Most of the studies were about people applying the insecticides, not the general public. And it's well known that insecticides are far from safe, if you aren't wearing PPE around them you're going to pay a price.
this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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the male fertily and sperm count are skrinking on every male, not only the ones applying insecticides
the comment is saying our research is only done on people directly applying the spray. As in, tests for safe levels of exposure.
Yeah unfortunately it doesn't tell us if the level of exposure the everyday person gets is enough to be harmful
Imagine if your sperm count spiked from insecticide exposure haha, what a plot twist that would be
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Even if this was 'only' an issue for the people that make all our food its an important issue and pesticide drift is a thing. so its also an issue for the people that live near where our food is made
Not necessarily. The level or concentration of it really matters.
Radiation is a good example of this. Standing next to a leaking nuclear reactor would be very, very bad for instance. But we also get hit with radiation everyday from naturally occuring sources. Radon is naturally in the air, and anything with carbon will have the teeniest amount of a radioactive carbon isotope too. Hell, even X rays with proper shielding still get you a dose. All of this background radiation though is benign. Everyday normal exposure isn't harmful.
The question is how much we need to be exposed to for it to be harmful, and that's the unanswered question about pesticides. Going back to radiation, being an X Ray technician is actually enough exposure to cause harm if you're always in the room when it goes off. We didn't realize this until they started showing notably higher rates of cancer. There's also some mercury compounds that are so toxic, a researcher followed all the proper procedures and still died from exposure because it turned out the little amount that got through all the protection was still a fatal dose. We literally had no idea.
So are pesticides causing a sperm reduction? We have absolutely no idea. That doesn't mean we can't cut back on it anyway though.
Can't wait to hear Alex Jones lie about this one, I hope aliens get involved again
Nah the chemicals in the crops are making the sperm gay, fellow policy wonk.
Wait, you're telling me that poisons are poison?!?
Oh my God, someone tell the pesticide companies!
Lmao I can't remember his name to find the video, but if anybody knows it, there was this guy who said it'd be safe to drink a glass of Round-Up (or something similar?) and the interviewer deadpan asked him to do it, and the guy was like "no... I'm not stupid"
Sorry for the terrible paraphrasing, it's a really funny (/sad) video tho
I mean, TBF if someone walked up to me with an unsealed liquid and combatively asked me to drink it I would refuse too.
Big regrets not washing those blueberries before eating them now.
Depends on whether you want kids though. Free birth control, just eat more pesticides by never washing your produce!
Can't wait to see someone say.
Oh I don't need a condom I ate some unwashed raspberries earlier
It looks like the experiment itself was comparing sperm levels between direct exposure and indirect exposure. That tells us that high concentration and direct exposure reduce sperm and establishes the pesticide as capable of doing that. But it doesn't tell us much about the global decline. Nothing in the article actually links the two together, and they haven't even linked the actual study.
We know that some harmful substances are benign in small quantities. The everyday radiation we're exposed to by naturally occuring isotopes doesn't do anything. On the other hand, X Rays are safe, but the technicians actually have a noticeable increase in cancer risk if they don't leave the room when they actually take the X Ray. So the latent background radiation there is enough to make a difference.
Ultimately, we still don't know if the latent exposure we get to these pesticides is enough to cause reproductive harm. If there isn't a scientifically significant difference in sperm levels between vegans and non vegetarians, I'm inclined to think this isn't the culprit. But it's worth further research and cutting back on usage anyway of course. It could be that we're exposed to enough to cause a decrease in sperm, but not enough that dietary differences would be visible.
(This is why foods and consumer products can have incredibly complex molecules and still be safe. The concentration makes it benign -- most of the time. This is why food additives are an interesting topic.)
Get outta here with your nuanced, well-reasoned opinions!
/s
Just kidding. Great comment and analysis, this is why I love Lemmy.
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That saves me a shitload on a vasectomy.
Just drink Roundup!
Vasectomies are actually pretty inexpensive.
Glyphosate is stored in the balls
Im a little offended that Monsanto thinks my sperm are insects if I’m being honest
Is this a bad thing? Fewer kids in the future seems like a win.
There's no fda approved male birth control because everything they've tried to specifically target fertility has other unacceptable side effects.
So view this as a canary in a coal mine scenario. This is one aspect of health that's easy to measure, but without further study we cannot assume that there aren't other more severe health complications associated with exposure to pesticides.
What are the unacceptable side effects to a vasectomy
Sterilization is not equivalent to birth control. To be considered birth control, fertility should return shortly after the cessation of usage. Since vasectomies are considered permanent it's not in the same category.
Although, that's beside the point, and I'm pretty sure you know it and are being cheeky. The point is if researchers trying to target just fertility with no unwanted adverse health effects have a hard time developing such a drug, then we should assume that it is very likely that substances that cause decreased fertility are also causing other adverse health consequences.
That's funny since there's countless negative side effects to female birth control
Depends if the economy can cope with the shrinking labor force and demand. And who is going to take care of all these old people. Unless we have automated a large part of our economy by then either we’d be fucked or the developing nations will be exploited even harder.
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African overpopulation was seriously overweighted back when people were talking about global warming in the 00s.
It's never been an issue we didn't have solutions for.
It's not for countries with shrinking populations. The most sustainable model is a roughly constant population, which we're going to reach sometime within the next 50 years. A shrinking population means an aging population, which comes with its own host of issues (see: Japan and Korea).
Sperm Motility issues 😪
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