I work with dementia patients and one of their problems is that they forget where they are, and what they are doing, and why. They can't follow a minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day sequence any more. For instance, they may wander down the street and forget where they were going, or wander into traffic completely forgetting that it is dangerous; or, they don't remember markers of where they've been. In a convalescent home setting, a man who has dementia might wander into a woman's room, be told that it is a woman's and he shouldn't come in without knocking, and he might even be embarrassed that he had done so, in the moment, but he will do it again and again and again and again. He thinks he's walking into his own room. He cannot remember the markers--his bed, his belongings--that tell him that a room is or isn't his, and cannot remember the caution, from hour to hour, let alone day to day.
When I first read about bee colony collapse, there was a description of something similar happening in bee brains: They would leave the colony to forage and GET LOST, and never return. Their famous internal map of where they found nectar and how to get back to the hive, was gone. This particular study noted deterioration in the bees' brain matter, and pinpointed pesticides as the cause.
With Alzheimer's, you can also actually see the damage to the brain--the loss of brain matter--when the interior of the brain is imaged. That struck me, too. They could see the damage to bees' brains, and we can see the damage to human brains. It's a visible deterioration with the outward symptom being loss of memory. (I don't know if there is visible deterioration with all forms of dementia, but it is certainly true of Alzheimer's.)
My thought was this: Are pesticides causing dementia in humans, as they seem to be causing dementia in bees?
There is quite a lot of difference between humans and bees, though we are intimately linked by food. So I really don't know if this is a reasonable--or scientific--question to ask: If pesticides are harming bees, what are those pesticides doing to US? Since we are larger, more complicated beings, perhaps the impacts are absorbed at first, and the consequences delayed.
One thing I do know: We CANNOT trust the EPA when it says that something is "not harmful to humans," because, a) such a report is probably written by the corporation that is selling the harmful item, and the EPA just pretends that it is an EPA study or report (they do this all the time!), and b) the Republicans have so underfunded the EPA that it is critically understaffed and often can't do its own studies and can't properly peer review the ones that corporations present them with and that get re-issued under EPA's name. Also, c) neither the EPA nor the corporations that it serves utilize the "precautionary principle" ('don't sell it if there is a chance that it is harmful, until it is truly proven harmless), and they don't do (or require that corporations do) studies anywhere near the length of time needed for many products to be proven harmless. This is especially true as to the span of human life, and, say, a lifetime's worth of slow poisoning, by pesticides or other products. We may be only seeing the result NOW of pesticides or other harmful products that were invented decades ago and were deemed "safe" then but are not truly "safe" in the long term.
Are the bee die-offs early warning--like the canaries in the coal mine--of what's being done to US? Are the bees more vulnerable in the short term, while we are vulnerable in the long term?
This thought is not directly related to the imperiled "food chain" nor to the utter immorality of human-made pesticides killing these innocent, beautiful, hard-working critters. That our political system has allowed this to happen is APPALLING, quite apart from pesticide impacts on human health. I just wonder about the connection (the one I made between bee dementia and human dementia). If there IS a connection, perhaps our human political system could be forced to be more responsive.
= new reply since forum marked as read
