Study: Effects of Pesticides in Children

Please note that this section contains my personal notes from my readings on this topic.

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From The Toxic Sandbox (2007) by Libby McDonald; pages 150 – 151:

In 1993, Dr. Guillette traveled to northwestern Mexico, where a tribe of Yaqui Indians had split up in the late 1940s, at the outset of the Green Revolution.  One faction chose to stay in the valley, where fields treated with pesticides went right up to the town line.  The other moved to the foothills, where they practiced traditional ranching methods free of chemicals.

Their children provided a perfect study subject in that the two groups shared a genetic background, diet, and cultural practices.  After performing a series of tests on the four- and five-year-olds in both groups, Dr. Guillette learned that although there was no difference in their grown patterns, the group of children exposed to pesticides repeatedly scored lower in the tests designed to measure stamina, gross and fine motor skills, eye-hand coordination, thirty-minute memory, and the ability to draw a person.

Dr. Guillette returned to the Yaqui Valley when these same children were six and seven years old and repeated the same tests.  What she saw was that the pesticide-exposed kindergartners and first graders on the whole had an interior sense of balance, difficulty solving easy puzzles, and poor eye-hand coordination.  Perhaps related to these low ability levels, they were easily frustrated and had trouble completing tasks.

In the third phase of the study, Dr. Guillette evaluated girls in prepuberty and discovered early breast development in the children who had been raised in the pesticide-using agricultural valley.  In the mostly pesticide-free foothills, the girls had some breast development by age ten with a normal correlation of fat deposits and mammary tissue.  In the valley, however, there appeared to be only fat deposits, with no mammary tissue in the developing breasts of these young girls.

Dr. Guillette inferred that the girls’ abnormal breast development was most likely caused in utero.  Mammary gland tissue is first laid down at six to eight weeks and then again at twenty weeks.  If pesticides somehow inhibited the proper development of mammary tissue, when these girls grow up and become mothers thye will be unable to breast feed their babies.