Pesticide Essays - Pesticides, Environmental Health, Biocides

Pesticide Pesticides are chemicals that make our produce perfect, and our yards free of pests. However, this perfection comes at a price to many different people. Pesticides are poisons with the sole purpose of killing. They are intended to kill weeds, insects and fungus. There are three types of pesticides called herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides. Every pesticide has an active ingredient, and an inert ingredient. The active ingredient is the poison that kills he pest, and the inert ingredient is the carrying, or spreading compound. (Honey pg. 2) Pesticides were once thought of as a miracle cure for hunger. They were supposed to keep crops free of pests, and misquitos under control. People were not aware of the dangers that these poisons possessed. DDT* was supposed to be a, "benefactor for all humanity" (Honey pg. 2). There were few regulations on the use of DDT use. It was even sprayed where children played. It was intended to kill misquitos, but it ended up poisoning, even killing people. (Honey pg.2) Elizabeth Rollings says that one of her teachers, Mrs. Keller, had a sister that died from DDT poisoning when Mrs. Keller was a child. People came to her house that sprayed the bushes with DDT to control misquitos, and when Mrs. Keller and her sister played near the bushes they were exposed to the deadly poison. Now a days the U.S. has seen the dangers that pesticides possess and banned many kinds from use in this country. However, the U.S. has yet to ban them from being made here and exported to foreign countries. In fact, 25 tons are exported every hour. (Honey pg. 1) There are three main problems with this: the regulations are very low in the places the U.S. exports to, many of the people in those places are unaware of the dangers, and the pesticides can return on the produce that the U.S. imports. A specific example of how unaware the people are is an incident in Costa Rica. The field workers in a sugar plantation were not told of the dangers of the pesticides that they applied, and they were not given any protective clothing. Many of them went shirtless, and in tennis shoes with no socks. They had used this pesticide for several days when many began to complain of headache and nausea; some began to vomit blood. One man died, but fortunately the problem was discovered in time to treat the rest of the workers before they died. Another of the problems that arise from pesticide exportation is getting it back in the produce we import from these countries. One third of the poison banned in the U.S. returns in what is being called the circle of poison, which is when pesticides that are exported and used on produce that return on the produce, back to the people it was being meant to keep away from. (Scanlan pg.1) To avoid this, many people are shopping at health food stores where pesticides have not been used on the food. There is a basic progression that occurs when the body is poisoned by a pesticide. First there is a biochemical inactivation of an enzyme. Next this biochemical change leads to cellular change. Then the cellular change causes symptoms of poisoning seen or felt in the particular organ where the enzyme that was deactivated was. All this changes a body's homeostasis*, and when homeostasis can not be maintained or restored, disease occurs. Most effects aren't permanent, but may take a long time to completely recover from. However, some do cause permanent damage. The damage of pesticide poisoning varies. It can effect just one particular organ system, or it can effect a number of organ systems.( GTI. Manifestations of Toxic Effects. pg 1) Another problem that pesticide poisoning possess is detection. A history of being exposed to chemicals can cause illness that can be hard to distinguish from a viral infection, such as the flu. One might go to long without treatment thinking they have a virus that they will eventually overcome, when in reality they have been poisoned by pesticides, which can lead to worse and worse damage over time. "People who handle chemicals frequently in the course of their jobs and become ill, should tell their physicians about their previous exposure to chemicals." (GTI Manifestations of Toxic Effects) The statistics of harm from pesticides are numerous. "Each year 25 million people, primarily from the Southern Hemisphere, are poisoned through occupational exposure to pesticides; of those 220,000 die." Pesticides have been linked to cancer in many

buy custom The Relationship between Local Food Environment and Residents Diet essay

buy custom The Relationship between Local Food Environment and Residents Diet essay Is there a relationship between Local Food Environment and Residents Diet in the prevention of Arteriosclerosis? There is acloseassociationbetween diet and diseases such as cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease and birth defects. Arteriosclerosis is one of these diseaseshighlyassociated with cholesterol intake. Reports indicate that taking foods containing saturated fats increases the risk of getting arteriosclerosis. At the same time, consumption of fruits and vegetables reduces the chances of one getting the disease. This paper arguesthat there is anassociation between thelocal foodenvironment, and the residentsdiethenceaffects the risk of arteriosclerosis. In this study, participants were thepopulationfrom the Arteriosclerosis Risk in Communities study in the period from 1993-1999. The participants were from Washington County, Forsyth County, Jackson City and Minneapolis. There were various reasons for the selection of these populations. First the data from the studywerereadily available from a large population sample with information on dietary intake. Secondly thepopulationinvolved was from adiversegeographic area and contained people ofvariedeconomic, educational andracialclases. Thirdly, there was information on neighborhood differences on diet. The numbers of participants were 2392 Black Americans and 8231 White Americans. The researchers used food frequency questionnaires to obtain the estimations of the intakes, the recommended foods and nutrients from the 10623 participants in the Arteriosclerosis Risk Communities study. They obtained thedataon availability of recommended foods through the presence of supermarkets, food stores and full service restaurants. These were the main suppliers of food to the communities. They varied the local food environment by increasing the number of the food suppliers. They obtained the increases in the amount of food taken by the participants due to the presence of a local foodenvironmentby computing the daily intake of calories in saturated fats, and daily intake of cholesterol. Othervariationfactors considered were the level of education, the amount of income and therace. Discussion Arteriosclerosis is aheartdisease that results from the clogging of blood vessels. The causal agent of the disease is high fat intake of fats. The disease is not transmissible, but it is common in families with a history of heart diseases. Intake of foods with low fat content, intake of vegetables and fruits is one of the prevention measures. There are a lot of recommendations outlined in the US for prevention of the disease. One of the measures is the availability of recommended foods in the vicinity of people. There are several other factors associated with the disease. Age is one of the contributing factors. The risk of the disease seems to increase with old age. In addition, othersassociateit with an increased concentration of cortisol in the blood that results from long timestress. There is one school of thought thatbelievesthediseaseis as a result of high intake of cholesterol. Another schoolbelievesthat stress is themaincause of the disease. Various prevention measures have be en stipulated depending on the school of thought. The study found out that the local foodenvironmentinfluences the intake of the recommendedfoodfor prevention of Arteriosclerosis. An increase in the number of supermarkets, food stores and full service restaurants in the study area increased intake of recommended foods. The study madevariousassumptions. One of them is that the supermarkets provide all the recommended foods. Another limitation to the findings was the fact that it did notconsiderage. Apart fromeducation, income and race, age among other factors is a determining factor in the choice of food. Buy custom The Relationship between Local Food Environment and Residents Diet essay

To what extent, if at all, might hegel be described as a communitarian Essay

To what extent, if at all, might hegel be described as a communitarian - Essay Example Undoubtedly, he is one of the greatest photospheres the world has ever seen and he has been credited with many achievements of which the most prominent one is the addition of a historical perspective to philosophy. He also was the first philosopher to understand the importance of ‘the other’ in relation to fully understanding the self. However, it is his writings on civil society, individualism and government which have to be discussed in order to understand if he was a communitarian and if he was, to what extent he agreed with the idea of being a communitarian. Of course to understand Hegel as a communitarian we must first discuss what being a communitarian is about and what communitarianism entails. Fundamentally, communitarianism is a set of connected philosophical ideas which started to take form as a system in the modernist era as an opposing force to the ideals of radical individualism (Chong, 2006). It advocates the idea of having a civil society which works as a unit where the community takes precedence over the individual (Wikipedia, 2006). Communitarianism is not directly opposed to the concepts of social liberalism or social democracy since the focus of the philosophy remains on the priority in decision making which is given to the community rather than the individual (Franco, 1997). However, as described by Franco (1997) it remains very difficult to place Hegel as a communitarian if we only use labels and not understand what Hegel was trying to get across to us. Franco further suggests that: â€Å"Hegel provides us with a ‘middle ground’ between deontological liberalism and contemporary communitarianism. Like the modern communitarians, he is critical of the individualistic and historical conceptions of rights underlying the liberal polity, but like many liberals in both his day and ours, he is skeptical of any attempt to return to some form of democratic participatory gemeinschaft based upon immediate face-to-face relations (Franco, 1997,