https://www.boerenlandvogels.nl/sites/default/files/Final%20version%20of%20TAP%20review.pdf

Pesticides and human chronic diseases: evidences, mechanisms, and perspectives.

Pesticides constitute a heterogeneous category of chemicals specifically designed for the control of pests, weeds or plant diseases. Pesticides have been considered potential chemical mutagens: experimental data revealed that various agrochemical ingredients possess mutagenic properties inducing mutations, chromosomal alterations or DNA damage. Biological monitoring provides a useful tool to estimate the genetic risk deriving from an integrated exposure to a complex mixture of chemicals. Studies available in scientific literature have essentially focused on cytogenetic end-points to evaluate the potential genotoxicity of pesticides in occupationally exposed populations, including pesticide manufacturing workers, pesticide applicators, floriculturists and farm workers. A positive association between occupational exposure to complex pesticide mixtures and the presence of chromosomal aberrations (CA), sister-chromatid exchanges (SCE) and micronuclei (MN) has been detected in the majority of the studies, although a number of these failed to detect cytogenetic damage. Conflicting results from cytogenetic studies reflect the heterogeneity of the groups studied with regard to chemicals used and exposure conditions. Genetic damage associated with pesticides occurs in human populations subject to high exposure levels due to intensive use, misuse or failure of control measures. The majority of studies on cytogenetic biomarkers in pesticide-exposed workers have indicated some dose-dependent effects, with increasing duration or intensity of exposure. Chromosomal damage induced by pesticides appears to have been transient in acute or discontinuous exposure, but cumulative in continuous exposure to complex agrochemical mixtures. Data available at present on the effect of genetic polymorphism on susceptibility to pesticides does not allow any conclusion.

Genotoxicity of pesticides: a review of human biomonitoring studies

A major goal of studying farmworkers is to better understand how their work environment, including exposure to pesticides, affects their health. Although a number of health conditions have been associated with pesticide exposure, clear linkages have yet to be made between exposure and health effects except in cases of acute pesticide exposure. In this article, we review the most common health end points that have been studied and describe the epidemiologic challenges encountered in studying these health effects of pesticides among farmworkers, including the difficulties in accessing the population and challenges associated with obtaining health end point data. The assessment of neurobehavioral health effects serves as one of the most common and best examples of an approach used to study health outcomes in farmworkers and other populations exposed to pesticides. We review the current limitations in neurobehavioral assessment and strategies to improve these analytical methods. Emerging techniques to improve our assessment of health effects associated with pesticide exposure are reviewed. These techniques, which in most cases have not been applied to farmworker populations, hold promise in our ability to study and understand the relationship between pesticide exposure and a variety of health effects in this population.

/pdf/studying-health-outcomes-in-farmworker-populations-exposed-37xyk4tl14.pdf

Studying health outcomes in farmworker populations exposed to pesticides.

Organophosphorous pesticide exposure alters sperm chromatin structure in Mexican agricultural workers.

Network forensics is the study of analyzing network activity in order to discover the source of security policy violations or information assurance breaches. Capturing network activity for forensic analysis is simple in theory, but relatively trivial in practice. Not all the information captured or recorded will be useful for analysis. Identifying key features that reveal information deemed worthy for further intelligent analysis is a problem of great interest to the researchers in the field. The focus of this paper is the use of artificial intelligent techniques for offline intrusion analysis, to protect the integrity and confidentiality of the information infrastructure. An effective forensic tool is essential for ensuring information assurance by updating the newly identified security breaches in to the organizations protection and detection mechanisms. Two artificial intelligent techniques are studied: Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and Support Vector Machines (SVMs). We show that SVMs are superior to ANNs for network forensics in three critical respects: 1. SVMs train, and run an order of magnitude faster; 2. SVMs scale much better; and 3. SVMs give higher classification accuracy. We also address the related issue of ranking the importance of input features, which is a problem of great interest in modeling. Since elimination of the insignificant and/or useless inputs leads to a simplification of the problem and may allow faster and more accurate detection, feature selection is very important in network forensics. Two methods for feature ranking are presented; the first one is independent of the modeling tool, while the second method is specific to SVMs. The two methods are applied to identify the important features in the 1999 DARPA intrusion data. It is shown that the two methods produce results that are largely consistent.

/pdf/identifying-significant-features-for-network-forensic-3td5msfqyv.pdf

Identifying Significant Features for Network Forensic Analysis Using Artificial Intelligence Techniques.

Sister-chromatid exchanges and chromosomal aberrations in a population exposed to pesticides.

Cytogenetic analysis in plant breeders

Les auteurs soulignent la necessite d'un controle sanitaire et des mesures de protection et une technologie appropriee dans le but d'utiliser les pesticides d'une facon correcte pour la sante

N. Sobel

Papers

Sister-chromatid exchanges and chromosomal aberrations in a population exposed to pesticides.

Cytogenetic analysis in plant breeders

Efectos de los plaguicidas en trabajadores de cultivos intensivos

Pesticides in intensive cultivation: effects on working conditions and workers' health.