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Top European Union (EU) health officials on Thursday proposed a partial ban on three common pesticides thought to harm bees, a critical link in the global food chain. The move by the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, comes in the wake of a report issued earlier this month by the EU's top food safety watchdog, which determined the chemicals pose a number of risks to the honey bees that farmers across the world depend on to pollinate their crops. Environmentalists and pesticide opponents have suspected for years that the three pesticides – clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam – are responsible for declining bee populations and massive bee die-offs in the United States and abroad. Environmental and food safety groups in the US are now urging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to follow the European example and suspend the most dangerous uses of the pesticides while speeding up reviews of their safety. "EPA cannot continue to condone the use of chemicals responsible for the wholesale killing of our pollinators and the irreparable damage of the US food supply," said Peter Jenkins, an attorney for the US-based watchdog group the Center for Food Safety (CFS). "Many of the most scientifically and agriculturally advanced nations have seen the dangers these neonicotinoids present and are reacting," said Jenkins. "The question is, why isn't the US?"

In a letter published in the journal Annals of Neurology, neurologists Margaret Parrish and Robert Gardner suggest a link between Parkinson's disease and golf. Of 26 patients with Parkinson's disorder that they collected for their small study of the disease, it turned out that 19 of them lived on or within two miles of a golf course. A coincidence perhaps, given the higher probability of golf courses in communities favored by senior citizens? The data suggest otherwise: "Sixteen of the 19 patients resided down-wind of a golf course," the researchers noted. Of the other three patients with Parkinson's living up-wind of a golf course, two of them had "additional golf course exposure." Such a small study proves nothing, but it may be an intriguing clue to tracking down the cause of this debilitating disease. Parkinson's disease results from the death of specific neurons deep in the brain, in a region called the substantia nigra. These neurons use the neurotransmitter dopamine to communicate, and when enough of them die, voluntary movement becomes halting or frozen. One way to kill these neurons is by ingesting certain toxic substances. MPTP, a contaminant in an illegal morphine-like street drug, turns unfortunate drug addicts into a Parkinson's patient overnight. For some reason, this toxic substance specifically attacks the neurons that are lost in Parkinson's disease, raising the possibility that other toxic substances in the environment might do the same thing.

Western civilization suffers from the delusion of replacing peasants and traditional culture with industrialized farmers. This goes hand-to-hand with another hazardous practice: privatizing and ruthlessly exploiting the natural world. This hubris has been infecting more than private corporate executives and governments, which, after all, have the models of nineteenth-century robber barons in mind. Scientists eat from this fruit of ignorance, too. They and their engineering colleagues modernized the infrastructure of exploitation. They made it “science based.” Chemistry, for example, developed petrochemicals and plastics and thousands of other deleterious substances that now threaten the entire life of the world with deforms, extinction, nay death. Agricultural scientists and engineers also justified the violent system of industrialized farming and food production that, in irrigating crops alone, uses about 70 percent of the world’s drinking water,[1] about 19 percent of fossil fuel energy, [2] and emits considerable amounts of the global warming gases. According to “Livestock’s long shadow,” a 2006 report of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, animal agriculture is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in carbon dioxide equivalent; 37 percent of methane (which is 23 times more lasting than carbon dioxide); 65 percent of nitrous oxide (which is 296 times more potent than carbon dioxide); and 64 percent of ammonia (which contributes to acid rain).

The Pacific leatherback turtle (Dermochelys coriacea) population has experienced a catastrophic decline over the past two decades and might be on the verge of extirpation. The most conservative population estimates, derived from nest counts and numbers of females nesting annually, show that there could be as few as 2,300 adult females in the Pacific Ocean. Others have proposed estimates of 1,690 adult females in the Eastern Pacific and 2,100–5,700 breeding females in the Western Pacific. The progressive decline in numbers of nesting females in the Eastern Pacific, well documented at Playa Grande, Costa Rica, and on the Pacific coast of Mexico, has been attributed to increased adult mortality associated with gillnet and longline fisheries and extensive egg harvesting. In the Western Pacific, declines in nesting females have been documented in Papua, Indonesia and Terengganu, Malaysia, where the nesting population virtually has collapsed as a result of intensive egg harvesting. Although consistent long-term nesting data are not available for most of the Western Pacific leatherback population, major nesting areas for leatherbacks recently have been identified, and conservation efforts to protect and monitor these sites are underway.

Over the past few decades, there have been increasing numbers of reports of diseases in marine turtles. Furthermore, in recent years, there have been documented instances of apparently new diseases emerging in these species of which the etiology and/or pathogenesis remain unknown. These instances i) raise concern for the survival of marine turtles, and ii) question the health and stability of the benthic marine environments in which turtles live. Knowledge of common disease processes and pathologic changes in lesions, along with a standardized approach to postmortem and sample collection are required to document and
understand the host-agent-environment interactions in marine turtle health. This review combines, for the first time, a standardized approach to the postmortem of marine turtles for veterinary clinicians, with a concurrent descriptive review of the gross and microscopic pathologic changes in lesions commonly seen.

The European Commission wants to suspend for two years the use of three neonicotinoid insecticides on crops attractive to honeybees and prohibit the sale and use of seeds treated with plant protection products containing these active substances, according to a proposal put forward at a meeting of the Standing Committee on the Food Chain and Animal Health (SCFCAH), on 31 January. The restriction is targeted at clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam, applied as granules, seed treatment or spray on maize, oil seed rape, sunflowers, cotton and cereals (except from winter cereals). "We are requesting (that) member states suspend for two years the use of this pesticide on seeds, granulates and sprays for crops which attract bees," Commission health spokesman Frederic Vincent told a regular daily briefing. “These are proportionate measures. We are giving the member states two years to see whether it’s working. Then we will see if we need to review the legislation in Europe,” the Commission’s spokesperson for health and consumer policy, Frederic Vincent, said on 31 January. The Commission hopes that a decision on the suspension would be taken in a form of a regulation on 25 February at the SCFCAH level and will enter into force on 1 July. A report from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) earlier this month said three widely-used neonicotinoid pesticides, made by Switzerland's Syngenta and Germany's Bayer, posed an acute risk to honeybees.

This book contains 20 chapters about the impact, environmental fate, modes of action, efficacy, and non-target effects of insecticides. The chapters are divided into 7 parts. Part 1 covers the non-target effects of insecticides, whereas part 2 is dedicated to integrated methods for pest control, in which insecticides are an important element for diminishing the populations of insect pests. Part 3 includes chapters about the non-chemical alternatives to insecticides, such as metabolic stress and plant extracts. Insecticides and human health are the main topic of part 4, and the interactions between insecticides and environment are discussed in part 5. Part 6 includes the chapters about insecticides against pests of urban areas, forests and farm animals, whereas biotechnology and other advances in pest control are discussed in part 7.