OP danger 'like smoking 100 cigarettes a day'
USING organophosphate pesticides regularly is probably as dangerous as smoking 100 cigarettes a day. But the packets of OPs do not come with the health warning.
If they did come with a warning it might read 'OPs accelerate the normal ageing process resulting in young-onset dementia, cancer, heart disease, strokes, arthritis and osteoporosis. OPs damage your brain causing psychiatric disease; they disrupt your immune system and cause cancer, allergies, chronic fatigue syndrome and multiple sclerosis; OPs poison your liver and kidneys so the body cannot rid itself of these compounds and other harmful agents.'How do I know this? Because it is all well documented in scientific literature and I see these problems in my patients in every day practice both in NHS and private work.
Why does this go 'unnoticed' by the Poison's Units? I believe it is because they receive substantial funding from the chemical industries so professorial chairs and consultant posts could be lost if they started diagnosing OP poisoning.
To be accurate, I do have one patient who was diagnosed as being poisoned by OPs, but was telephoned the next day by the consultant to say he had changed his mind. It seems the medical experts can pick and chose the pieces of science which suit them and ignore those which do not. Farmers have been encouraged and directed to use toxic chemicals in full knowledge of the serious short and long term toxic effects of these chemicals.
Farmers were never fully informed as to their toxic nature and neither were they given proper information about how to protect themselves from the malign effects. They have paid for this serious omission with their health.
I have worked for 13 years in a rural farming community and it is now very clear to me that there is an excess of debilitating illnesses among farmers in my practice. After the Second World War and to the seventies, the main pesticides used were the organochlorines. In the short term these were not so toxic, but in the long term they accumulated in the environment and in body fat tissues in such a dangerous way that most of them were taken off the market. These chemicals are so persistent that I can find traces of them in the blood and fat of almost any patient who comes in to my surgery even today.
They were replaced by OPs. Although these did not accumulate in the environment so much, they were much more toxic in the shorter term. The group of farmers most affected by OPs were those who were handling sheep dip because this also contained phenolic compounds, equally if not more toxic than the OPs.
Different people exhibit different symptoms of OP poisoning depending partly on genetic susceptibility, whether they have had single massive exposure, or chronic sub-lethal exposure; whether it has been combined with other chemicals and other OPs and how good their body is a coping with toxic chemicals.
A Government-sponsored study at the Institute of Occupational Medicine of farmers who regularly handled OPs but who were complaining of no symptoms showed that they suffered from mild brain damage. Their ability to think clearly and problem solve was impaired.
Overall, pesticides have the effect of accelerating the normal aging process. One would expect farmers with their healthy style of living to live much longer than the average population. Not so; they get osteoporosis, Parkinson's disease, heart disease and cancer much younger than they should. It is all too easy to put ill health down to stress in farming. Actually, the real reason is more likely to be chronic chemical poisoning.