GE Corn Releases Insecticide

This is another sharp reminder that what appears to be a good idea has consequences.  However, actual releases appear to be minor but not zero.

It will give pause to any such similar plans for insecticides as it should.  An insecticide kills bugs of all sizes and shapes and can impact the ecology over a wide range of conditions and time.  We now have reason to think that is what has happened in the colony collapse disorder fiasco and honey bees matter.

I am more and more convinced that we need to be way more conservative regarding these protocols and perhaps insist that a national institute become responsible for investigating long term effects of such.  This particular science is way more dangerous than a rogue drug were perhaps a few people are impacted.  A rogue pesticide is now the likely culprit in destroying the honey bee across the globe.  Would more research have picked up on it?  Possibly, but a slow staged roll out would have been halted much sooner.

The present suspect is still out there doing its damage and naturally has a massive lobby to keep it in business.  Obviously this is bad practice.

Insecticide from GE corn crops found in streams

By Ben Coxworth

11:50 September 29, 2010

http://www.gizmag.com/ge-insecticide-in-streams/16508/

A new study by Indiana’s University of Notre Dame has revealed that streams across the U.S. Midwest contain insecticides from adjacent fields of genetically engineered corn, even well after harvest. The transgenic maize (GE corn) in question has been engineered to produce the insecticidal protein Cry1Ab. Pollen, leaves and cobs from those plants enter streams bordering on the cornfields, where they are said to release Cry1Ab into the water.

Notre Dame ecologist Jennifer Tank and colleagues conducted a field survey of 217 stream sites in northwestern Indiana, six months after the corn harvest. 86 percent of those sites contained corn crop debris, and Cry1Ab was detected in the debris at 13 percent of those sites. That said, Cry1Ab that had presumably leached out of corn debris was detected in the water itself at 23 percent of the original 217 sites. The concentrations were not provided.

"Our study demonstrates the persistence and dispersal of crop byproducts and associated transgenic material in streams throughout a corn belt landscape even long after crop harvest," Tank stated.

The study also concluded that 91 percent of the 200,000 km (124,274 miles) of streams and rivers in Indiana, Iowa and Illinois are located within 500 meters (547 yards) of corn fields. Cry1Ab, a byproduct of the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, does already occur naturally in the environment – expansive crops of corn that produce it, needless to say, do not.