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from the Dynamic-Debugging-Tool-shown-harmful? dept.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180816081500.htm:
National birth cohort study finds DDT metabolites in the blood of pregnant women are associated with elevated odds of autism in offspring
A study of more than 1 million pregnancies in Finland reports that elevated levels of a metabolite of the banned insecticide DDT in the blood of pregnant women are linked to increased risk for autism in the offspring. An international research team led by investigators at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and the Department of Psychiatry published these results in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The study, conducted in collaboration with investigators at the University of Turku and the National Institute of Health and Welfare in Finland, is the first to connect an insecticide with risk for autism using maternal biomarkers of exposure.
Researchers identified 778 cases of childhood autism among offspring born from 1987 to 2005 to women enrolled in the Finnish Maternity Cohort, representing 98 percent of pregnant women in Finland. They matched these mother-child pairs with control offspring of mothers and offspring without autism. Maternal blood taken during early pregnancy was analyzed for DDE, a metabolite of DDT, and PCBs, another class of environmental pollutants.
The investigators found the odds of autism with intellectual disability in offspring were increased by greater than twofold for the mother's DDE levels in the top quartile. For the overall sample of autism cases, the odds were nearly one-third higher among offspring exposed to elevated maternal DDE levels. The findings persisted after adjusting for several confounding factors such as maternal age and psychiatric history. There was no association between maternal PCBs and autism.
Journal Reference:
Alan S. Brown et al. Association of Maternal Insecticide Levels With Autism in Offspring From a National Birth Cohort. American Journal of Psychiatry, 2018 DOI: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.17101129
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday August 28 2018, @06:37AM (9 children)
And just like asbestos, nobody is going to jail about mass poisoning.
The debate instead, will be: see? "not vaxxx fault, autism caused by foreign substance" vs "yes but what about interaction with whatever preservatives in the vaccines? some time correlation is still there!"
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday August 28 2018, @07:52AM (6 children)
Who do you want to arrest? The guys who invented the chemical? The guys who sold it? Manufactured it?
What would you hope to achieve? Do you want to get chemical manufacturers to test every new chemical or drug against every possible type of disorder or disease? How do you propose doing that? Autistic monkeys?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Tuesday August 28 2018, @10:47AM (5 children)
> What would you hope to achieve? Do you want to get chemical manufacturers to test every new chemical or drug against every possible type of disorder or disease?
Yeah it sounds like madness.
Now, what sounds like worse madness: "let's release this barely tested chemical, we cannot be held liable because so many others did exactly the same so it's quite difficult to pin any responsibility on us". This will eventually spell disaster. oh sorry, I mean it has.
We think we live in a better world because we have our plastic cars, and fast smartphones. But try to calculate how it would cost you to eat like an average villain back before the industrial revolution, clean water, organic veggies, humanely grown meat, fish.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 28 2018, @11:26AM (1 child)
if by "clean water" you mean "water full of human shit from the town upstream", then yes - they had "clean water".
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday August 30 2018, @09:33PM
well...
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday August 28 2018, @11:49AM (1 child)
> back before the industrial revolution, clean water, organic veggies, humanely grown meat, fish.
I buy the organic veggies. But before the industrial revolution, clean water was not available and (much) meat/fish were not available to most.
(Score: 2) by dry on Wednesday August 29 2018, @05:06AM
If you were lucky, you might have clean water bubbling up from a spring.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 28 2018, @12:42PM
You have a very good point, but I don't think meat was necessarily grown humanely "back in the day" either... perhaps in more attractive conditions than current factory farms, but when there are five little piglets who spend some time together and they start being taken away one by one, never to return, the fifth piglet isn't exactly in a good mental state by the time they come for him.
We all need lebensraum, and space isn't going to be providing it in the next 100 years. To continue our current standards of living sustainably, population needs to back down - cleverness with fertilizers and chemicals will only take us so far, and comes with these risks. Some countries are showboating their ability to "go carbon neutral" with respect to energy production. I'd like to see that taken a step further and produce all food sustainably and chemical free (now: define chemical...), mechanical weeding instead of herbicides, natural pest solutions like crop rotation instead of pesticides, etc.
Some of you may die, but the survivors would live in a better world.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 28 2018, @08:34AM
Poisoning? Are you implying that autism is a bad thing?! Ableist scumbot!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 28 2018, @10:40PM
Nor should they. Jail shouldn't be for second-guessing decades old lawful activity. It should be for crimes not merely because bad things happened.
And keep in mind that correlation is not causation. Even if there is a correlation in this case rather than some p-hacking, it could be due to common behavior or environment that happens to increase DDT intake as well as introduce risk factors for autism.