VPE 511: Environment and Environmental Hygiene (2+1)

PESTICIDE INDUSTRY

• Indiscriminate and non-judicious use of pesticides has led to acute contamination of food and food products, ground water and air. Misuse of pesticides is a serious problem in most of the developing countries, including India.
• Availability and sale of banned and outdated pesticides is quite common. Precautionary measures to be taken by the personnel involved in spraying operations are hardly followed, thereby leading to serious health problems in farm workers.
• The waiting period recommended for different pesticides before the product is harvested, is hardly ever followed. Pesticides are necessary at present, but they are not a long term solution for crops and human health.
• In this context, we need to lay greater emphasis on biological control within the frame work of IPM. Recent years have seen tremendous efforts to understand the natural diversity of biodegradation, with the aim of exploiting these findings for bioremediation purposes.
• New genes, enzymes and metabolic route have been discovered for the aerobic and anaerobic degradation of organic pollutant. Methods have been fine – tuned to gain a more detailed insight into structure-function relationships, leading to the identification of structural elements and single amino acids (and therefore nucleotides) that determine protein activities and specificities.
• The broad knowledge acquired has allowed us to use culture independent studies, based on functional characteristics to assess the diversity and quantity of catabolic genes in response to pollution, rather than just changes in community structure.
• The integration of new methodologies, like stable isotope probing, has allowed changes in the community to be linked with functional characteristics and has enabled active community members to be identified.