Subject: (Dr. Weiner) We're all frogs in this pond.... (fwd)
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 134545 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Roy L. Beavers" <rbeavers@llion.org>
To: emfguru <rbeavers@llion.org>
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.........The SILENCE from our RICH health bureaucracies is deafening......
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 08 Apr 1999 12:27:48 -0500
From: Bob Weiner
To: "Roy L. Beavers"
Subject: we're all frogs in this pond
To Roy & the group,
The situation regarding the extent of environmental pollution is much
worse than the mainstream media is reporting.
http://www.canoe.ca/CalgaryNews/cs.cs-02-26-0008.html
Friday, February 26, 1999
Weed killer in rain
Lethbridge results alarm experts
By CAROL HARRINGTON, CANADIAN PRESS
Rain laced with a common weed killer is drenching gardens
and farms in southern Alberta -- a discovery that has alarmed
scientists.
Agriculture Canada says a study in the Lethbridge area last
year has revealed extremely high, unacceptable amounts of herbicide
2,4-D in the rainfall.
"I'd hate to be the bearer of bad news, but don't bob for
apples in grandma's rain barrel," said Bernie Hill, a pesticide residue
chemist at the Lethbridge Research Centre who led the study funded by
Agriculture Canada.
"It implies this stuff is floating in the air in minute amounts and you
are breathing it."
The herbicide was found in all 150 samples of rain collected
during May 30 to Aug. 17 last year at eight Lethbridge-area locations,
including the backyards of three residences, a rural golf course and a
farm.
The highest amount of 2,4-D was found at the golf course,
where the herbicide registered 5.1 parts per billion. The lowest amount
was from rain collected in a residential backyard, with a reading of 1.6
ppb.
The Canadian aquatic life guideline for 2,4-D is 4 ppb and
the drinking guideline is 100 ppb. Farmers in the Lethbridge region are
the biggest users of 2,4-D in Alberta, with more than 20,000 kg of the
herbicide sold to the area's grain farmers each year. The herbicide,
which is produced by several chemical companies, is also used by people to
rid their lawns of dandelions.
When asked whether the study's biggest amount of herbicide
in rain is detrimental to human health, Hill answered: "That's the
million-dollar question."
Alberta Agriculture Minister Ed Stelmach was stunned to
learn of the study's results. "I don't know how they'd get into the
atmosphere. I didn't think those chemicals would evaporate."
Lethbridge East MLA Ken Nicol, an agricultural economist,
said the report supports a river water quality study last year that also
revealed contamination. "It is serious, it really is," he said.
But AGCare, a group that represents more than 45,000 Ontario
farmers who use pesticides, insist 2,4-D is a safe chemical.
"It's been out there for quite some time," said AGCare
chairman Jim Fischer. "It's been accepted as a moderate chemical."
[...sure, just ask the frogs (Bob)]
But Rocky Notnes of the international Pesticide Action Group
said studies show 2,4-D to cause cancer in small animals who lick the
herbicide from their paws.
Scientists suspect the high level of 2,4-D is specific to
the Lethbridge region due to the area's persistent hot, windy and dusty
weather.
The 2,4-D levels in the study were 10 to 50 times higher than herbicide
levels reported at other Canadian locations, such as Manitoba and
Ontario, Hill said.
And, from the New Scientist, 3 April 1999
It's raining pesticides
Fred Pearce and Debora Mackenzie
RAIN IS NOT what it used to be. A new study
reveals that much of the precipitation in Europe
contains such high levels of dissolved pesticides that it
would be illegal to supply it as drinking water.
Studies in Switzerland have found that rain is laced
with toxic levels of atrazine, alachlor and other
commonly used crop sprays. "Drinking water
standards are regularly exceeded in rain," says
Stephan Müller, a chemist at the Swiss Federal
Institute for Environmental Science and Technology
in Dübendorf. The chemicals appear to have
evaporated from fields and become part of the clouds.
Both the European Union and Switzerland have set a
limit of 100 nanograms for any particular pesticide in
a litre of drinking water. But, especially in the first
minutes of a heavy storm, rain can contain much
more than that.
In a study to be published by Müller and his colleague
Thomas Bucheli in Analytical Chemistry this
summer, one sample of rainwater contained almost
4000 nanograms per litre of 2,4-dinitrophenol, a
widely used pesticide. Previously, the authors had
shown that in rain samples taken from 41 storms,
nine contained more than 100 nanograms of atrazine
per litre, one of them around 900 nanograms.
In the latest study, the highest concentrations of
pesticides turned up in the first rain after a long dry
spell, particularly when local fields had recently been
sprayed. Until now, scientists had assumed that the
pesticides only infiltrated groundwater directly from
fields.
Müller warns that the growing practice of using
rainwater that falls onto roofs to recharge
underground water may be adding to the danger. This
water often contains dissolved herbicides that had
been added to roofing materials, such as bitumen
sheets, to prevent vegetation growing. He suggests
that the first flush of rains should be diverted into
sewers to minimise the pollution of drinking water,
which is not usually treated to remove these
herbicides and pesticides.
Meanwhile, Swedish researchers have linked
pesticides to one of the most rapidly increasing
cancers in the Western world. Non-Hodgkin's
lymphoma, which has risen by 73 per cent in the US
since 1973, is probably caused by several commonly
used crop sprays, say the scientists.
Lennart Hardell of Orebro Medical Centre and Mikael
Eriksson of Lund University Hospital found Swedish
sufferers of the disease were 2.7 times more likely to
have been exposed to MCPA, a widely used
weedkiller, than healthy people (Cancer, vol 85 p
1353).
MCPA, which is used on grain crops, is sold as
Target by the Swiss firm Novartis. In addition,
patients were 3.7 times more likely to have been
exposed to a range of fungicides, an association not
previously reported.
The patients were also 2.3 times more likely to have
had contact with glyphosate, the most commonly
used herbicide in Sweden. Use of this chemical, sold
as Round-Up by the US firm Monsanto, is expected
to rocket with the introduction of crops, such as
Roundup-Ready soya beans, that are genetically
modified to resist glyphosate. The researchers suggest
that the chemicals have suppressed the patients'
immunity, allowing viruses such as Epstein-Barr to
trigger cancer.
>From Monsanto's web page www.monsanto.com:
"Monsanto has reinvented not only itself, but an industry. We're now a
life-sciences company, exploring the natural connections between food,
medicine, and health. We're developing products previously
inconceivable [...no argument here] , confirming our conviction that
such a new way of looking at things will help us all to thrive."
Bob Weiner
Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org
Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.feb.se/EMF-L/EMF-L.html