Environmental pollution by insecticides is one of the most important problems in the world. Some of the pesticides were found to exert carcinogenic, teratogenic and/or mutagenic effects even following normal agricultural use (U.S.Geological Survey, 1997). On the other hand residues from insecticides, herbicides and insect growth hormones are known to represent the most common food contaminants particularly in developing countries. Thus the wide spread use of insecticides in agriculture stimulated our interest for studying their possible toxic effect(s) in man and animals.
The aim of the present work was to study the effect of short term (for 2 weeks) oral daily feeding with diet containing 10 times the human maximum acceptable daily intake (a concentration that may be faced by human) of either permethrin, pirimiphos-methyl or bendiocarb on osmotic fragility of rat erythrocytes.
Sprague Dawley male rats were divided into four groups, each consists of 10 animals. Animals of each group were fed either normal diet (control group), permethrin (21.7 ppm), pirimiphos-methyl (4.4 ppm) or bendiocarb (2.0 ppm) for 2 weeks. Twenty four hours later, blood samples were withdrawn and osmotic fragility was determined. The obtained results indicated that permethrin, pirimiphos-methyl and bendiocarb increase the osmotic fragility.