Dr. Chensheng Lu of Harvard School of Public Health, a nutritionist-turned-bee-expert, says members of Congress are ingesting five neonicotinoid pesticides in the cafeteria.
That will get some action. After all, this is the same cafeteria so concerned about sustainability they replaced plastic spoons with corn-based ones that melted in soup and had to be sent to a special composter in emissions-belching trucks. Everyone hated them, they were terrifically expensive, and it took Republicans getting back control of the House of Representatives to undo that policy.
But this is a little easier - just stop eating food. Because just about anything will have some trace level of pesticides in it. Lu did the analysis for the American Bird Conservancy - he was basically the science 'beard' for activists who are raising money using shock value. But the conclusion was foregone, or they would have used an actually toxicology lab run by an expert rather than a nutritionist on an ideological bender.
Will their effort work? Is 'save the lives of politicians' going to resonate with their donors? It wont matter. With today's technology, we can detect anything anywhere, but even IARC doesn't say anything as crazy as this. If you are going to eat 10,000 apples a day, maybe you would reach the No Effect Level for neonics, but something else will have killed you long before then.
On his Forbes blog, Dr. Henry Miller has the takedown.
