How do pesticides affect children's behavioral and psychological functioning? Do we know enough about this topic to choose to avoid most pesticides in our homes and in our foods?

Here is an excerpt from the book Silent Scourge: Children, Pollution and Why Scientists Disagree, 2003, copyright, Oxford University Press, all rights reserved.  To read more, visit my web page on Children and Pollution, where there are some links to informative web pages on pesticides. This book was cited and quoted in the pesticide section as well as the lead poisoning section of the report on Arizona's Children and the Environment -- Colleen Moore

"The effects of synthetic chemical pesticides, other than methylmercury, on children’s neurobehavioral development have not been studied in the same way as has methylmercury. Here is an analogy to the history of lead. Until the mid-1940s when Byers and Lord did their follow-up study of childhood lead poisoning victims, it was assumed that lead poisoning in children was only an acute illness. When the U.S. government provided money for lead exposure screening, researchers such as Needleman, Perino and Ernhart, and others began to find that IQ test scores were lowered by sub-toxic lead exposure. The first studies were not long term prospective studies--they simply measured lead and IQ test scores in children in a particular age group. After those initial studies showed that sub-poisoning lead was associated with lower IQ test and school performance, then long-term prospective studies were begun that tracked children’s lead exposure from birth to adolescence.
    Where are we now in the study of pesticides and children’s behavioral development? Basically we are in the 1940s before the publication of Byers and Lord’s landmark work. I have been unable to find any studies that follow up child pesticide poisoning victims to see how they perform in school later. There has not even been good research to see if there is a link between current exposures to pesticides and neurobehavioral functioning in children. I found only two studies of how pesticide exposure affects the behavioral functioning of children and adolescents. Neither study is sufficient to help us decide whether pesticides do have negative effects on children’s neurobehavioral development. As yet there been no attempt to test whether exposures early in life (prenatally or during infancy) relate to children’s later behavioral functioning.
    In 1993 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) issued a report on pesticides in the diets of infants and children. The report recommended that, “Neurodevelopment effects must be part of the battery of end points evaluated for toxicants, including pesticides and agricultural chemicals” (NAS, 1993, p. 110). As a result of that report, animal neurodevelopmental testing is now ...  "  (to read more, click the link below)

The book "Silent Scourge: Children, pollution, and why scientists disagree" covers the behavioral and psychological effects of pollutants that we commonly encounter in the environment. The book is written by Colleen Moore (Professor of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and covers these topics.
Chapter 1 covers lead
Chapter 2 covers mercury.
Chapter 3 covers PCBs
Chapter 4 covers certain pesticides
Chapter 5 covers the effects of noise on children's development
Chapter 6 covers community pollution disasters including Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Love Canal
Chapter 7 is on the Precautionary Principle

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