Good crop dusting info (planes not your butt)

ahmed said:
I heard that the pesticide is basically less concentrated nerve gas.... Isn't that something to be concerned about?
Click to expand...

Had to go fly a 2 day trip, but here is some useful information for all of you concerned about chemicals.

I got t-cart to PM me the brand names of his most used herbicides and fungicides so far this season.

For those not familiar with toxicology, lethal dose is measured through several different methods in a labratory setting. Generally, rats (both male and female) are used, and different methods of contact are tested (oral, dermal, etc.). All this comes to a value know as LD50. This is the median lethal dose that is required to kill half the tested individuals. The value is generally expressed in mg/kg of body weight.

Anyways, back to chemicals... for the herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides that I researched, all had LD50 values in the 2000 to >5000 mg/kg range in the type of testing that would be most representative of the likely method of contact (again... oral, dermal, etc).

For comparison with the 2000 to >5000 mg/kg LD50's on agricultural chemicals... nicotine, caffine, and Aspirin all have LD50s equal to or less than 200 mg/kg. That means that most agricultural chemicals are 10 to 20 times safer than Aspirin!

To put all that in perspective, according to oral LD50's for Aspirin (200mg/kg), and assuming average body weight of 190 lbs, it would take nearly 15000mg (or .04 lbs) of Aspirin to potentially be lethal to a human. To further put it into perspecitve, Extra Strength Bayer Aspirin is 500mg per tablet... that would mean that it would take 30 tablets to start reaching a median lethal dose!

Now, imagine having to come in contact with that much of the active ingredient (generally about 25% of the total) of agricultural chemicals and you will soon realize that the vast majority of today's chemcials are very safe indeed!



edit: considering the nerve gas reference, I will add this...
Chemical Name: Naled
Product Name: Dibrom Concentrate (87.4% naled)
Method of Action: Neural pathway inhibitor
Most common method of contact: Dermal
Dermal LD50: > 4000 mg/kg (still 20 times safer than Aspirin :))
 
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