NEW STUDY
Pregnant? Living near fields of crops sprayed with pesticides? You might want to move.
A study published last month in Environmental Health Perspectives shows that babies whose moms lived within a mile of crops treated with widely used pesticides were more likely to develop autism.
According to the research, mothers who lived less than one mile from fields treated with organophosphate pesticides during pregnancy were about 60 percent more likely to have autism than children whose mothers did not live close to treated fields. When women in the second trimester lived near fields treated with chlorpyrifos—the most commonly applied organophosphate pesticide—their children were 3.3 times more likely to have autism.
And still, the pesticide-makers would have us believe all cases of autism are caused by genetics?