[AHatLikeThat]

The complete article is paywalled, but what is available gives no citation. I could find no recent pesticides report on the EU website.

I am pro-organics, but I question the veracity of the telegraph's article. At the least, I think this post should be linked to the actual EU report, if one does exist.

[mchannon]

Once past the paywall, it doesn't get much better.

“At least 100 different pesticides are known to cause adverse neurological effects in adults, and all of these substances must therefore be suspected of being capable of damaging developing brains as well,” a report carried out by the parliament’s Scientific Foresight Unit, led by the Swedish University of Agricultural Scientists, states.

[7sigma]

Organics also use pesticides which are not a s effective as synthetic ones and therefore need to be applied more often so they it can be more harmful

[ciconia]

DO you really need proof that poison is bad for you?

[justinpombrio]

> DO you really need proof that poison is bad for you?

My friend once ate what looked like a few nightshade berries. We called poison control, who asked how many. "Three." They immediately said it was fine, and nothing to worry about.

A couple dozen will kill you, three will have no effect.

[gonvaled]

What is poison?

Water is poison: drinking 50 liters in 1 minute will kill you.

[qubex]

I guess that a 'poison' is a chemical that kills by biological effects... drinking fifty litres of water in a minute will kill you by mechanical means, which is kind of beside the point... the element iron is also a lethal if five hundred kilograms collide with you at a hundred metres per second, but you haven't been 'poisoned'.

[gonvaled]

My point is that anything is poison, depending on dosage. Even water, the basis of terrestian life, although I know I am stretching the analogy there.

But yes, water will destroy your cellular membranes if exposed to it in big quantities for a long time. Those are chemical (biological) effects.

[qubex]

(I'm just picking your brain because now I'm curious.)

How about a noble gas? Presumably those are chemically inert enough to not cause anything chemical/biological at all?

[gonvaled]

Nature does not care about our definitions, and properties are usually on a gray scale, not black-white. Inert gas have very low reactivity [1], but they can still react:

> Nonetheless, low reactivity—instead of no reactivity, as had formerly been thought—characterizes the rare gases. One of the factors governing the reactivity of an element is its electron configuration, and the electrons of the noble gases are arranged in such a way as to discourage bonding with other elements.

That said, I would probably classify noble gases as perfectly safe, since damage from exposure to them will more likely come from mechanical interactions, and not biological / chemical.

[1] http://www.encyclopedia.com/science-and-technology/chemistry...

[cynicalbastard]

i think everyone knows poison is bad, but the question is, how much is proven to cause problems?

chlorinated pools are also full of poison but that isn't really an issue.