Every year toward the beginning of rainy season, dense clouds of black salt marsh mosquitoes begin rising from the Everglades and coastal wetlands and descending upon Miami. For years, Miami and the Keys have fought back with a powerful tool: permethrin, a pesticide effective at killing the insects before they can make life miserable for South Florida.
But a new study suggests that chemicals like permethrin are also dangerous to humans. The peer-reviewed research looked at a small area in New York subjected to regular aerial spraying and found an association between the pesticide use and the development of autism in children who live nearby.
The new research, published in Frontiers in Pediatrics, comes in a study headed by Steven D. Hicks, a medical researcher at Penn State University. Although researchers for years have suspected connections between autism and other developmental delays and pesticide, proving that tie has been difficult. Hicks and his team concentrated on Onondaga County in central New York, where the county government every year sprays pyrethroid pesticides — the class to which permethrin belongs — over a four-zip-code area called the Cicero Swamp to fight West Nile virus-carrying mosquitoes.
His team obtained permission to review medical records from SUNY Upstate, the only regional children’s hospital in an 80-mile radius — meaning they could separate young people who lived in the pesticide application area from those who didn't. When they compared autism diagnoses rates, the results were striking. "Zip codes with aerial pyrethroid exposure were 37 percent more likely to have higher rates of ASD/DD," the authors write. "To our knowledge, this is the first study to show a relationship between the route of pesticide exposure and rates of neurodevelopmental delay. It raises intriguing questions about the safety of pesticide use in our society and how the manner in which those pesticides are applied might affect brain development in children.
Source: Miami New Times, June 12, 2017
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/permethrin-mosquito-killing-pesticide…
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