with the financial costs of needed health careWe are scratching the tip of a proverbial icebergWe simply don’t have the data to do a true full cost accountingIt is appalling how ignorant we are.But we have enough to get started.
Low doses? Doses that many toxicologists until quite recently dismissed as irrelevant. Parts per billion. Biological responses even down to parts per trillionTools: tests have been done one chemical at a time but we know that there are cocktail effects… mixtures of chemicals add up to strong consequences yet all testing… almost all safety testing… has been done one chemical at a timeAnd the tests used rarely are directly relevant to the range of public health problems that have become epidemic, such as heart disease and type two diabetes, which is where the big health costs are.
