Should Pesticides Be Allowed? No!

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Pesticides are the only toxic substances released intentionally into our environment to kill living things. This includes substances that kill weeds (herbicides), insects (insecticides), fungus (fungicides), rodents (rodenticides), and others. The use of toxic pesticides to manage pest problems has become a common practice around the world. Pesticides are used almost everywhere -- not only in agricultural fields, but also in homes, parks, schools, buildings, forests, and roads. It is difficult to find somewhere where pesticides aren't used -- from the can of bug spray under the kitchen sink to the aeroplane crop dusting acres of farmland; our world is filled with pesticides. In addition, pesticides can be found in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink. Pesticides have been linked to a wide range of human health hazards, ranging from short-term impacts such as headaches and nausea to chronic impacts like cancer, reproductive harm, and endocrine (glands that secrete hormones or other products directly into the blood) disruption. Acute dangers - such as nerve, skin, and eye irritation and damage, headaches, dizziness, nausea, fatigue and systemic poisoning - can sometimes be dramatic, and even occasionally fatal. Chronic health effects may occur years after even minimal exposure to pesticides in the environment, or result from the pesticide residues which we ingest through our food and water. A July 2007 study conducted by researchers at the Public Health Institute, the California Department of Health Services, and the UC Berkeley School of Public Health found a times 6 increase in risk factor for autism spectrum disorders (ASD) for children of women who were exposed to organochlorine pesticides. Pesticides can cause many types of cancer in humans. Some of the most prevalent forms include leukaemia (blood or bone cancer), non-Hodgkins lymphoma

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