The (Potential) Pain of a Quadrillion Insects
How most insecticides work and to what extent.
Since I grew up in a small rural town, I grew up around farms. My family did not have one but we did grow a lot of our own food every year. I vividly remember watching Papaw pick corn and my grandma, Ganga, pull cucumbers from under the giant prickly leaves. What is almost as vivid are the pesticides we added; all over the veggies was a dusting of this white substance. In college, I got interested in bugs and found out how bad the insecticide situation is.
Insecticide means “insect killer”
Humans, the creatures of invention, have really figured out how to kill insects well. According to the EPA, the most common classes of insect-killing substances are organophosphates, pyrethroids, and carbamates. You might recognize the first as one of the substances found in oat products (alongside glyphosate) that caused a health scare in 2019. It makes sense that people might be worried because organophosphate is essentially a neurotoxin; in insects, it causes paralysis by inhibiting an important enzyme.
Pyrethroids act similarly by causing mobility issues, weakness, and eventual death. Carbamates, as you can probably guess, also works on the nervous system inducing paralysis and respiratory failure. If I…
