Whenever we have high pollen counts here in the UK and you can see the airborne pollen in sunbeams between clouds, I think of this…

The Americas (North and South) is absolutely rammed with genetically modified organic material. This stuff is airborne all the time, gm food is processed and digested, but pollen is alive and inhaled.

Some math below this note.

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On a high pollen day there is up to 1,000 grains of pollen per m^3 of air.

Typical male will inhale and exhale 10.8m^3 per day.

That’s 10,000 grains of pollen inhaled, it doesn’t go through you digestive system but lands in the mucus in your nose, throat and lungs.

That’s a lot of genetically engineered material entering via an untested vector.

Also, if you dry your bedding outside it likely collects enormous quantities of pollen as it hangs damp in the wind. Vastly more pollen grains than you inhale. Obviously people with hay fever dry their bedding in machine driers for this reason. But most people do not.

Anyway it’s probably harmless, just seems like a potentially important health vector was missed by regulators in the Americas (lobbyists are much more powerful there than Europe or Asia).

Is more more proof that plants are trying to kill us. So we should a #carnivore diet? Ha

More *pollen

The inhalation of pollen is not a completely untested vector. Newly expressed proteins are assessed regarding their potential toxicity. And the amount entering the body is very small.

Probably the biggest risk comes from allergic reactions, but this applies to all kinds of pollen and is not specific for GM, no?