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November 22, 2013
Q. “I'm going to do a Folidol,” desperate people would joke. But there was nothing funny about it. Though little-known in the Western world, what was this global problem?
A. During the Green Revolution of the 1970s, countries like Sri Lanka turned to organic chlorines and organic phosphates as insecticides, says toxicologist Michael Eddleston of the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom, as reported by Mara Hvistendahl in Science magazine. Crop production shot up. Unfortunately, so did suicides: An estimated third of the world's suicides — especially in rural Asia — involve ingesting such biochemicals. “In Asia, people don't have guns, they have pesticides.”
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