English
'BEES AND PESTICIDES - THE STATE OF THE SCIENCE' from Pesticide Action Network North America which was submitted to the American EPA on 21st March 2012 as the basis for PANNA's petition that the EPA urgently review the legality of its decision to award Clothianidin a conditional registration, against the advice of its own Science division in 2003 (attached).
Dear Editor,
Sir Robert Watson, chief scientist at the Department of the Environment (Defra), has acted bravely in ordering a reassessment of the licensing of neonicotinoid pesticides in the UK.
Watson faces an uphill struggle; Defra, its Food and Environment Research Agency and the Advisory Committee on Pesticides have all resolutely ignored the many peer-reviewed studies from Europe, from as long ago as 1999, which proved the extreme toxicity of neoniocotinoids for honeybees, bumblebees and butterflies.
The wildlife NGOs are similarly in denial. With the honourable exception of Buglife, all have stood by silently as bees, pollinating insects, soil-invertebrates and farmland birds are wiped from the face of Britain's countryside.
Painful as it may be for Defra, the ACP and the leading wildlife bodies to admit that they got this wrong, they must call for a complete ban on these poisons now, or we will suffer complete ecological disaster in this country.
Dear Editor,
Your report (31 March) that in the light of new research, the Environment Department's distinguished chief scientist, Sir Robert Watson, will review the safety of the notorious neonicotinoid pesticides, long blamed for the destruction of honey bees and other pollinators, is brilliant news.
Insect experts Buglife, supported by the Soil Association, first presented scientific evidence of the damage these new and dangerous chemicals are doing to pollinating insects during the last Labour government, at a bee seminar in 10 Downing Street called by Sarah Brown. Then and since, government scientists and regulators refused to act – just as their predecessors did 50 years ago when faced with evidence of the destruction of birds of prey by DDT. However, the battle to ban neonicotinoids is not over, as is clear from the denials of the latest science from chemical companies
Neonicotinoids are now known to have lethal impacts on bees at tiny doses, well below the levels regulators currently consider "safe". Most chemical sprays used on our food are declared "safe" by governments on the basis that the very small doses that often remain on food are below a level where they can affect humans or wildlife, and can thus be ignored. This latest research undermines a significant part of the safety case for all chemical sprays used in farming, and should lead to a fundamental rethink in how we farm.
An extended radio interview with Tom Theobald about three new studies that have recently been published regarding the ways that neonicotinoids harm bees. The studies include one from Purdue, and two from Europe, and all three indicate that these new pesticides are causing more harm to bees than previously thought. Tom Theobald is the Colorado bee-farmer who uncovered the duplicity of the American EPA - in licensing Clothianidin against the official judgement of their own scientific officers. Listen to the interview: http://howonearthradio.org/archives/1807
The UK Government is to reconsider its refusal to ban neonicotinoid pesticides, the nerve-agent chemicals blamed for the collapse of bee colonies worldwide, the chief scientist at the Department of the Environment, Sir Robert Watson, told The Independent. Sir Robert, a former head of the UN climate panel, moved quickly to begin a comprehensive re-evaluation of the Government's stance after two new scientific studies, from Britain and France, strongly linked neonicotinoid use to bee declines. He said the new studies, and others, would be closely analysed. The Government has refused previous requests to consider a precautionary suspension of the chemicals, which have been banned in France and Italy, despite mounting evidence that they are harmful to bees and other pollinating insects, even in minute doses.
Twice in the past three years, the UK Government has been asked, on the basis of compelling evidence, to suspend the use of the new generation of neonicotinoid pesticides, until the increasingly worrying evidence that they are extremely harmful to bees and other pollinating insects has been shown to be unfounded. The first occasion was in 2009, by a coalition of environmental groups led by Buglife, the invertebrate conservation charity; the second was in 2011 by the Labour MP Martin Caton, after this paper's disclosure that America's leading bee scientist had found a harmful link. On each occasion the request was ignored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Today we report new findings that show that declines in bee colonies may be caused by a new generation of nerve-agent pesticides.
Defra ministers and officials cannot afford to brush aside the matter again.
Use of a specific group of insecticides is having a serious impact on bumblebee populations, according to a team of Scottish scientists. The Stirling University researchers found exposure even to low levels of neonicotinoid pesticides had a serious impact on the health of bumblebees. Bee populations have fallen sharply, and scientists say urgent action is needed to reverse the decline. Of particular concern is an 85% drop in the number of queens. That means 85% fewer nests in the following year. The research found bumblebee colony growth slowed after exposure to the chemicals. This may partly be to blame for colony collapse disorder, a mysterious phenomenon which has hit large numbers of hives in Europe and North America in recent years.
Commercial beekeepers and environmental organizations have filed an urgent Legal Petition with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) demanding the suspension and further use of a pesticide, which the agency's own scientists assessed as "highly toxic to honey bees" back in 2003. The Petition demands new safeguards be adopted, to ensure similarly dangerous pesticides are not approved by the agency in the future. The legal petition is supported by over one million citizen-petitions, which were collected from people across the country, demanding the ban of one pesticide in particular – clothianidin – because of its lethal impact on honey bees.
Substantial evidence gathered over the past half century has shown that environmental exposures in early life can alter patterns of childhood development, and influence life-long health and risk of disease and dysfunction. Among the chemical exposures identified as potentially harmful to early development are: cigarette smoking during pregnancy, ionizing radiation, and insecticides. Patterns of illness have changed substantially in the past century among children in the United States and other industrial nations. Today the major illnesses confronting children in the United States include a number of psychosocial and behavioral conditions. Neurodevelopmental disorders, including learning disabilities, dyslexia, mental retardation, attention deficit disorder, and autism – occurrence is more prevalent than previously thought, affecting 5 percent to 10 percent of the 4 million children born in the United States annually. Beyond childhood, incidence rates of chronic neurodegenerative diseases of adult life such as Parkinson’s disease and dementia have increased markedly. These trends raise the possibility that exposures in early life act as triggers of later illness, perhaps by reducing the numbers of cells in essential regions of the brain to below the level needed to maintain function in the face of advancing age. Prenatal and childhood exposures to pesticides have emerged as a significant risk factor explaining impacts on brain structure and health that can increase the risk of neurological disease later in life.
There have been a few studies of neonicotinoid-induced toxicity in the nervous systems of vertebrates, and these studies were conducted with only a few of the neonicotinoids, such as imidacloprid, thiamethoxam, and clothianidin. Imidacloprid has been reported to act as an agonist or an antagonist of nAChRs at 10 microM in rat pheochromocytoma (PC12) cells and to change the membrane properties of neurons at concentrations greater then or equal to 10 microM in the mouse cochlear nucleus. Exposure to imidacloprid in utero causes decreased sensorimotor performance and increased expression of glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) in the motor cortex and hippocampus of neonatal rats. Furthermore, it has been reported that the neonicotinoids thiamethoxam and clothianidin induce dopamine release in the rat striatum via nAChRs and that thiamethoxam alters behavioral and biochemical processes related to the rat cholinergic systems. Recently, imidacloprid and clothianidin have been reported to agonize human alpha4beta2 nAChR subtypes. This study is the first to show that acetamiprid, imidacloprid, and nicotine exert similar excitatory effects on mammalian nAChRs at concentrations greater than 1 microM. In the developing brain, alpha4beta2 and alpha7 subtypes of the nAChR have been implicated in neuronal proliferation, apoptosis, migration, differentiation, synapse formation, and neural-circuit formation. Accordingly, nicotine and neonicotinoids are likely to affect these important processes when it activates nAChRs. Accumulating evidence suggests that chronic exposure to nicotine causes many adverse effects on the normal development of a child. Perinatal exposure to nicotine is a known risk factor for sudden infant death syndrome, low-birth-weight infants, and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Therefore, the neonicotinoids may adversely affect human health, especially the developing brain.