The lurking dangers of chemical pesticides

In order to maximize agricultural productivity, pesticides are being used widely. Pesticides usage from organophosphates, organochlorine, and carbamate class are rampant. The decades of reckless pesticide usage has contaminated the soil, water, air, and provoking deleterious effects on human health.

Numerous studies have shown that these chemicals disrupt the immune and hormonal signaling, leading to various degrees of inflammation. Teratogenicity, infertility, neural disorders (leading to depression, suicides), cancer (blood, lungs, prostate, breast, skin) are direct outcomes of pesticide exposure through oral, ocular, dermal, and respiratory routes. The lipophilic pesticides deposit in the adipose tissues, provoking inflammatory cytokines. Some pesticides target cholinergic system and damage DNA. 

Pesticide-driven pathologies occur by erratic enzyme activity. Some well-studied enzymes playing pivotal role in the diseases include caspase, serine protease, acetylcholinesterase. 


Considering the burden of ailments caused by pesticides, its important to reduce their usage, by educating the farmers, and regulating the manufacturers.

For more information, please read: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30411285/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Danger associated molecular patterns (DAMPs)

Image
Allergen are irritants, offenders or inflammatory agents. They can be pathogens, mutagens, xenobiotics, and pollutants. Danger associated molecular patterns (DAMPs) are altered metabolism products of necrotic or stressed cell, which serve as alarm signals for the innate immune system. When excess, DAMPs can prove lethal due to their signal transduction roles.  Inflammatory agents as arthropod chitin, bacterial pneumolysin are DAMP triggers. In fact, any inflammatory agent, including food preservatives, cosmetics, pesticides, polluted air,  can lead to DAMP generation. These generate DAMPs, which in turn create a pro-inflammatory state. Some well-studied DAMPs include uric acid, creatinine, ferritin, extracellular ATP, HSPs, amyloid ß, S100, HMGB1, and ECM proteins. ECM proteins as elastin, fibronectin, laminin, collagen have been identified as DAMPs. The DAMPs such as S100 and chromogranin A are already known as cancer biomarkers, so other cancer markers such as a-fetoprotein (AFP), BC
Read more

Microbial biosurfactants for oil spill remediation

Image
The crude oils are viscous hydrocarbons. During transportation through waterways,  sometimes oil spill occurs, which cause environmental disasters. Among others, Exxon Valdez in Alaska (1989), Deepwater Horizon/BP well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico (2010) are major oil-spill-related eco-disasters of the past decades. The viscous oil forming a gooey film on the water surface choke aquatic life, to death and ruin the ecological balance in the affected areas. The chemical and mechanical ways of oil spill remediation is effective, but has its own issues. So, lately biosurfactant-producing bacteria and fungi are being explored. Biosurfactants are amphiphilic compounds capable of reducing interfacial tension, dispersing the oil particles, and degrading into non-toxic debris. Among the microbes, only Pseudomonas, Bacillus, and Candida have shown much promise.  Of all the candidates, rhamnolipid, sophorolipid and surfactin have been characterized well. Biosurfactants are the same compounds use
Read more

Mushroom polysaccharides as therapeutics

Image
Mushroom polysaccharides have shown antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anticancer, antidiabetic, antimicrobial, and antilipemic to immunomodulatory properties. The ß-glucan, a component of fungal cell wall, has proven its therapeutic relevance. The variants of ß-glucans include pleuran from Pleurotus , lentinan from Lentinus , schizophyllan from Schizophyllum , grifolan from Grifola etc. Some ß-glucans are bound to proteins, as proteoglycan, such as PSK or krestin from Trametes versicolor . Beta-glucans interact with receptors of macrophages, and dendritic cells. These glucans bind to the membrane pattern recognition receptors, TLRs and dectin-1, inducing innate immune activity. On attachment to the ß-glucan, dectin-1 is phosphorylated by tyrosine kinases, and induces an intracellular signaling cascade. The recognition of the glucan by the macrophage triggers proinflammatory cytokine production such as tumor necrosis factor (TNF-a) and various interleukins (ILs). So, the pharmacological
Read more