British MP Demands Immediate Ban on Neonicotinoid Pesticides that Kill Bees

[Nabber86]

"Imidacloprid can be detected/reported down to the nanogram level using standard analytical methods."

How do you detect that in HFCS?

I will try to say this as nicely as possible and hopefully this will be interpreted only as constructive criticism and not a personal attack, but you have demonstrated time and again in this thread that your knowledge of chemistry, especially analytical chemisty, is somewhat lacking.

I really can not help you any further.

[WLC]

That's the only response I can give.

[WLC]

Joe:

Thanks for the link. I just finished watching.

[Nabber86]

WLC, you win.

I guess I am left no other choice than to add 7th and 8th conclusions to the list:

7. Molecules of imidacloprid have the abilty to hide behind fructose molecules and escape detection. They are in it together and it is a conspiracy.

8. HFCS has magical properties that makes it different from any other physical material in the known universe. It behaves much like dark matter and trying to extract simple chemical compounds from such a complex martrix is a feat that is comparable only to performing nuclear fission. You literaly need a particle accelerator to pry anything loose from it's deadly grip.

[WLC]

My first choice would be to filter the HFCS through PVPP to bind the contaminants, and then wash with distilled water to remove traces of the syrup.

Then, I would try to extract the contaminants from the PVPP with methanol.

Keep in mind that I could do all that in a spin column format with minimal amounts of PVPP and methanol (but lots of HFCS and distilled water). The trick is I'd use a vacuum manifold to run the HFCS and distilled water through the spin column loaded with PVPP, and then centrifuge to collect the methanol wash from the column. By the way, everything except the small volume of methanol extract (which gets sents in for analysis) can go down the sink or in the regular trash.

How would you do it? Don't forget, if you sticky up the gizmo, you'll have to clean it up yourself. Can you keep hazardous wastes down as well? Hmmm...

[Nabber86]

My first choice would be to filter the HFCS through PVPP to bind the contaminants, and then wash with distilled water to remove traces of the syrup.

What, no cylclotron? That's preposterous!

[deknow]

How would you do it? Don't forget, if you sticky up the gizmo, you'll have to clean it up yourself.

...I would start by talking to someone who has done something similar.....like test honey for imidacloprid. I don't know enough to think my first attempt would be as good as someone else's.refined process.
Deknow

[WLC]

Dean:

I'm the only one I know who has ever used it to remove polyphenols (an inhibitor of many reactions) from honey.

There is no one else.

[Roland]

Nabber - thanks for post 92

This is like arguing how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.

Has ANYONE contacted a testing lab, such as Krueger in Mass? They do the honey testing for me.



WLC - you may knock Randy Oliver, and I have personally gotten in his face before, but at least he produces some results that are usable by the commercial or hobbiest beekeeper.

Crazy Roland

[deknow]

The Harvard study itself uses a quality control/quality assurance program on the spiked HFCS. Table 2 seems to show recovery down to .5ug/kg (ppb). They cite a method by Zhang eal (2011) "Multiresidue pesticide analysis of agricultural commodities using acetonitrile salt-out extraction, dispersive solid-phase sample clean-up, and high-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectometry".

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21671617

deknow

[WLC]

Uh, Dean..

'Acetonitrile is a liquid with an ether like odor. It is a volatile highly polar solvent used in many different industrial applications. HUMAN EXPOSURE: Symptoms and signs of acute acetonitrile intoxication include chest pain, tightness in the chest, nausea, emesis, tachycardia, hypotension, short and shallow respiration, headache, restlessness and seizures. The systemic effects appear to be attributable to the conversion of acetonitrile to cyanide. Blood cyanide and thiocyanate levels are elevated during acute intoxication...'

I'm not crazy about using small amounts of methanol. I like acetonitrile even less.

Roland:

Trust me on this.

[deknow]

Uh, Dean..

Errrrr, WLC,

You have been claiming that imidacloprid can't be detected in HFCS with current testing methods...you seem to have been claiming that you are the only one capable of doing so. Regardless of your wilingness to work with this or that chemical, here is a published method...one which was apparently applied to samples down to .5ppb in the study you have been defending. The author of the study would have said, "of course you can test for imidacloprid in HFCS...we did it in our quality assurance and control programs"...but you've been talking about 2ppb neonic background levels, sticky machinery, impossible to test substances, and the need to engineer a new way to test for imidacloprid because no one can do it right....based upon a very sketchy source cited by a Harvard School of Public Health researcher.
I'd be willing to bet that any number of labs would be happy to test HFCS for imidaclprod, and would be generally accurate....you would just have to ask...again, I think they do this at Penn State as well.

Uh, I don't think you are paying enough attention to what you are defending...if you had read the study, you would know that they measured imidacloprid in HFCS.

deknow

[WLC]

Err.. Dean.

I'm the only one I know who has used PVPP in honey.

PVPP has also been used to bind pesticide contaminants in water samples. Without too many toxic chemicals (O.K., methanol needs to be handled with caution).

I just came up with a potential 'beekeeper safe' protocol that might be worth trying. That's all.

As for the Wong protocol...

Have you read the paper? I haven't read the whole thing. I stopped when I saw that the recovery rates weren't that great.

I think that the method was used as a quality control for Lu's 'artificial' HFCS samples. Not for analysis of other HFCS samples.

Correct me if I'm wrong. I simply don't think that it's worth rereading again.

.5ppb w/ the recovery rates reported are too close to background levels to be useful in my opinion.

By the way, I'm not defending the study itself, I'm saying that the research hypothesis might have some merit if they can demonstrate that Cargill/ADM changed their production methods for HFCS when CCD was first reported.

Jesus, Joseph, and Mary.

Jerry's throwing tomatoes at the paper!

[deknow]

I think that the method was used as a quality control for Lu's 'artificial' HFCS samples. Not for analysis of other HFCS samples.

Yes...are you suggesting that a method that could detect imidacloprid in intentionally spiked samples would not work for "naturally contaminated samples"?

Don't you think it's funny that they claim it's difficult to measure imidacloprid in HFCS...yet they do so as part of their protocall?

deknow

[WLC]

Dean:

Please remember that it hasn't been published yet.

It's like trying to fight a shadow.

We don't know if it will be published at all.

Funny huh?

Meanwhile, Jerry is throwing tomatoes.

I think that everyone has lost their minds over there.

[Zonker]

It strikes me as odd that no one is concerned that we're eating the same stuff, and in much large quantities, as the bees.

[camero7]

Harvard is releasing the "final draft." Got a copy from them yesterday.

[Nabber86]

here is a published method...one which was apparently applied to samples down to .5ppb in the study you have been defending. The author of the study would have said, "of course you can test for imidacloprid in HFCS...we did it in our quality assurance and control programs"...but you've been talking about 2ppb neonic background levels, sticky machinery, impossible to test substances,

I'd be willing to bet that any number of labs would be happy to test HFCS for imidaclprod, and would be generally accurate....you would just have to ask...again, I think they do this at Penn State as well.

Uh, I don't think you are paying enough attention to what you are defending...if you had read the study, you would know that they measured imidacloprid in HFCS.

deknow

That's as well said as anybody can put it.

And apparenty WCL thinks you actually run the HFCS through the GC column and "sticky up the gizmo".

[WLC]

"It strikes me as odd that no one is concerned that we're eating the same stuff, and in much large quantities, as the bees."

That's why this paper is important. It is from a school of public health after all.

It raises several key issues:

There are no standards for legally allowable concentrations of imidacloprid in HFCS.

There are no publicly available studies showing concentrations of imidaclopirid in HFCS.


We need to have standards for contaminants, and publicly available testing data for HFCS.
That's the message that I'm taking away from this paper.

Nabber:

The Wong reference used solvent extraction and salting out. We don't have any information on yields, etc. from the Lu paper on how the Wong methodology worked on their spiked HFCS samples. Who knows? Maybe they did 'sticky up' the gizmo?

[Nabber86]

If you look near the youtube panel down the page, you see that someone else has weighed in on the difficulty of extracting pesticides from HFCS.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...lony-collapse/

Jumping bejesus on a pogo stick! WLC actually does think that you run HFCS through the GC.

“It’s very difficult to test for this particular chemical in high-fructose corn syrup. A lot of labs have spent lots of time trying to do it, but high-fructose corn syrup is a very sticky, dense matrix that basically gums up the testing machines,” said Benbrook. “That’s why relatively little is known about imidacloprid in high-fructose corn syrup.”