I think pesticides should be the top priority for an EA but for different reasons than you—it is responsible for a third of the world’s suicides, about 300,000 pesticides suicides a year with 10x more intentional acute poisonings that survive. It is also very easy to mitigate: ban the most toxic pesticides, more secure controls (ie. lockboxes in houses or a central storage facility in the town), education, adding emetics to them, etc. The scale of the problem is huge, it is all but ignored in the developing world (suicide in general, not just by pesticides), and there are ways to drastically reduce it with regulations that have been proven in rich and poor countries alike. That’s my little pitch for suicides by pesticides as the top priority for an EA to fund or work on. I also think that compassion for insects is another valid reason to promote less or safer pesticides, too!
I think pesticides should be the top priority for an EA but for different reasons than you—it is responsible for a third of the world’s suicides, about 300,000 pesticides suicides a year with 10x more intentional acute poisonings that survive. It is also very easy to mitigate: ban the most toxic pesticides, more secure controls (ie. lockboxes in houses or a central storage facility in the town), education, adding emetics to them, etc. The scale of the problem is huge, it is all but ignored in the developing world (suicide in general, not just by pesticides), and there are ways to drastically reduce it with regulations that have been proven in rich and poor countries alike. That’s my little pitch for suicides by pesticides as the top priority for an EA to fund or work on. I also think that compassion for insects is another valid reason to promote less or safer pesticides, too!
Further information: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/notes/2006/np24/en/ http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/6/902.full