Count down to Expo!
Brain Development
In recent years as the population in the world increases, the need for more living space, better technology, and more food, increases drastically. Investigated and researched by the Environmental Protection Agency, they found that there was an estimated $8,163 million worth of pesticide purchases in the year 2010. And then in 2012, they found it to have risen up to $8,866 million, still increasing as the years go by. Why do agricultural farms demand such a large use of pesticides? Well it's most likely to compensate for their immense crop that they produce. Farmers do not have time to manage every crop at once, and a quick sweep of pesticide on their land seems to be a cost-effective ritual for them to get the job done quickly. (EPA Research Journal)
With the increasing use of pesticides, they have been shown to be harmful to the brain and brain development. For example in February 2009, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry published a study that found that children who live in homes where their parents use pesticide are twice as likely to develop brain cancer than children who don’t live in these conditions (toxicsaction.org). And in 2010, scientists in the University of Montreal and Harvard University released data that connects pesticides used on fruits and vegetables that could cause ADHD in young children or adolescents (toxicsaction.org). Children especially pose a great threat due to their underdeveloped nervous systems which are easily susceptible to harmful pesticides that would deal great damage.(toxicsaction.org) Another experiment to support that the pesticides have a harmful effect on the brain, was done by the Department of Environmental Epidemiology, in January of 2008, the findings of the studies showed that children's exposure to pesticides may bring about impairments in their neurobehavioral development (degruyter.com). This is caused by a children's exposure to organophosphate pesticides (ncbi.nlm.nih.org)
