[lou_lou]

Scientists are closing in on an inescapable conclusion: Pesticides may be a cause of Parkinson's disease

Jackie Christensen was 32 when her body began to betray her. She had just returned to work after the birth of her second son and when she tried to type, two fingers on her left hand refused to cooperate. "They wouldn't go where I would want them to on the keyboard," says Christensen, who at the time -- it was 1997 -- was co-director of the food and health program at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a Minneapolis think tank. "I also had what they frequently call frozen shoulder, with a very low range of motion in my left arm."
http://www.onearth.org/article/parki...pesticide-link

[lurkingforacure]

For those following the colony collapse disorder that is happening to our bees in the US (over a million colonies lost last year, no bees, no food, so this is important to all), researchers at Purdue and Harvard have honed in, so to speak, on the cause: neonics that are sprayed on the plant but also get into the plant vascular system. From there, bees get it in their system when they gather nectar rom the plant. Neonics, from what I have read, causes tremors in the bees and disrupts the bee's homing system such that they cannot find their way back to the hive. Meanwhile, a starving queen and pupae eagerly await the return of the bees who never come, and they die as well. The researchers were actually able to duplicate colony collapse using the neonics.

Neonics are used on about 150 million acres of farmland in the US and are also present in home gardening products. Here's a link for more:

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debat...g-bees-solved/