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The Hidden Cost of Bananas: Pesticide Effects on Newborns’ Health
... In addition, export-bound banana production dominates the agricultural sector in several regions of the Coast, and accumulation of pesticide residues from these plantations has been documented (Deknock et al., 2019). This raises concerns, as previous studies conducted in Ecuador have shown that environmental exposures to pesticides from banana plantations have a negative effect on birth weight (Calzada et al., 2021) and are linked to indicators of genotoxicity in farmers (Hutter et al., 2020). ...
Human populations and ecosystems are extensively exposed to pesticides. Most nations lack the capacity to control pesticide contamination and have limited availability of pesticide use information. Ecuador is a country with intense pesticide use with high exposure risks to humans and the environment, although relative or combined risks are not well understood. Here, we analyzed the distribution of application rates in Ecuador and identified regions of concern because of high potential exposure. We used a geospatial analysis to identify grid cells (∼8 km × 8 km) where the highest pesticide application rates and density of human populations overlap. Furthermore, we identified other regions of concern based on the number of amphibian species as an indicator of ecosystem integrity and the location of natural protected areas. We found that 28% of Ecuador's population dwelled in areas with high pesticide application rate. We identified an area of ∼512 km² in the Amazon region where high application rates, large human settlements, and a high number of amphibian species overlapped. Additionally, we distinguished clusters of pesticide application rates and human populations that intersected with natural protected areas. Ecuador exemplifies how pesticides are disproportionately applied in areas with the potential to affect human health and ecosystems' integrity. Global estimates of population dwelling, pesticide application rates, and environmental factors are key in prioritizing locations to conduct further exposure assessments. The modular and scalable nature of the geospatial tools we developed can be expanded and adapted to other regions of the world where data on pesticide use are limited.
... Despite their usefulness, they pose potential risks to food safety, the environment, and living organisms. (Calzada et al., 2021;Mahmood et al., 2016;Hernández et al., 2020) For this reason, there is an increasing need for approaches to detect and identify them in environmental samples. Once pesticides are released to the environment, they (parent compounds) may be degraded by biotic or abiotic processes into one or more pesticide transformation products (TPs). ...
The diversity of hundreds of thousands of potential organic pollutants and the lack of (publicly available) information about many of them is a huge challenge for environmental sciences, engineering, and regulation. Suspect screening based on high-resolution liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS) has enormous potential to help characterize the presence of these chemicals in our environment, enabling the detection of known and newly emerging pollutants, as well as their potential transformation products (TPs). Here, suspect list creation (focusing on pesticides relevant for Luxembourg, incorporating data sources in 4 languages) was coupled to an automated retrieval of related TPs from PubChem based on high confidence suspect hits, to screen for pesticides and their TPs in Luxembourgish river samples. A computational workflow was established to combine LC-HRMS analysis and pre-screening of the suspects (including automated quality control steps), with spectral annotation to determine which pesticides and, in a second step, their related TPs may be present in the samples. The data analysis with Shinyscreen (https://gitlab.lcsb.uni.lu/eci/shinyscreen/), an open source software developed in house, coupled with custom-made scripts, revealed the presence of 162 potential pesticide masses and 96 potential TP masses in the samples. Further identification of these mass matches was performed using the open source approach MetFrag (https://msbi.ipb-halle.de/MetFrag/). Eventual target analysis of 36 suspects resulted in 31 pesticides and TPs confirmed at Level-1 (highest confidence), and five pesticides and TPs not confirmed due to different retention times. Spatio-temporal analysis of the results showed that TPs and pesticides followed similar trends, with a maximum number of potential detections in July. The highest detections were in the rivers Alzette and Mess and the lowest in the Sûre and Eisch. This study (a) added pesticides, classification information and related TPs into the open domain, (b) developed automated open source retrieval methods - both enhancing FAIRness (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) of the data and methods; and (c) will directly support "L'Administration de la Gestion de l'Eau" on further monitoring steps in Luxembourg.
The diversity of hundreds of thousands of potential organic pollutants and the lack of (publicly available) information about many of them is a huge challenge for environmental sciences, engineering, and regulation. Suspect screening based on high-resolution liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS) has enormous potential to help characterize the presence of these chemicals in our environment, enabling the detection of known and newly emerging pollutants, as well as their potential transformation products (TPs). Here, suspect list creation (focusing on pesticides relevant for Luxembourg, incorporating data sources in 4 languages) was coupled to an automated retrieval of related TPs from PubChem based on high confidence suspect hits, to screen for pesticides and their TPs in Luxembourgish river samples. A computational workflow was established to combine LC-HRMS analysis and pre-screening of the suspects (including automated quality control steps), with spectral annotation to determine which pesticides and, in a second step, their related TPs may be present in the samples. The data analysis with Shinyscreen (https://git-r3lab.uni.lu/eci/shinyscreen/), an open source software developed in house, coupled with custom-made scripts, revealed the presence of 162 potential pesticide masses and 135 potential TP masses in the samples. Further identification of these mass matches was performed using the open source MetFrag (https://msbi.ipb-halle.de/MetFrag/). Eventual target analysis of 36 suspects resulted in 31 pesticides and TPs confirmed at Level-1 (highest confidence), and five pesticides and TPs not confirmed due to different retention times. Spatio-temporal analysis of the results showed that TPs and pesticides followed similar trends, with a maximum number of potential detections in July. The highest detections were in the rivers Alzette and Mess and the lowest in the Sûre and Eisch. This study (a) added pesticides, classification information and related TPs into the open domain, (b) developed automated open source retrieval methods - both enhancing FAIRness (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) of the data and methods; and (c) will directly support “L’Administration de la Gestion de l’Eau” on further monitoring steps in Luxembourg.
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