It's more like "use it until there's another product that we can sell at equal or higher profit. Then get those old organophosphates (now cheap) banned by backing critical research that was previously blocked."

Uhm, the idea behind of "use it as long as we can get away with it" is not the lack of laws but the lack of enforcement. No new law is going to change that.

Oh woah.

My mother has a lot of those and they keep crumbling and she has to have them changed. She swallowed a few of them. She also suffer from neurological diseases and fibromyalgia.

That those are in fact made of mercury is blowing my mind right now.

I'll advise her to get her mercury levels checked out.

Other people appear to be down-voting you, so I'll comment instead: The standard defense is that the mercury is locked in place inside the amalgam, and does not migrate. I've never looked at the evidence either way.

Not to mention CFL bulbs. It's really great when something as mundane as a lightbulb breaking turns into a veritable hazmat situation.[0] The risk/reward ratio there boggles the mind, especially given the fact LED bulbs exist.

[0] https://www.epa.gov/cfl/cleaning-broken-cfl

That stuff must be really super cheap, as the price difference between it and the alternatives is insane.

edit: internet searching about on this apparently shows that the price difference should not be that much??? Two different dentists want me to pay about $250+ more per tooth for non-amalgam fillings. Madness!

Agreed.

Sorry for the downvotes. I received chelation therapy after years and years of very strange accumulating issues that some day crossed a threshold where they could no longer be ignored. I had actually not seen that coming and called myself healthy, the human brain is extraordinarily capable of ignoring obvious problems. When I was forced to acknowledge that not all was well my world fell apart. Long story short, I found the problem after some searching. Mercury was high both in hair and in urine - I was lucky. Normally chronic exposure is next to impossible to show via such tests. After chelation mostly with DMPS, later also lots of DMSA I achieved miracles. For exanple, a double-sized right thyroid with a nodule became normal and the nodule disappeared. That condition had been there for at least 25 years (first diagnosis). It disappeared within a few weeks, after the 4th or 5th DMPS treatment the tissues surrounding that area were very active, I knew there was something going on. So I went to the endocrinologist again who did the ultra-sound twice because he did not believe it. That is just a single example of many, from psoriasis (gone) to warts on the feet (gone), eye problems (gone), never-ending colds (for months!) that had gotten worse and worse over time, and a long list of other problems.

How do I know it was the amalgam fillings? Because that was my only exposure, and because it turned out my jaw bones were very damaged - exactly were there had been amalgam fillings. It was discovered not by x-ray, several OPGs never showed anything. But when I was to get an injection into the buccal mucosa the needle went right into the bone (that's really not supposed to happen, you can't penetrate bone with a small needle used for a mucosa injection). The doctor checked and this happened in all the places where I had had amalgam fillings. He then injected DMPS in those places. A year later, and after the jaw bones had been very active (but in a positive way) the needle didn't go in anywhere any more. To this day there is (decreasing) activity in my jaw bones, and I still take chelators that have an effect right there (jaw bone).

But please, go ahead and downvote anyone who says something about amalgam fillings. I actually have a background in medical topics, from anatomy, physiology to (of course) bio chemistry, and I read quite a few studies. The lead situation was so bad that politicians actually went to action to do something about it, worldwide. Mercury is far more toxic than lead (and, according to some LD study I once found on PubMed, together about a thousand times more toxic than either lead or mercury alone). Yes, pieces of amalgam are not the problem, they go right through. And as others have said, insertion and even more so removal - with a drill creating heat which creates vapor (no matter how much you cool with water, by then the vapor already exists) - are the worst parts. I had had a few fillings removed while I was a student. Only recently, two decades later, did I connect the dots, why back then I had a huge "almost asthma" allergy almost overnight, as well as huge problems finding sleep, strange thoughts, and big problems with some joints that didn't seem to have any observable reason. The removal was without protection, the removal of the last fillings a few years ago, when I hoped I had found the problem (I did not know, amalgam removal and chelation was an experiment because I could not find anything else, and boy was I proven correct), was with good protective measures that I think worked (I didn't get worse then I already was at the time).

Here is something to consider: What happened when I started DMPS chelation was something that according to doctors doing that kind of treatment is not uncommon, so much so that I was told that might happen before it happened. The initial values went down quickly and linearly - but after a few DMPS treatments my symptoms suddenly jumped. Turned out that the amount of excreted mercury had also jumped (tripled). From then on my body became "active". All kinds of crazy stuff happened, for a long time (it's still not quite over in the jaw area). It seems that the body is overwhelmed at some point and is no longer able to excrete everything. Maybe the spikes of insertion and/or removal of amalgam fillings contribute, too much at once. After the first year I took chelators because it still helped, but it was no longer necessary for excretion, my body had become pretty active. Maybe somebody whose body can deal with the spikes, or who never experiences them, has less trouble continuously getting rid of the mercury that is released from the fillings.

Sooo many questions, and I made soooo many interesting observations. Too bad it's impossible to talk about it, even anonymously on the Internet, because for some reason this topic raises the emotions of sooo many people. That the subject is present on so many websites of the esoteric kind is because it's next to impossible to talk about it in normal circles. My insurance always paid every little thing, even the most stupid and ridiculous and useless stuff - but when I finally send them a bill that mentioned "mercury" and "DMPS" (chelator) they suddenly refused. IT was a trigger word. They had paid for dozens of doctors (that one year when everything escalated, I went to many doctors with the many issues I had, from gastroenterologist to psychologist), now, the one thing that actually worked, and which was very cheap(!), they refused. It's insane. Same here - somebody mentions the trigger words (mercury, amalgam), the comment is voted down immediately. By whom actually? Are there so many prominent toxicologists reading this?

I don't think so. Even a normal MD would not know much about it. I've actually seen this: When I go to a talk from a doctor specialized in lung disease and someone in the audience asks about something not the lung the doctor is very careful not to say anything, because it's not their specialty. Strange, everybody (including non-doctors) has a strong opinion when it comes to the subject of chronic mercury poisoning through amalgam fillings.

Yes this is common now. For example Monsanto has Roundup Ready GMO crops & Roundup:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_Ready

The crops are designed to withstand Roundup, while weeds are not, so farmers can use Roundup to control weeds with crops that would normally be killed by the herbicide.

That is the problem with GMO. It is a useless word.

It is important to know what is done and where the GMO is used: In some container or open air or open water.

> high pesticide tolerance so farms can pump in pesticides

(I'm sort of in biotech.) This is one way to look at it. But I'm pretty sure one of the mechanisms that allow the plants to survive being covered in certain pesticides also allows them to effectively decontaminate / degrade the pesticide.

A plant engineered to express an enzyme capable of degrading organophosphates [0] could allow for both the plant to be protected from exposure to the toxin & even after harvesting still express low levels of the enzyme which should clean the plant.

That's the idea at least... From experience, it's not nearly that simple. E.g., the degradation products are also somewhat toxic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryldialkylphosphatase

Is there a regulation to how much pesticides they can spray into foods?

If this is the case then non GMOs sounds more appealing.

There are several different approaches to GMO crops. One, like you say, is the herbicide-ready crop. Another is the insecticidal crop, like Bt-Corn, that produces insecticides that kill common pests, and works in the way that the other poster suggests. Yet a third is to impart nutritional characteristics to a crop that weren't there before, like vitamin-A-producing rice. Of course, there are also the usual goals of higher yield, drought resistance, reduced waste, ease of harvesting and regularity of product. The hybridization and selective breeding processes have done the majority of work in those areas and are not considered GMO by most activists, but they are nonetheless modified.

it's almost like someone at Monsanto thought this approach might allow them to sell 5000 times more chemicals too. pretty lucky cooincidence they got there after all that science happened to show them that this is the most effective approach to solve world hunger (how is that going btw?)

Equating GMOs and "poison" is intellectually dishonest

That's a pr problem, not a science problem. But you bring up a good point, even if you come up with the perfect technical solution, if people are suspicious, or there are bad actors out there with pseudoscience products to sell, you can get dumpstered for no good reason. The fact that we're struggling to maintain herd immunity in certain population segments tells you how hard it can be to defend good solutions in the face of irrational paranoia.

Why are you conflating RoundUp (NOT even a pesticide) with all GMOs? Attacking GMO technology because of one company's misuse is like attacking electricity because of the electric chair.

We're talking about replacing pesticides. Monsanto is in the business of selling herbicides and pesticides, so of course they're not going to use the tech to neuter their profits. If anything they are benefiting from the negative press and comments like your own as it discourage the public from supporting the necessary government research. I doubt this will come from private corporations as the profit motive just isn't there.

Slightly tangential, but regarding the definition of "natural," I personally prefer to think in terms of concentrates. The chemicals in question exist in nature in many cases, or at least there is a similar naturally occurring compound. The main thing that I think makes a useful distinction is the concentration level. Like other drugs, the danger is in the dose, and the extreme levels of potency we can get with a little chemistry is what makes them "natural" or "synthetic" in my opinion (regardless of their actual origin). I'm more cautious accepting highly concentrated substances than I am accepting the same thing diluted with the thousands of other naturally occurring substances that accompany it "in the wild."

Organic farmers don’t use organophosphates

There is a big difference between organic and conventional pesticides.

USDA Organic program also excludes GMOs.

Just a note, the world runs no risk of malnutrition even if we produce less food with cleaner forms of production. The world already produces more than enough for everyone. The problem is distribution, not production.

>So you mean, grow much less of it, and at greater cost?

Yes.

>You know what else presents a risk of "reduced IQs, memory and attention deficits"? Malnutrition

Okay, so no matter what we're reducing IQ, memory and attention. So why not ban them?

Essentially, yes. The "green revolution" is an illusion and its effects cannot be sustained. We need to gradually back down to a place where humans can grow enough food for themselves without also poisoning themselves and without exhausting soil fertility.

Maybe we could train the insects to raise the children for us too!