Recent organic diet intervention studies suggest that diet is a significant source of pesticide exposure in young children. These studies have focused on children living in suburban communities. The objective of the study was to determine whether consuming an organic diet reduced urinary pesticide metabolite concentrations in 40 Mexican-American children, 3-6 years, living in California urban and agricultural communities.

In a prospective cohort study of patients presenting with pesticide self-poisoning, Andrew Dawson and colleagues investigate the relative human toxicity of agricultural pesticides and contrast it with WHO toxicity classifications, which are based on toxicity in rats.

Epidemiological studies link organophosphorus pesticide (OP) exposures to asthma, and we have shown that the OPs chlorpyrifos, diazinon and parathion cause airway hyperreactivity in guinea pigs 24 hr after a single subcutaneous injection.

Recent studies have indicated that organophosphorus pesticides (OPs) may disrupt metabolism by altering the expression or function of adenylyl cyclase (AC; the enzyme that catalyzes the formation of cAMP from ATP) or G-proteincoupled receptors and G-proteins involved in the AC signaling cascade.

Widespread residential pesticide use throughout the United States has resulted in ubiquitous, low-level pesticide exposure. The mix of active pesticide ingredients is changing in response to 2000

Research indicate that developmental exposures to apparently nontoxic doses of DZN compromise neural cell development and alter ACh synaptic function in adolescence and adulthood. The patterns seen here differ substantially from those seen in earlier work with chlorpyrifos, reinforcing the concept that the various organophosphates have fundamentally different effects on the developmental trajectories of specific neurotransmitter systems, unrelated to their shared action as cholinesterase inhibitors. March 2008

Pesticides are killing frogs and other amphibian species in the US