“Without full access to all performed toxicity studies, there can be no reliable safety evaluation of pesticides by E.U. authorities,” researchers warn in a new study.
New research published Thursday in the journal Environmental Health found that pesticide companies did not disclose to European Union regulators at least nine studies examining the brain toxicity of their chemical products—a finding that experts said is a scandal that must spur reforms.
“It is outrageous,” Christina Rudén, a professor of regulatory ecotoxicology and toxicology at Stockholm University and a co-author of the new study, told The Guardian.
The researchers behind the new study found that pesticide companies submitted 35 developmental neurotoxicity (DNT) assessments to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency between 1993 and 2015 as part of efforts to win regulatory approval for their products.
But the companies withheld nine of those 35 studies from E.U. regulators, the new analysis notes, raising concerns that the firms deliberately suppressed information that may have impacted risk assessments. The Guardian noted that “the pesticides identified in the new study include the insecticides abamectin, ethoprophos, and pyridaben and the fungicide fluazinam.”
“These are, or have been, used on a range of crops including tomatoes, strawberries, potatoes, and aubergines,” the newspaper added.
The researchers said their findings demonstrate that “non-disclosure of DNT studies to E.U. authorities, in spite of clear legal requirements, seems to be a recurring phenomenon.” Last year, the same researchers discovered that an industry-sponsored DNT study on glyphosate found impacts on “neurobehavioural function, motor activity, in rat offspring”—findings that were not shared with E.U. officials.
Glyphosate is currently authorized for use in the E.U. through 2023, despite evidence of its negative effects on humans, animals, insects, and the environment.
“Without full access to all performed toxicity studies, there can be no reliable safety evaluation of pesticides by E.U. authorities,” the researchers warned Thursday. “Rules should be amended so that future studies should be commissioned by authorities rather than companies. This ensures the authorities’ knowledge of existing studies and prevents the economic interest of the company from influencing the design, performance, reporting, and dissemination of studies.”
Bayer—which owns Monsanto, maker of the cancer-linked glyphosate product Roundup—and Nissan Chemical were among the sponsors of the studies withheld from E.U. authorities, who only learned about the assessments years after they were conducted.
As AFP reported, the brain toxicity studies “were conducted on pregnant rats, testing whether the offspring of those exposed to the compounds suffered developmental problems.”
“Decreased weight gain, delayed sexual maturation, and deteriorating motor activity were among the side effects reported in adult offspring in the studies,” the outlet continued. “Of the nine pesticide compounds, four have now been taken off the E.U. market, while another four are currently under review.”
“It is outrageous and unbelievable that a good fraction of these studies do not make it to the authorities as required by law,” Axel Mie, another study co-author, told AFP. “There must be legal consequences and serious ones for the companies if they do not follow the law.”
In 1961, I left Greece for the United States. The reason for that life-changing decision was education. The University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin welcomed me and gave me a free education. I earned my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Illinois and my doctorate from Wisconsin.
In college
My education was a mixture of science and humanities. I combined zoology with Greek (ancient, medieval and modern) history, as well as Roman history and modern European (Russian, Soviet Union, Southeastern European and British) history. To this multidisciplinary bowl I added the history of science from my postdoctoral studies at Harvard.
I did all this book reading, test taking, and writing a dissertation in ten years. The next step was finding work. By the time I graduated from Wisconsin, in 1972, I was married with my first child. This made earning a living imperative.
I worked on Capitol Hill and the US Environmental Protection Agency for twenty-seven years.
Sporadically, I taught at several universities about things I learned at work: how the federal government regulates or fails to regulate pesticides and agriculture.
The hidden truth
If this sounds obscure, technical, and of little value, it is not. There’s complexity in these things, but within this complexity there are gems of truth on how this country works.
Imagine a group of bureaucrats led by a political representative of the president deciding how much pesticide poison goes into each fruit, vegetable, grain, bread, cheese and meat Americans eat. That’s what the Office of Pesticide Programs does. The responsibility is awesome. The science is dubious; the ethics abhorrent. I did not want to do anything with it, save for criticizing the very idea of poisoning our food under the guise of environmental protection, which translated into protecting the farmer and poison maker from legal suits. The moment I came across evidence of massive and chronic malpractice and fraud in the testing of pesticides, I knew my early suspicions were legitimate; I knew how agribusiness rules America.
This experience helped me understand the meaning and practice of “environmental protection” in an industrialized America. In other words, I brought to the classroom information not in environmental policy textbooks
History, and especially the history of science, hovered around me, always tempting my thought to precedents: how did people of earlier times and other societies face the natural world or raise food?
The message to my students
I probably overwhelmed my students with data, facts and explanations about the environment and how America works. But the take-home message to my students was a warning:
”Your elders have abandoned your protection to the unkind and often corrupt industry and politicians. Study the natural world, study the science of the environment and, once out of school, reform or change the politics of this country for your protection and the protection and health of the natural world. A polluted natural world is your enemy. It will make you sick or kill you.
“Do away with pesticides, industrial agriculture, nuclear bombs, nuclear power plants, plastics, and toxic chemicals. They were the products of war, ignorance and hubris.
“Build a society with different values, one based on carbon-free and toxic pollution-free technologies, including respect for nature. Don’t approve any industry disrupting ecosystems, poisoning the natural world, and causing the extinction of species. Learn from science and older traditions and wisdom how the world works. Learn from the natural world.”
I don’t know if my students understood me. I treated them like graduate students. I opened their eyes to the beauties of science and truth as well as the secret and corrupt ways of the chemical industry. I let them see and examine original documents showing industry-government corruption. Some of them might have passed my ideas to their parents and, possibly, administrators.
I knew college and universities were rarely on the forefront of justice or truth, much less political change. In many instances, like the land grant universities, they become the inventors of hazardous chemicals and technologies that enable agribusiness to control rural America. At other instances, universities legitimize pollution.
With some exceptions, my college colleagues were indifferent to me and my teaching.
At Humboldt State University in northern California, I taught about society and the environment in a sociology department. There was a possibility for a permanent position for me but the chairman of the department said not to bother to apply because my doctorate was in history, not sociology. I asked him to come to my class, so he could form his own opinion about my teaching. “I care less about your teaching or the admiration students have for you,” he said.
Twice at two different schools (the University of Maryland and Pitzer College) I spoke to the Dean about expanding teaching and research on the fate of black farmers in America who declined by 98 percent in the twentieth century. The Deans were black. They listened to me politely but did nothing.
These anecdotes may be a fly in the ointment, but they suggest a deeper malady.
America after WWII
Since World War II, the culture of America is becoming inimical to democracy and civilization. By civilization I mean justice, the rule of law, the employment of science for making decisions, equal opportunity for humans to make a living, relative equality among citizens and ethical and science-based government rules regulating corporate and business behavior. Moreover, protecting human and environmental health should be at the core of this civilization.
Civilization is in trouble in America. Perpetual wars, the nuclear bomb, and the supremacy of money have made this country an empire. This political transformation is dismantling democracy at home and threatens the planet.
An oligarchy of billionaires are behind this aggression. They have captured the government, milking its fat Pentagon budget while using other government departments like the Environmental Protection Agency to buy legal protection for their chemicals polluting our food, drinking water, air, rivers, lakes and the seas.
The spectacle of Trump
The spectacle of Trump being president says it all. This is a very bad man. Some people, including senior government officials, and especially ambassador Gordon Sondland, are saying Trump urged the government of Ukraine to dig dirt about his political opponent Joe Biden. Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) accused Trump of being “a criminal in the White House.” Others charge him with betrayal and infamy for allowing the Turks to slaughter the Kurds who have been faithful American allies.
Trump is threatening democracy. He displays and employs government power for his personal benefit. He does not have a clue about international relations. He is an enemy of public and environmental health.
In desperation, the Democrats in the House are collecting evidence of wrongdoing for “impeaching” him. They know, however, that the Republicans in the Senate will declare Trump innocent of all charges.
This effort of finding Trump guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors is the ethical thing to do. But for me, Trump’s persistent undermining of this country’s environmental laws, including his willful ignorance of climate change, constitute high crimes and misdemeanors. They are translated into policies hurting and killing people all over the country. And pretending there’s no climate change, as the Trump EPA does, exacerbates the onslaught from climate change.
This official apathy and blindness is affecting the country, even the Democratic politicians running for president. The warming of the Earth and the fossil fuels causing it have all but disappeared from public discourse.
With the possible exception of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), I just don’t think these candidates are passionate enough to embrace the climate threat and opportunity for shaping American politics and assuring the survival of civilization and the natural world. Yet they say climate change is the gravest danger America and the world face.
The hegemony of commercial television
Another way of explaining this pathology is the overwhelming power and influence of commercial television. It has remade Americans into obedient corporate subjects. Just like cigarette companies during most of the twentieth century brained-washed Americans to do nothing without a cigarette hanging from their mouth, advertisements and news reporting mix with each other so thoroughly the viewer, in most case, does not understand the difference between the two. The result of this willful malpractice and propaganda is the dumbing down of Americans.
Second, commercial television networks treat the natural world like a zoo: a place for expensive cruises, hunting, industrialized farming, logging, mining and forest fires. Even the PBS and BBC nature documentaries keep corporate crimes against nature strictly separate from the lives of the threatened species they document.
This television onslaught has been taking place for decades while most Americans live increasingly in cities, which separate them further from the natural world.
Despite this undemocratic and plutocratic record, commercial television is in charge of the Democratic presidential debates. They ask the questions and restrict answers to seconds and minutes.
Undoing this industrial-cultural-academic-television-propaganda complex requires a “political revolution” even greater than the revolution Senator Bernie Sanders has in mind.
The Sanders agenda
Sanders is an angry American prophet who insists in bringing justice back to America. He wants an economy for all. He is lashing at bankers, drug and insurance companies, billionaires, Trump and the Republicans. He is accusing them of theft: sucking trillions to an oligarchy and impoverishing the rest.
Should Sanders be elected, this country may be spared some of the calamity of climate change. He has promised repeatedly to put fossil fuel companies out of business – replacing them with carbon-free alternatives and creating 20,000,000 well-paying jobs.
In addition, Sanders is likely to save America from tyranny. This will demand a Herculean labor: channeling the Potomac River through the Washington stables of billionaires and industry lobbyists.
This would demand the end of exporting American jobs; taxing the billionaires enough to narrow the gigantic gap between them and the rest of Americans: use that money to fund climate change and cleaning up and eliminating pollution; outlawing the fossil fuels industry and funding alternative carbon-free energy technologies; revive the New Deal government programs of President Roosevelt for healthy farming, environment, and rebuilding of rural America; upgrade America’s medical mess to European health standards; make state universities free; give EPA the freedom and independence it needs to embrace its real mission; regulate commercial television: it should not be able to interrupt news with advertisements, nor charge money to politicians running for office; regulate and tax Wall Street; regulate and tax agribusiness: ban pesticides, break up large plantations, and bring back family farms.
Finally, take money out of politics.
Only this broad agenda of economic, social and ecological renewal can put the breaks to a Hothouse Earth and violent political revolution.
Evaggelos Vallianatos is a historian and environmental strategist, who worked at the US Environmental Protection Agency for 25 years. He is the author of 6 books, including Poison Spring with Mckay Jenkings.
Senior Lecturer in Chemistry, University of Birmingham
March 8, 2018
The former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter are in a critical condition in a hospital in Salisbury, UK, following exposure to an unknown nerve agent. Several locations in the city have been cordoned off and decontaminated since the pair were found unconscious on a park bench on March 5. But what are nerve agents exactly and how do they affect the body?
The first nerve agents were invented by accident in the 1930s when researchers were trying to make cheaper and better alternatives to nicotine as insecticides. In their search, German scientists made two organic compounds containing phosphorus that were very effective at killing insect pests. However, they soon discovered that, even in minuscule amounts, the substances caused distressing symptoms in humans exposed to them.
The two substances – too toxic to be used as commercial insecticides in agriculture – became known as tabun and sarin. The research was handed over to the Wehrmacht (the Nazi armed forces), which evaluated them as weapons and began constructing plants to manufacture them. The sarin plant was not operational by the time the Third Reich collapsed, but fell in to the hands of Soviet forces that overran Poland and Germany.
Pesticide research continued after the war and the molecule known as VX was first made in an Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) laboratory in the UK in 1952. It again proved too toxic to be used in agriculture and it was passed to the UK’s Porton Down Chemical Weapons Research Centre, and subsequently to the US government, when the UK renounced chemical weapons. Its destructive power became clear on March 13, 1968. Somehow, the substance escaped from the army’s chemical weapons proving ground and killed over 3,000 sheep grazing 27 miles away in the Skull Valley area of Utah.
Since then, other nerve agents have been developed, but much less is known about them, although they are thought to work in broadly the same way. Unlike street drugs, nerve agents cannot be made in your kitchen or garden shed, on account of their toxicity, even in tiny amounts. Synthesis of nerve agents requires a specialist laboratory, with fume cupboards.
Known cases
Nerve agents were not thought to have been deployed until the 1980s. Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces are understood to have used sarin during the Iran-Iraq war, notably against Kurdish citizens in Halabja in March 1988, leaving an estimated 5,000 dead.
On March 20, 1995, members of the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult used umbrellas with sharpened tips to puncture plastic bags and boxes containing sarin while they were travelling on the Tokyo subway system. Fortunately, the sarin used was impure, otherwise the casualty list would have been much longer. As it was, 13 people died and several thousands got sick.
Although there were claims that VX was used during the Iran-Iraq war, until recently, the only known human fatality caused by VX occurred when two members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult used VX to assassinate a former member of their sect in Osaka in 1994.
Two young women, an Indonesian and a Malaysian, are currently on trial in Malaysia, charged with killing Kim Jong-nam, the half brother of Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, allegedly by smearing VX nerve agent across his face in an airport in Kuala Lumpur.
Effects on the body
Nerve agents can be absorbed through inhalation or skin contact. In fact, when the Nazis were building their first nerve agent plant, workers wearing protective suits died in agony when nerve agent got through gaps in their suits.
Unlike traditional poisons, nerve agents don’t need to be added to food and drink to be effective. They are quite volatile, colourless liquids (except VX, said to resemble engine oil). The concentration in the vapour at room temperature is lethal. The symptoms of poisoning come on quickly, and include chest tightening, difficulty in breathing, and very likely asphyxiation. Associated symptoms include vomiting and massive incontinence. Victims of the Tokyo subway attack were reported to be bringing up blood. Kim Jong-nam died in less than 20 minutes. Eventually, you die either through asphyxiation or cardiac arrest.
The chemicals work by disrupting the central nervous system. The body uses a molecule called acetylcholine to send messages between cells – when an acetylcholine molecule “arrives”, it causes an electrical impulse to be sent. The body constantly has to remove those acetylcholine molecules from the receptors, otherwise there would be a dangerous build-up. It uses an enzyme called acetylcholinesterase (AChE) to do that. However, a nerve agent stops acetylcholinesterase from doing its job.
Antidotes do exist, one being atropine, but have to be administered quickly, otherwise the effect of the nerve agent cannot be reversed. Some antidotes can be administered as prophylactics to troops about to go into battle, if there is a risk of nerve agents being employed. This is obviously a real problem in a civilian situation, where there is no expectation of encountering these chemicals.
We do not yet know which kind of nerve agent poisoned Skripal. While they all work in similar way, different approaches may be needed for decontamination. To decontaminate streets and other hard surfaces, you can use water to flush it out – making sure to use enough to properly dilute the chemical. This works well for the more volatile sarin, which tends to evaporate easily or slowly get broken down by moisture. However, other substances, such as VX, are less volatile and reactive. In this case, bleach and alkali can be used to break the molecules down. In a situation where we don’t know which has been used, a mix of water and bleach may be the best approach.
As more details emerge from the case, we’ll know more about the precise substance used and how it should be tackled. Either way, nerve agents are horrendously lethal and chemical warfare is an obscene use of chemicals.
If the proposed Monsanto-Bayer merger goes through, the new company would control more than 25 per cent of the global supply of commercial seeds and pesticides. Monsanto held a 26% market share of all seeds sold in 2011. Bayer sells 17% of the world’s total agrochemicals and also has a seeds sector. If competition authorities pass the deal, the combined company would be the globe’s largest seller of both seeds and agrochemicals.
It marks a trend towards consolidation in the industry with Dow and DuPont having merged and Swiss seed/pesticide giant Syngenta merging with ChemChina. The mergers would mean that three companies would dominate the commercial agricultural seeds and chemicals sector.
In response to the Monsanto-Bayer merger, after it was announced in 2016 the US National Farmers Union President Roger Johnson issued the following statement:
“Consolidation of this magnitude cannot be the standard for agriculture, nor should we allow it to determine the landscape for our future… We will continue to express concern that these megadeals are being made to benefit the corporate boardrooms at the expense of family farmers, ranchers, consumers and rural economies… [there is an] alarming trend of consolidation in agriculture that has led to less competition, stifled innovation, higher prices and job loss in rural America.”
For all the rhetoric that we often hear about ‘the market’ and large corporations offering choice to farmers and consumers, the evidence is restriction of choice and the squeezing out of competitors. Over the years, for instance, Monsanto has bought up dozens of competitors to become the largest supplier of genetically engineered seeds with seed prices having risen dramatically.
Consolidation and monopoly in any sector should be of concern to everyone. But the fact that the large agribusiness conglomerates specialize in a globalised, industrial-scale, chemical-intensive model of farming should have us very concerned. Farmers are increasingly reliant on patented corporate seeds, whether non-GM hybrid seeds or GM and the chemical inputs designed to be used with them. Monsanto seed traits are now in 80% of corn and more than 90% of soybeans grown in the US.
By its very nature, the economic model that corporate agriculture is attached to demands expansion, market capture and profit growth. It might bring certain benefits to those farmers who have remained in agriculture, if not for the 330 farmers in the US who leave their land every week (according to data from the National Agricultural Statistics Service).
But in the US, ‘success’ in agriculture has largely depended on over $51 billion of taxpayer handouts over a 10-year period to oil the wheels of a particular system of agriculture designed to maintain corporate agribusiness profit margins. And any ‘success’ fails to factor in all the external social, health and environmental costs. It is easy to spin failure as success when the parameters are narrowly defined.
Moreover, the exporting of Green Revolution ideology and technology throughout the globe has been a boon to transnational seed and agrochemical manufacturers, which have benefited from undermining a healthy, sustainable indigenous agriculture.
Britain is a leader in intensive, corporate-dominated agriculture. But is this the model of agriculture the world should rely on?
Let us turn to campaigner and environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason to appreciate some of the consequences of this model. She has just written an open letter to Professor Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer for England and Chief Medical Advisor to the UK government. Although written to Davies, the letter is intended for the four Chief Medical Officers of Health for England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland and Public Health England.
Her letter is essentially a plea to highly placed officials to act.
Mason provides a stark reminder of the impacts of the agrochemical/agribusiness sector, its political power and its effects on health. She draws attention to a report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, which states unequivocally that the storyline perpetuated by the likes of Bayer’s Richard van der Merwe (in this piece) saying we need pesticides and (often chemical-dependent) GMOs to feed the world is a myth.
The report is severely critical of the global corporations that manufacture pesticides, accusing them of the “systematic denial of harms”, “aggressive, unethical marketing tactics” and heavy lobbying of governments which has “obstructed reforms and paralysed global pesticide restrictions”.
The authors of the report call for a comprehensive new global treaty to regulate and phase out the use of dangerous pesticides in farming and move towards sustainable agricultural practices. They say:
“excessive use of pesticides is very dangerous to human health, to the environment and it is misleading to claim they are vital to ensuring food security.”
Mason notes that chronic exposure to pesticides has been linked to cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, hormone disruption, developmental disorders and sterility. Certain pesticides can persist in the environment for decades and pose a threat to the entire ecological system on which food production depends.
One of the report’s authors, the UN expert on Toxics Baskut Tuncak, wrote in the Guardian:
“Our children are growing up exposed to a toxic cocktail of weedkillers, insecticides, and fungicides. It’s on their food and in their water, and it’s even doused over their parks and playgrounds. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most ratified international human rights treaty in the world (only the US is not a party), makes it clear that states have an explicit obligation to protect children from exposure to toxic chemicals, from contaminated food and polluted water, and to ensure that every child can realise their right to the highest attainable standard of health. These and many other rights of the child are abused by the current pesticide regime. These chemicals are everywhere and they are invisible. The only way to protect citizens, especially those disproportionately at risk from exposure, is for governments to regulate them effectively, in large part by adhering to the highest standards of scientific integrity.”
Mason offers Sally Davies and her colleagues evidence that suggests rising UK Mortality rates point to a critical, unprecedented health epidemic. Arguing that the heavy use of agrochemicals in the UK is a major contributory factor, she notes Cancer Research UK (CRUK) is protecting the agrochemical industry due to its strategic influence. As a result, the mainstream narrative on cancer focuses on the role of alcohol (see this also) and ‘lifestyle choices’ while sidelining the strong evidence that agrochemicals are having.
Rosemary Mason asks Sally Davies if she is aware that the UK Department of Health is working with industry, again citing evidence in support of her claim.
As someone who has written extensively on the adverse impacts of glyphosate, Mason refers Davies to research that links Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup with liver damage.
If the National Health Service in the UK is experiencing a crisis – as indeed it is – due to rising rates of morbidity (not withstanding the effects of poor funding and creeping privatisation), surely these spiralling rates of diseases must be addressed. And where better to start by shining the light on agrochemicals rather than blaming individuals for lifestyle choices and alcohol consumption?
For instance, a report by ‘Children with Cancer UK’ in 2016 said there were 1,300 more cases per year of cancers in children, particularly in young adults, compared with 1998. While the medical correspondent from The Telegraph has mentioned pesticides as a possible cause, a spokesperson from CRUK said there is no evidence of environmental factors.
Among the various statistics Mason provides are those indicating that colon cancer had risen by 200%, thyroid cancer has doubled, ovarian cancer is up by 70% and cervical cancer is up by 50% since 1998.
Yes, despite the evidence, the corporate media in Britain is silent about pesticides, which partly results from the corporate sponsorship of the UK Science Media Centre; so any science against the corporations can be suppressed by interested parties, including AstraZeneca, Coca Cola, Syngenta, BP and Monsanto.
While Mason produces figures to show the massive increase in a range of agrochemicals over the years, the Chief Scientist for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Professor Ian Boyd, points out that once a pesticide is approved there is no follow up. There is also no follow up as to the impacts of not just one chemical but the cocktail of agrochemicals out there and how they interact when in the human body and within the environment.
And let’s not forget that many of these agrochemicals were fraudulently placed on the commercial market in the first place without proper testing.
Readers can read Mason’s letter in full here, where she also discusses a potential UK-US trade deal with the US and the impacts on the lowering of food and environmental standards and subsequent relations with the EU.
Alternative approaches and solutions exist but the political influence and financial clout of transnational corporations means that ‘business as usual’ prevails.
The original source of this article is Global Research
Scientists have recently discovered an ancient tribe that ritually poisons its own food. Dubbed the “Suicide Tribe,” this shocking anthropological discovery is sending shockwaves across the scientific establishment.
“We’ve never witnessed such self-destructive behaviors in human societies before,” said Dr. Eugene Navarovski from the Technical Institute of Ancient People, who led the research. (See the new video animation, below…)
Tribal elders, scientists discovered, were collecting massive “wealth” in the form of clam shells by selling toxic poisons to other members of the tribe who were required to spray the poisons on their food.
Not surprisingly, this caused an alarming outbreak of serious disease, including cancer and Alzheimer’s, but the tribal elders believed they were “rich” because they accumulated huge stores of clam shells (while their own children suffered and died).
Science has never documented such a shocking display of organized suicide.
We’ve put together a 5-minute animation that documents the stunning details of this scientific discovery:
Americans have been programmed to fight amongst themselves along partisan political lines, always pointing the finger at the other side of the phony left-right paradigm.
Divide and conquer is the broad tactic being used to keep people from recognizing, focusing on, and targeting the truly diabolical agents in our world who hold real power over all of us at once.
Our world is deeply colored by these cartels, and they impact every area of our lives, constantly maneuvering to make more and more dependent on them for our needs.
In short, these are the organizations which rule over us. These are the great forces in our world which prevent positive change and ensure that we continually slide downward into tyranny and self-destruction.
1. The International Banking Cartel
The geopolitical financial elite have for centuries been organizing to consolidate the mechanisms of wealth into the hands of a very few. The Rothschilds are the popular face of this cartel, but the banking and financial corruption goes far, far beyond their influence.
“The few who understand the system, will either be so interested from its profits or so dependent on its favors, that there will be no opposition from that class.” — Rothschild Brothers of London, 1863
Banks are in a unique position of power in our world, and can generate extraordinary profits without actually producing anything.
Through the issuance of currency and credit, they can control the amount of money available to the economy and create economic booms and busts, seizing titles to land, homes, businesses, and property.
They hold extraordinary influence over government for their role as financiers of everything from public works to war, and enjoy extraordinary pecuniary advantage and privilege.
Combine this with the new influence of supra-national organizations like the Bank of International Settlements and the World Bank, and you realize that the world is on the cusp of falling into the greatest trap of all time.
The banking cartel is the primary source of war, destabilization and military grade destruction in our world today.
Additionally, the government deliberately serves these corporate interests by limiting and preventing information and access to services and healing modalities which may produce positive results without dependence on hospitals and physicians.
The raping of the planet for fossil fuel energy is something that has been going on for decades, but is finally now beginning to create substantial blowback as environmental destruction is proving to be something that cannot be ignored any longer.
We are witnessing major growth in the sectors of renewable energy, but the traditional energy industry has a long history of interfering with the release of alternative technologies, even going so far as to actively suppress technologies.
This cartel has shaped our world in dramatic ways, most notably by creating near universal dependence on the automobile as the primary form of transportation, which has shaped both our cities and our mindsets.
The never-ending push for oil exploration is killing the most precious environmental resources we have left, but the influence of the energy cartel is so great that it can practically buy entire nations, such as Ecuador, where foreign oil ventures are allowed to press ever further into the Amazon.
4. Agricultural Chemical Producers
The industrial agro chemical giants have completely changed the face of farming on planet earth within the last 75 years or so.
Family farms continue to go under at a record-setting pace, and it is clear that the endgame of companies like Monsanto is to own the patents to all food seed, lording over a planet where people are prosecuted for planting food crops.
This is quite startling, and when couple with the fact that seed biodiversity is collapsing around us, it may only be another ten years before this endgame is realized.
This institution is the newest in our world, consisting of what is now commonly referred to as ‘Big Data,’ meaning the corporations and government agencies which collect data points on everything in our world and use this information strategically for their interests.
James Corbett of the Corbett Report remarks:
“Half a century ago, outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower coined the term “military-industrial complex” to describe the fascistic collusion between the Pentagon and America’s burgeoning armaments industry.
“But in our day and age we are witnessing the rise of a new collusion, one between the Pentagon and the tech industry that it helped to seed, that is committed to waging a covert war against people the world over. Now, in the 21st century, it is time to give this new threat a name: the information-industrial complex.”
Corbett’s recent video explains the rise of this all powerful institution in the following presentation.
Final Thoughts
There are very few, if any, honest politicians or organizations working in earnest to spread the benefit of industry, technology and prosperity in such a way that actually eliminates the great problems humanity faces such as hunger, environmental stewardship, health freedom, and more.
These are the cartels which represent the greatest threats to our collective well-being and the prosperity of future generations.
“Sixty percent (60%) of Americans with a chronic condition is almost impossible to grasp because it’s a mind-boggling statistic. How is this possible? And, why so many?”
Pesticide suicide refers to toxic chemicals mucking up the health of animals, plants and insects. This worldwide causatum may be totally out of control or maybe not; nobody knows for sure. Therein lies the scary part.
However, what is known is not encouraging: “Industrial toxins are now routinely found in new-born babies, in mother’s milk, in the food chain, in domestic drinking water worldwide… Humans emit more than 250 billion tonnes of chemical substances a year, in a toxic avalanche that is harming people and life everywhere on the planet.” (Source: Scientist Categorize Earth as a Toxic Planet, Phys Org, February 7th 2017) For obvious reasons, it is not at all comforting to hear Earth referred to as a “toxic planet.” Indeed, it would be insulting, if not true.
In that regard, there may be connecting dots around “toxic planet.” A huge increase in the incidence and prevalence of chronic diseases has been reported in the United States over the last 20 years during the same time frame as pesticide/chemical usage has become ubiquitous. (Journal of Organic Systems) At the beginning of the 20th century infectious diseases like tuberculosis, pneumonia, and diarrheal disease were the leading causes of death. By the 21st century mortality by infectious diseases was replaced by chronic illnesses like heart disease, stroke, and cancer. Regrettably, there is a pronounced trend in America. A Rand Corporation study states that 60% of Americans have one and 40% have multiple chronic conditions. (Source: Incidence and Prevalence of Chronic Disease, Autoimmunity Research Foundation)
Sixty percent (60%) of Americans with a chronic condition is almost impossible to grasp because it’s a mind-boggling statistic. How is this possible? And, why so many?
Whether pesticide suicide (inclusive of all chemicals) is reality is not known 100% certain. But, the indicators aren’t hopeful. The rate of growth of chronic problems increasingly suggests serious problems exist within ecosystems, border-to-border from Maine-to-California and Canada-to-Mexico. Of course, given enough time, truth is revealed via ecosystem breakdowns (already starting) and/or advancing cases of autism, gastrointestinal issues such as inflammatory bowel disease, chronic diarrhea, colitis, Crohn’s disease, obesity, cardiovascular disease, depression, cancer, cachexia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and ALS, or none of above, which would, in part, be indicative of no ecosystem toxicity.
Further to the point, Jennifer Hsaio’s article, “GMOs and Pesticides: Helpful or Harmful,” Harvard University, August 19, 2015: “According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the health effects of pesticides are not well understood, but their use has been associated with conditions such as cancer, diabetes, and neurological effects.”
Once again, the phrase “pesticides are not well understood.” Yet sprayed coast-to-coast to kill things. “Health effects of pesticides not well understood,” prompts a logical response: Is society totally delusional, deranged, crazed? Answer: Yes, it probably is! How can a well-adjusted society permit use of chemicals manufactured to kill things helter skelter throughout the countryside when… “Health effects of pesticides are not well understood?”
The following quote from Julian Cribb’s Surviving the 21st Century (Springer Int’l Publishing, Switzerland 2017) likely tells the story:
“The evidence that we ourselves— along with our descendants, potentially for the rest of history— are at risk from the toxic flood we have unleashed is piling up in literally tens of thousands of peer-reviewed scientific research reports. Despite this mass of evidence, the public in most countries is only dimly aware, or even largely unaware of what is being done to them. The reason is twofold: First, most of these reports are buried in scientific journals, written in the arcane and inaccessible language used by specialists. The public may hear a little about certain chemical categories of concern, like pesticides and food additives, or the ‘dirty dozen’ (Stockholm C0nvention 2013) industrial super-poisons, or ‘air pollution’ in general. However, these represent only a scant few pixels in a much larger image now amassing in the scientific literature of tens of thousands of potentially harmful substances which are disseminating worldwide. Second, the proportion of chemicals which have been well-tested for human safety is quite small…” (Page 108)
In short, humanity is poisoning itself with a massive flood of chemicals all across the world, dripping wet with toxicity, and shockingly, nobody is really sure of the impact! Yet, there are dizzying numbers of academic research papers, literally tens of thousands of peer-reviewed scientific research that discuss the issue. Duh!
Still, by all appearances, in the public domain, absolutely nobody knows for sure what’s going on, which is a national tragedy, as well as a facsimile of the “unknown” world at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Yet, chemicals may be more ubiquitous worldwide than Fukushima Daiichi, who knows for sure? Could be a tie.
One of the chemicals that is most newsworthy, most discussed, and most entangled in controversy is glyphosate, which is one of the most widely used herbicides in the U.S. for agriculture, forestry, lawns, gardens, and industrial weed areas. In fact, since 1974, glyphosate usage has increased by leaps and bounds. Two-thirds of the total volume applied from 1974 to 2014 has been sprayed in the past 10 years alone. Glyphosate agricultural usage in the U.S. in 1974 was 1400 (1000 lb) growing to 249,906 (1000 lb) by 2014.
“Genetically engineered herbicide-tolerant crops now account for about 56% of global glyphosate use. In the U.S., no pesticide has come remotely close to such intensive and widespread use. This is likely the case globally, but published global pesticide use data are sparse. Glyphosate will likely remain the most widely applied pesticide worldwide for years to come, and interest will grow in quantifying ecological and human health impacts. Accurate, accessible time-series data on glyphosate use will accelerate research progress.” (Source: Charles M Benbrook, Trends in Glyphosate Herbicide Use in the United States and Globally, Environmental Sciences Europe, 28:3 January 2016)
Monsanto sold the first commercial glyphosate product in the U.S. in 1974. The brand name is Roundup. Subsequently, many crops have been genetically engineered to be herbicide-tolerant or GE-HT. But, does GE-HT herbicide-tolerance really work?
It was only a few weeks ago that the EU granted glyphosate a new five-year lease throughout Europe, closing one of the most bitterly fought pesticide relicensing battles ever, as 1.3 million EU citizens endorsed a petition to ban the product. “But the enzyme-blocking chemical has also become a mainstay of modern agricultural techniques that farmer’s unions see as environmentally friendly, even as critics condemn it as a ‘pesticide treadmill’ of danger to plants, animals, and people.” (Source: Arthur Neslen, Controversial Glyphosate Weedkiller Wins New Five-Year Lease in Europe, The Guardian, Nov. 27, 2017) Are farmer’s unions correct or are 1.3 million petitioners correct?
Still, there may be serious problems with GE-HT: According to the following article: Genetically Engineered Crops, Glyphosate and the Deterioration of Health in the United States of America, Journal of Organic Systems, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2014: “A huge increase in the incidence and prevalence of chronic diseases has been reported in the United States (US) over the last 20 years. Similar increases have been seen globally. The herbicide glyphosate was introduced in 1974 and its use is accelerating with the advent of herbicide-tolerant genetically engineered (GE) crops. Evidence is mounting that glyphosate interferes with many metabolic processes in plants and animals and glyphosate residues have been detected in both. Glyphosate disrupts the endocrine system and the balance of gut bacteria, it damages DNA and is a driver of mutations that lead to cancer.”
“The World Health Organization recently announced that glyphosate is a probable carcinogen… Although studies have shown conflicting conclusions about the link between glyphosate and cancer in humans, glyphosate has been linked to cancer in rats and mice and experiments in human cells have shown that exposure to glyphosate can cause DNA damage,” Ibid.
GE crops are typically far more contaminated with glyphosate than conventional crops, courtesy of the fact that they’re engineered to withstand extremely high levels of Roundup without perishing along with the weed. “Monsanto has steadfastly claimed that Roundup is harmless to animals and humans because the mechanism of action it uses (which allows it to kill weeds), called the shikimate pathway, is absent in all animals. However, the shikimate pathway is present in bacteria, and that’s the key to understanding how it causes such widespread systemic harm in both humans and animals,” (Source: Monsanto’s Roundup Herbicide May Be Most Important Factor in Development of Autism and Other Chronic Disease, Mercola, June 9, 2013)
According to The Institute of Responsible Technology d/d May 10, 2013: “It was ‘supposed’ to be harmless to humans and animals—the perfect weed killer. Now a groundbreaking article just published in the journal Entropy points to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, and more specifically its active ingredient glyphosate, as devastating—possibly ‘the most important factor in the development of multiple chronic diseases and conditions that have become prevalent in Westernized societies. That’s right. The herbicide sprayed on most of the world’s genetically engineered crops—and which gets soaked into the food portion—is now linked to autism … gastrointestinal issues such as inflammatory bowel disease, chronic diarrhea, colitis and Crohn’s disease, obesity, cardiovascular disease, depression, cancer, cachexia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and ALS, among others.” Prompting the logical question: What chronic health-related problems are not listed?
For more details about pesticide issues as discovered by The Institute of Responsible Technology, Jeffrey Smith interviewed Stephanie Seneff, PhD, Senior Research Scientist at MIT. Dr. Seneff has been involved in research at MIT for over three decades. A video by The Institute of Responsible Technology follows:
According to Dr. Seneff: Monsanto has steadfastly claimed that Roundup is harmless to animals and humans because the mechanism of action it uses (which allows it to kill weeds), called the shikimate pathway, is absent in all animals. However, the shikimate pathway is present in bacteria, and that’s the key to understanding how it causes such widespread systemic harm in both humans and animals. The bacteria in your body outnumber your cells by 10 to 1. For every cell in your body, you have 10 microbes of various kinds, and all of them have the shikimate pathway, so they will all respond to the presence of glyphosate!
Glyphosate causes extreme disruption of the microbe’s function and lifecycle and glyphosate preferentially affects beneficial bacteria, allowing pathogens to overgrow and take over. At that point, your body also has to contend with the toxins produced by the pathogens. Once the chronic inflammation sets in, you’re well on your way toward chronic and potentially debilitating disease.
According to The Detox Project: Anresco Laboratories has found glyphosate in a range of U.S. food products, and the chemical also tested positive in urine, conducted by the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), using validated LC-MS/MS method.
Here’s the problem, as stated by The Detox Project: “The cultivation of Roundup Ready GMOs has considerably increased food contamination by glyphosate. Roundup Ready plants do not degrade glyphosate but tolerate it, so they accumulate Roundup residues during their growth. As a consequence, glyphosate has among the highest maximum residue limits for pesticides with up to 500,000 parts per billion authorized in some GM feed. A recent study on 10 batches of GM soybeans from Iowa found glyphosate at an average concentration of 11,900 ppb (maximum of 20,100 ppb). According to Monsanto, residues levels of up to 5,600 ppb in GM soy represent ‘extreme levels.”
In the main, this article has dealt with one chemical, i.e., glyphosate, at the expense of further investigation of the entire complex of chemicals. That’s an encyclopedic task over decades just to get to the bottom of whether pesticide suicide is truly a reality. Therein lies the horrifying, frightening aspect of a world ubiquitously covered with chemicals. By the time you know for sure, it’s late.
Meanwhile, a Rand Corporation study states that 60% of Americans have one and 40% have multiple chronic conditions: “Nearly 150 million Americans are living with at least one chronic condition; around 100 million of them have more than one. And nearly 30 million are living, day in and day out, with five chronic conditions or more. (Source: Chronic Conditions in America: Price and Prevalence, Rand Review, July 2017)
Allowing and encouraging domestic hemp cultivation would be a boon for small farmers, especially organic farmers. I’m talking only about industrial hemp, not medical cannabis/marijuana, which continues to prove its merits and gain acceptance
Industrial hemp’s use should be a no-brainer. But it’s a complex boondoggle of legal and bureaucratic nonsense even without THC, the molecule that leads to “Reefer Madness”. Industrial hemp commercial cultivation is legal in Canada. But the USA hemp industry was pushed to the side by government connected industry insiders whose monopolies were threatened when it appeared hemp may boom and compete for the very products of their monopolist concerns.
Circa 1937, the hemp industry had been given a mechanical invention gift known as the decoricator machine was invented. It was a machine that was to hemp what the 19th Century cotton gin was. It replaced hand shredding of hemp to glean its fibers, fibers that could be used for textiles, clothing, paper, and plastic.
With the advent of the decoricator, hemp would have been able to take over competing industries in paper, textiles for clothing and other applications, fuel, and plastics. Growing hemp in abundance was easy, and it’s plant to harvest time was no more than six months.
According to Popular Mechanics during that time, “10,000 acres devoted to hemp will produce as much paper as 40,000 acres of average [forest] pulp land.” Then a small number of large businesses with competition concerns used high level government connections to push through the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.
The ensuing marijuana scares hyped by movies such as “Reefer Madness” brought about more legislation that would prohibit all hemp cultivation, even hemp without THC.
Prior to this, even without the high speed decoricator, hemp was an easy cash crop for small farmers, some of whom were recruited to continue cultivating hemp during WW II to provide hemp fibers for U.S. Naval ships’ ropes as well as other military applications.
And prior to that, hemp was so important during colonial and early American times that farmers were virtually required to cultivate it along with their other crops.
George Washington – “Make the most you can of the Indian Hemp seed and sow it everywhere.”
Thomas Jefferson – “Hemp is of first necessity to the wealth and protection of the country.”
Hemp for Nutrition
Hulled hemp seeds, their powders and cold pressed oils provide all the essential amino acids for easily digested high protein. Hemp is not only very high in omega-3, but it provides an almost perfect ratio of omega-3 to omega-6.
It is truly a super food that you can buy in health food stores or online. The seeds come from Canada, where industrial hemp is legal. Hemp is so nutritionally dense that one could survive on hemp seeds alone during extreme food shortages. If hemp were legal, you could easily grow your own.
Hemp Improves Farming
Hemp plants don’t need pesticides or synthetic fertilizers, which rely mostly on the phosphate industry. A phosphate industry byproduct is the sodium fluoride that is sold to municipality water works for our poisoned tap water.
The runoff from fields of phosphate fertilizers into waterways that merge with seawater is causing all sorts of nitrogen and phosphorous excesses and imbalances, leading to algae that stifles the water’s ecological support systems.
Hemp’s thick roots ward off weeds, and growing hemp improves the soil’s nitrogen, making that soil better for other crops. They would be useful and lucrative rotation crops for organic farmers.
Hemp plants have a growth cycle of only four months. In mild climates, harvesting hemp two times in one year would create an annual cash cow for farmers. The marijuana taboo is eliminated by allowing the male plants to continually pollinate the female plants. This reduces psychotropic THC to legal levels.
Eliminating Toxic Petrochemical Plastics
There is a clump of plastic waste residue larger than the state of Texas floating in the middle of the Pacific. A lot of it is expected to decompose, creating a plastic soup in the ocean. The toxins from this plastic soup spread out into other oceanic regions and are hazardous to fish and bird wildlife. This soup could find its way into our kitchens as well!
All kinds of plastics are produced with hemp, from clear wraps for foods to automobile parts. Hemp plastics are durable and heat resistant. And they are bio-degradable. Recently the French auto industry use hemp to manufacture some of its automobile parts. Henry Ford pioneered this in 1941 when he built his “vegetable car” with hemp and flax. It was stronger and lighter than steel cars.
Ford’s hemp-mobile also used hemp bio-diesel fuel, which creates very little pollution. The petroleum industry didn’t want to see or hear that. Hemp seeds were even used to make paints and lacquers in the mid-1930s.
Petrochemical plastics for all purposes could be replaced with hemp plastics that are non-toxic and bio-degradable. Bye-bye BPA!
Construction Materials for Housing
Amazingly, housing construction materials made from hemp fibers have been discovered to be superior to most cheap materials used in housing construction these days. Ever see a house under construction after its initial framing?
What you’ll usually see before whatever exterior coating is used are sheets of wood substitutes, either pasteboard or particle board or pressboards, some of which are processed and bound with toxic chemicals that can off-gas into interior quarters. It’s cheaper than other materials and used abundantly.
Inexpensive hemp can be made into various different building materials, hempcrete, fiberboard, carpet, stucco, cement blocks, insulation, and plastic. Those materials are stronger and much longer lasting than what’s being used currently. They are also mold and rot free and more fire resistant. And they are environmentally and ecologically friendly and non-toxic.
More Trees for Tree Huggers
Pulp from trees is used to make paper. But anything wood pulp can do, hemp fibers can do better. It’s said that the original Constitution and Bill of Rights were on hemp paper.
Paper from trees can be recycled maybe three times. Hemp paper can be recycled eight times. Since hemp was effectively banned in the USA since 1937, 70% of the USA’s forests have been eliminated. It takes years for trees to grow. Hemp can be gown and harvested within six months.
It’s estimated that one acre of hemp produces more oxygen from CO2 and methane than 25 acres of forest. One idea presented by hemp advocates is to have inner city hemp plots to improve urban air quality. We wouldn’t need bogus carbon tax legislation.
Pulping trees for paper creates more waste, pollution, and consumes more energy than most enterprises. This industry consumes more water than almost all others. It is the fifth largest industry consumer of energy, and it emits a good deal of toxicity in the process.
“Why use up the forests which were centuries in the making and the mines which required ages to lay down, if we can get the equivalent of forest and mineral products in the annual growth of the hemp fields?” — Henry Ford
Anything the petrochemical industry can produce, hemp can do better without toxic environmental and human consequences. Deforesting could be a thing of the past if hemp became the major source of construction materials and paper. Heavily pesticide and herbicide sprayed or GMO cotton wouldn’t be necessary, nor would toxic synthetic fibers.
Amazing how such an easily cultivated plant with so many beneficial applications has been so efficiently suppressed by the one or two percent for their purposes while too many among the 98% agreed with that suppression.
Paul Fassais a contributing staff writer for REALfarmacy.com. His pet peeves are the Medical Mafia’s control over health and the food industry and government regulatory agencies’ corruption that harms more than most realize. Visit his blog by following this link and follow him on Twitter here.
“Marijuana is a medical diamond in the rough. A panacea dressed in poisons’ clothing. It houses hundreds of different chemicals, all of which if used correctly, is beneficial to the human body.”
Marijuana is a holistic form of medicine that has had a tumultuous history in our modern society. It has been unjustifiably mislabelled as the herbal equivalent of a shit disturber, particularly in the minds of our baby boomers. They grew up believing that it is a villain out to eat away at their brains, steal their mental virtue and common sense, all the while corrupting their pristine character. To hell with its ability to calm the anxious, heal the sick and improve one’s overall well-being; that stuff is for the Hippies, Rastafarians and wayward youth. Thankfully our collective minds have evolved with a greater understanding of the health benefits of this herb.
Marijuana is a medical diamond in the rough. A panacea dressed in poisons’ clothing. It houses hundreds of different chemicals, all of which if used correctly, is beneficial to the human body. The myriad of chemicals in the plant work synchronistically, increasing the efficacy of each constituents’ ability to heal the body. Cannabidiol (CBD) is one one of the many highly beneficial chemicals present in all forms of marijuana and it works hand in hand with tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).
A researcher named Antionio Zuardi wrote about the medical marvel that is CBD and its potential medical uses in the Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry in 2008 stating, “Studies have suggested a wide range of possible therapeutic effects of cannabidiol on several conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, cerebral ischemia, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, other inflammatory diseases, nausea and cancer.”
Cannabichromene (CBC) is prevalent in dried marijuana. According to a study conducted in 2009 from PubMed, “CBC exerts anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, and modest analgesic activity.” It has been known to stimulate the increase of bone properties, including density and is also an anti-carcinogenic. In 2011 a preclinical trial concluded that CBC works specifically on nerve endings above the spine, modifying sensations and degrees of pain. Its easy to see why, although there is stigma surrounding the use of marijuana, it is a medical gem that should be taken seriously, and seriously taken by our elderly.
In Canada the largest demographic of citizens who suffer from chronic pain are the elderly. They are also the largest demographic of opioid users because of this. As stated in the Canadian Drug Summary: Prescription Opioids, this group of our population has “limited access to appropriate and timely treatment: 50 per cent have had to wait six or more months and many areas of Canada do not have any specialist pain treatment services. Although prescription opioids are one of several approaches to addressing chronic pain, they can also result in addiction and overdose death.”
The First Do No Harm: Responding to Canada’s Prescription Drug Crisis Report in Short explains that, “Canada is the world’s second largest per capita consumer of prescription opioids after the United States. The International Narcotics Control Board reports that Canadians’ use of prescription opioids increased by 203 per cent between 2000 and 2010, an increase steeper than in the U.S. Some First Nations in Canada have declared a community crisis owing to the prevalence of the harms associated with prescription drugs”.
In 2014 CTV News reported that “Oxycodone prescriptions increased by 850 per cent between 1991 and 2007. Between 300 and 400 people die each year in the province from an overdose of a prescription opioid”. Until this date, there has been no reported cases ever of overdose related deaths due to the consumption of marijuana in any form. With the opioid epidemic on the rise, why are doctors choosing to be so lenient and prescription happy, doling out opioids to their patients like Santa does gifts to good children, yet so stringent and, often times judgmental, when it comes to prescribing marijuana; a drug that has been proven to effectively alleviate, and in some cases, help heal underlying conditions that cause chronic pain? A more important question is why does the government allow this? Is providing our old and sick with adequate, albeit almost certainly less profitable, medicine not a priority for the government?
And this leads to my next question. Knowing the permissive attitude that our government has towards bad practices, will the old, sick and people who generally need a pot fix still get their supply from them? Moreover, should they? Unless you’re down to your bottom dollar, odds are no. The government, in their efforts to monopolize the marijuana market are hooking and reeling people in by the promise of medical coverage under Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP). They have also put forth a seemingly strong argument that marijuana provided by them is more rigidly regulated and purer; meaning that unlike what many would get from their drug dealers, medical marijuana would be free of additives and chemical alterations, which makes it a lot safer. And that’s a good thing. Well at least it would be if that were true.
(Natural News) A new study conducted at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington (HealthData.org) and published in The Lancet medical journal finds that a shocking 20 percent of global deaths are caused by toxic foods, junk foods, processed foods and harmful food ingredients. In essence, the study reveals that the toxic food industry is now about as dangerous as Big Tobacco.
The study, based at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, compiles data from every country in the world and makes informed estimates where there are gaps… Diet is the second highest risk factor for early death after smoking. The problem is often seen as the spread of western diets, taking over from traditional foods in the developing world.
In other words, all the toxic food ingredients, processed foods, junk foods and fast foods that we’ve been warning you about for years are now being recognized by the science establishment to be one of the leading killers of human beings across our planet. Many of these foods are saturated with glyphosate and pesticides, and an increasing number are also genetically engineered. The food industry, in other words, is about as dangerous to human health as the tobacco industry, yet while Big Tobacco is highly regulated, there are virtually no enforced regulations that limit heavy metals, pesticides or dangerous chemical ingredients (like aspartame) in the U.S. food supply.
Natural News warnings about toxic foods confirmed yet again
Once again, this emerging science confirms Natural News as being scientifically correct and way ahead of the curve. We’ve been warning readers about the toxicity of the food supply for almost 15 years, even as the corrupt food industry attempted to discredit anyone who dared report the truth about toxic ingredients such as high-fructose corn syrup or partially hydrogenated oils.
Watch the full report in the Natural News videos here:
Recently, the Lancet sent me an article on its Dementia Commission:
“After decades of neglect, dementia was thrust into the international spotlight in 2013 with the G8 Dementia Summit in London, UK, followed 2 years later by the First WHO Ministerial Conference on Global Action Against Dementia. Against this background, The Lancet launched a Commission to review the available evidence and produce recommendations about how best to manage—or even prevent—dementia. “
Tell you what, Lancet, since your article emphasizes “leaving no one behind,” I would suggest that since this commission appears to not address the fact that the wholesale use of pesticides, Glyphosate in particular, is most likely one of the main causes of the disease, then your “leaving no one behind” statement really means to leave no one behind in actually getting the disease, not eradicating it.
Here is the interesting part of the article:
“Although the symptoms of dementia generally occur in later life, the underlying brain pathology develops many years earlier. As outlined in the Lancet Commission, dementia is likely to be a clinically silent disorder that begins at midlife (about age 40–65 years) and the terminal stage manifests as symptoms of dementia. This hypothesis suggests a window of opportunity to intervene by addressing dementia risk factors in middle age. The Commission adopts a life-course approach and identifies nine potentially modifiable risk factors at different stages of life that, if eliminated, might prevent more than a third of cases of dementia: low educational level in childhood, hearing loss, hypertension, obesity, smoking, depression, physical inactivity, social isolation, and diabetes.”
Seriously? Consumption of pesticides doesn’t even rate a mention? Dementia is not a socioeconomic or psychological condition, but a physical one, with a physical causation, and the commission does not even address this adequately in the article. What it appears to be doing is substituting a lot of symptoms for cause.
Dr. B.J. Hardick gives us a realistic look at the dementia epidemic:
“Every three seconds someone is diagnosed with dementia, which now affects 5.3 million Americans and more than half a million Canadians. Alzheimer’s steals more than just memories. It hijacks one’s personality, thoughts and emotions—the very essence of who you are. Early-onset dementia (before age 65) currently represents about five percent of cases, and rising, hitting many in their 40s and 50s.”
Instances of dementia have risen dramatically since the introduction of Glyphosate in our food supply since 1994.
NOTE: Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia.
The correlation between Glyphosate usage and dementia cannot be disregarded, as it is only basic logic: If a person is exposed to a toxic chemical that causes dementia early in life and it takes several years for the symptoms of the disease to manifest, guess what? The more that chemical is used, the greater the instances of the disease will occur. You can cry correlation does not equal causation until the cows come home, but if the correlation is strong enough, guess what? It cannot be ignored and must be addressed based on the preponderance of evidence linking it to causation. To not do so and list symptoms as cause is like throwing darts at everything but the bull’s-eye on a target and claiming to hit it.
“We know dementia starts in the brain 30 to 50 years before symptoms appear. Science is just beginning to wrap its head around the various factors contributing to the amyloid plaques so characteristic of those with Alzheimer’s disease. Research confirms that many of the chemicals we’re exposed to in our food, water and air have direct links with Alzheimer’s.”
The link between the increased use of Glyphosate in our food and the rising tide of dementia cannot be simply dismissed. To do so is criminal.
If the Lancet is any indication, it appears that the medical community is intent on making sure that dementia will be “leaving no one behind” as it fails to address this damning correlation.
(Natural News) A hotly-debated study led by Professor Gerardo Ceballos at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico warns that the human population explosion is leading to the widespread contamination and destruction of the planet, ultimately collapsing life support systems upon which human civilization depends. As reported by The Times of Israel:
Human overpopulation and over-consumption are leading Earth to its sixth mass extinction faster than was previously thought, with the human race likely to be eradicated along the way, a new study warns…
These findings indicate nothing short of “biological annihilation,” the scientists conclude, “a massive anthropogenic [human-driven] erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilization.”
To some, the warnings of Paul Ehrlich echo the hysteria of globalists like Al Gore, who claims that climate change, not chemical poisoning of the planet, will destroy human civilization unless everybody agrees to pay him $15 trillion dollars. In truth, “climate change” only predicts oceans rising less than a meter in a hundred years, yet the mass chemical poisoning of our world will collapse human civilization long before rising oceans becomes a relevant issue (and that’s assuming the temperature data are accurate, but we know much of those data are routinely faked by the pro-climate change science hustlers).
The entire “environmental” movement ignores all the real, immediate threats to our planet
What’s my take on all this? The real threat to sustainable life on our planet isn’t so-called “climate change,” it’s the mass contamination of our world with pesticides, herbicides, pharmaceutical runoff, hormone-disruptor chemicals, genetically engineered crops, heavy metals in medicine (such as mercury in vaccines), industrial chemicals and biosludge. Yet, astonishingly, no mainstream environmentalists seem to care about any of these threats. The entire environmental movement has become nothing more than a mindless climate change echo chamber, totally clueless about the real threats to our world that are destroying sustainability right now.
For example, left-leaning environmentalists are now openly denying the chemical gender-bender effects of atrazine because they all want to believe that gender is a “choice” rather than something that can be altered by chemical exposure. So they deny all the science surrounding atrazine because it conflicts with their LGBT narratives. In a similar way, the same Leftists who warned about cigarette smoke causing cancer now believe that marijuana smoke is somehow harmless, even though it contains many of the exact same carcinogens as tobacco smoke. Meanwhile, California’s hemp farms are producing massive tonnage of toxic runoff, poisoning thousands of acres of land across the state. And nobody seems to care, since it’s all being done in the name of “pot legalization.”
In my view, if we don’t stop the mass chemical poisoning of our world — and of ourselves — we will of course destroy ourselves in the process. That’s why I’ve dubbed humanity a “suicide cult.” In the name of corporate profits, humans are poisoning their food (pesticides), poisoning their minds (psychiatric drugs), poisoning their agricultural soils (glyphosate) and even poisoning their children (toxic vaccines).
An analysis of research into male fertility suggests that there has been a steep decline in sperm counts for men living in richer nations.
The review pooled data from 185 different studies, and found a 59.3 per cent drop between 1973 and 2011 in the average amount of sperm produced by men from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. No similar pattern was seen in South America, Asia and Africa, although fewer studies had been conducted in these countries.
Dietary and environmental exposures as well as pharmaceuticals are all linked to the quality of male sperm, revealing that toxins in many substances we interact with affect sperm maturation and membrane function in men. This means that men who are at increased risk of sperm DNA damage because of advancing age can do something about it.
“Given the importance of sperm counts for male fertility and human health, this study is an urgent wake-up call for researchers and health authorities around the world to investigate the causes of the sharp, ongoing drop in sperm count,” says Hagai Levine, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who worked on the analysis.
“The fact that the decline is seen in Western countries strongly suggests that chemicals in commerce are playing a causal role in this trend,” says team-member Shanna Swan, of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York.
Confirmation
Exposure to chemicals in the womb, adult exposure to pesticides, smoking, stress and obesity have all previously been linked to lower sperm counts. But previous studies reporting falling sperm counts have been challenged by some for being unreliable.
“Previous smaller studies have suffered from confounding factors, including the fact that methods of counting sperm in the laboratory might have changed over the years, or that the populations of men being studied might have changed,” says Daniel Brison, at the University of Manchester, UK.
“This new analysis overcomes those problems by including a large number of studies of varying design and location around the world, to confirm that the decline in sperm counts is likely to be real,” says Brison.
Allan Pacey, of the University of Sheffield, UK, says that, despite the decline found in the study, average sperm counts still remain in the normal range.
‘Use By’ Food Dates Are Responsible For Billions In Food Waste
Norbert Wilson who joined the Friedman School as a professor of food policy, has been investigating food waste, building on his past research on food choice, domestic hunger, food banking and the international trade of food products. What motivates people to spend good money on food they don’t intend to eat?
According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, a staggering 1.3 billion tons — is lost or wasted every year.
The impact of food waste is not just financial. Environmentally, food waste leads to an exaggerated use of chemicals such as fertilizers and pesticides; more fuel used for transportation; and more rotting food.
When Wilson turned his attention to issues related to food waste, he theorized that consumers buy food even when they’re aware they may not finish it. It’s a concept that anyone who has purchased a container of sour cream can understand–we buy it knowing we may toss the container with a hefty portion still clinging to the sides.
Wilson found a clue in 2013, when the Natural Resources Defense Council released a report showing that a substantial portion of America’s $160 billion food-waste problem could be traced to those “use by” and “sell by” dates on food containers. It turns out that many consumers, worried that food that has passed the date on its packaging is no longer worth eating, throw out plenty of perfectly good stuff. Could consumers be thinking about those labels as they buy the food?
To find out, Wilson devised an experiment that involved putting differently worded date labels on yogurt, cereal and salad greens. The labels used a variety of terms–“use by,” “best by,” “sell by” and “fresh by”–and included an expiration date. Wilson wanted to know whether certain language would result in people buying food with a greater expectation that they would waste some of it–what Wilson and his colleagues called the “willingness to waste.”
The 200 participants in the study were asked to examine food carrying the different labels and then say how much of each product they expected their household to consume. In nearly every case, the subjects’ answers indicated that they would be more willing to toss out food if it had the “use by” wording. The researchers theorized that may have been because “use by” implies that the food would no longer be safe to eat after that date.
The study found that date labels were influential even when it came to a food like boxed cereal, which is less vulnerable to spoilage. In fact, the willingness to waste was actually higher for cereal than it was for more perishable items like yogurt and bagged salad.
The cereal example also showed that the perception of a bargain can influence willingness to waste amounts. For instance, when participants in the study perceived that they were getting a better deal by buying a larger box of cereal (think Costco-size double boxes of Cheerios), they anticipated wasting more of it, even if the “use by” date was a year in the future.
“I was surprised by how strong a response they had to the cereal,” Wilson said, “and that people were willing to waste more when they saw the larger size.” The pitfall for consumers, he said, is that tossing more of the cereal may have canceled out the savings they thought they were getting.
The findings imply that the way foods are packaged can enable waste. Tweaking package sizes may keep consumers from buying more than they’ll eat. But one wide-reaching change would be to standardize date labels–currently unregulated at the federal level–so that they have a consistent meaning. “To move forward on reducing food waste,” Wilson said, “we will need collaborations between industry, consumer groups and the government to change labels.”
Lost and Tossed
“Loss” means food that doesn’t make it to market, while “waste” is the term for food that stores, restaurants and consumers toss. Loss is a greater concern in developing countries, accounting for 84 to 95 percent of the food that goes uneaten there. Waste is a bigger problem in higher-income countries, where about a third of uneaten food is simply squandered. Researchers see chances to fight both problems all along the supply chain.
FARMS Harvests lost to poor storage and contamination. Farmers in low-income countries often can’t protect harvested crops from the elements and pests. Simple technologies, such as metal silos, could help. Some farmers cut their losses by 40 percent when they started using specialized plastic storage bags.
TRANSPORT Food lost in packaging and handling. Without refrigeration or other ways to preserve them, foods wilt and spoil. Rough handling damages produce and hurries rot.
RETAIL Food wasted by stores and restaurants. American stores toss about 43 billion pounds of food per year–from dented melons to discontinued cookies to ham that is nearing its “sell by” date. Restaurants cook abundant amounts and then dump what’s left at the end of the day.
CONSUMERS Food wasted at home. What with buying too much, serving too much and not storing food properly, an average American family throws away up to $2,200 worth of food every year.
Pesticides have been heavily scrutinized for years by activists around the world. And now, it seems that the rest of the world is finally waking up. A recent report by the United Nations (UN) has put the spotlight on pesticides — but not in a way that you might expect.
The report has garnered a substantial amount of attention because the UN has actually acknowledged the fact that pesticides can and do harm innocent people. In fact, the UN’s report accuses global pesticide manufacturers of “systematic denial of harms” and indicates that some 200,000 people die each year from acute pesticide poisoning.
As Toxics Action Center explains, pesticides are one of the few chemicals deliberately introduced into the environment with the explicit intent of killing other living things. Whether it’s a can of bug spray for that wasp’s nest on your deck, or tractors spraying farmland, the goal is the same: To kill bugs or other pests like weeds. And no matter how you look at it, if it can kill a bug or a plant, there’s a good chance that it can harm humans too.
Agrochemical companies that create and produce pesticides have long maintained that their products are essential to addressing the global hunger crisis. But is that really true? Experts from the UN certainly seem to disagree with the industry’s sentiments.
Hilal Elver, the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food, has stated that this widely publicized belief about pesticides is truly nothing more than hot air. “It’s a myth,” Elver commented. She went on to say, “Using more pesticides is nothing to do with getting rid of hunger. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), we are able to feed 9 billion people today. Production is definitely increasing, but the problem is poverty, inequality and distribution.”
Elver also noted that the majority of pesticides are used on commodity crops and not crops that are needed to feed the world’s hungry people. Soy crops and crops used for palm oil are two examples of these commodity crops that rely on pesticides. Elver says that pesticide makers do not deal with world hunger at all, but rather large-scale agricultural efforts.
In the report, Elver and co-author Baskut Tuncak, the UN’s special rapporteur on toxins, detail the shortcomings of widespread pesticide use.
“Reliance on hazardous pesticides is a short-term solution that undermines the rights to adequate food and health for present and future generations,” the report proclaims.
Tuncak also notes that while science continues to demonstrate that there are adverse effects associated with pesticides, proving a definitive link between specific human diseases or environmental damage and pesticide use has been challenging. This obstacle has been made nearly insurmountable by the systemic denial promoted by the agrochemical industry. Tuncak states that the industry has used aggressive and unethical marketing tactics to keep the harms of pesticides under wraps and out of the public eye.
“The power of the corporations over governments and over the scientific community is extremely important. If you want to deal with pesticides, you have to deal with the companies – that is why [we use] these harsh words. They will say, of course, it is not true, but also out there is the testimony of the people,” Elver stated.
Jay Feldman, the executive director of Beyond Pesticides, a non-profit environmental organization, says that the $43 billion organic industry is more than enough proof that you don’t need pesticides to feed people — and it’s certainly hard to disagree with him. Experts across the world have expressly stated that there are more sustainable farming methods out there that would help fight global hunger without the added side effect of poisoning people. The UN report, for example, points to natural methods of pest suppression and the use of crop rotation to boost sustainability and reduce the toxic burden of pesticide use.
When a person attempts conversation about how something causes cancer, they are often met with the dismissive response “but everything causes cancer.” They are right, in a way. Almost everything does cause cancer, yet it is possible to avoid.
This article can be a resource for avoiding carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, and health damaging chemicals. It only scratches the surface, but this should be a perfect introduction for someone who is unaware that many things are too toxic to tolerate.
A. GM, pesticide contaminated soy is linked to endocrine disruption and cancer
As you may have heard, the pesticide RoundUp or glyphosate is an enemy to public health in several ways, but did you know many soy products are contaminated with it, and can cause endocrine disruption and cancer?
Genetically modified soybeans are grown in great abundance, and the result is cheap, plentiful soybean oil. The soybean oil is put into just about every processed food product you can think of, and it often contains the pesticide it is genetically modified to be resistant to.
Have you ever heard of doctors prescribing anti-depressants, referencing a “chemical imbalance” as the cause of depression? Well endocrine disruption, hormonal imbalance from chemicals, is one true cause of “chemical depression,” so avoiding them can be a critical decision in securing emotional health.
What’s more, the small amounts of glyphosate found in soy products interact with a phytoestrogen in soybeans, creating a reaction that has a more potent endocrine disrupting effect.
“Glyphosate-based herbicides are widely used for soybean cultivation, and our results also found that there was an additive estrogenic effect between glyphosate and genistein, a phytoestrogen in soybeans. However, these additive effects of glyphosate contamination in soybeans need further animal study.”
B. Artificial Coffee Creamers
This article could choose any number of processed foods to expose the toxicity of. Let’s just choose one: artificial coffee creamer.
This is an artificial creamer sold under the brand “Ambiance.”
It contains these chemicals.
“Corn syrup solids” are in the same vein of unhealthy as high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated soybean oil is one of those health damaging soy products, dipotassium phosphate is a common additive to coffee creamer that is linked to health problems written about in academic papers, and the list goes on.
2. Body Care Products
A. Aluminum in Deodorant
Breast and skin cancer, Alzheimer’s, endocrine disruption, and other health problems are strongly linked to the use of “body care” products. For example, aluminum compounds in antiperspirant/deodorant are linked to Alzheimer’s. Endocrine disruptors are even ending up in water supplies.
The way body care products can cause health problems is well summarized in a 2009 paper titled, “Underarm antiperspirants/deodorants and breast cancer”:
“An extensive number of cosmetic products are applied topically on and around the human breast on a daily basis, often multiple times a day, including not only underarm anti-perspirant/deodorant products but also body lotions, body sprays, moisturising creams, breast firming/enhancing creams and suncare products. These products are not rinsed off but left on the skin, allowing for continuous dermal exposure, absorption and deposition into underlying tissues, which may be further increased by abrasions in the skin created by shaving [2,3,5–7]. The extent to which chemicals absorbed by this route escape metabolism remains unknown, but they would certainly escape the systemic metabolism to which orally derived chemicals would be subjected [5–7].”
“Aluminum-free deodorants should consist of essential oils and all natural ingredients. Aluminum free alone may not be enough as some aluminum-free deodorants are still high risk, according to the Environmental Working Group, and can contain chemicals like triclosan and propylene glycol. Triclosan is perhaps a more fierce endocrine disruptor than propylene glycol, so try to avoid it. This article contains a recipe for making your own deodorant using natural ingredients like baking soda and coconut oil.”
B. Chemical sunscreen can cause endocrine disruption and cancer
You may have heard of sunscreen actually causing skin cancer and hormone disruption.
Oxybenzone is a main ingredient in many sunscreens. Luckily there are alternatives.
“There are two ways that a sunscreen can protect the skin from sun damage: with a mineral barrier or a chemical one.
Mineral sunscreens typically include ingredients like zinc oxide or titanium dioxide, which create a physical barrier to protect the skin from the sun.
Chemical sunscreens use one or more chemicals including oxybenzone, avobenzone, octisalate, octocrylene, homosalate and octinoxate.”
In one case, a woman who blogged about the value of body care products and sunscreen actually ended up with skin cancer. An ABC headline reads: “Woman ‘Shocked’ to Develop Skin Cancer Despite Sunscreen Vigilance.”
“Annie Tomlin is an expert beauty editor who is known for telling her millions of readers about the importance of sunscreen, so when a red patch appeared on her hairline and wouldn’t go away, she knew something wasn’t right.
“As it grew and grew I thought, ‘this isn’t normal,’” she said.
A biopsy revealed that Tomlin had basal cell carcinoma. It’s the most common kind of skin cancer. Tomlin said she was “shocked” by the diagnosis in November.”I’m religious about sun protection. I wore it every day as a kid,” she said.”
C. Baby Powder (talcum)
Pharma giant Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder causes cancer. They have knowingly sold it for years, and over a thousand women are suing them.
What’s not to like about this company and its business prospects? Nothing, that’s what! Just look at this: Last week Johnson & Johnson’s pharmaceutical arm, Janssen Biotech, agreed to license a potential prostate cancer treatment from Tesaro for $50 million. The bold move will insure that J&J remains at the forefront of biopharmaceutical research and development.
I’ll admit it. The internal J&J memo that proves that Johnson & Johnson knew of the baby powder / cancer linkage in 1992 looks bad. It does. And the fact that the same memo also recommends targeting black and Hispanic women (including an “adult Hispanic media program” and an “adult black print effort”) looks bad. It does. But look at the numbers. Look at them!”
3. Cancer Causing, Health Damaging Drugs
A. Diethylstilbestrol (DES)
In the past century, bad drugs have led to deformed children, cancer, birth defects, and more. One was called Diethylstilbestrol, or DES: pregnant mothers were encouraged to take it, and infants exposed to it in utero were born with many kinds of health problems.
“Human exposure to DES occurred through diverse sources, such as dietary ingestion from supplemented cattle feed and medical treatment for certain conditions, including breast and prostate cancers. From about 1940 to 1971, DES was given to pregnant women in the mistaken belief it would reduce the risk of pregnancy complications and losses.
In 1971, DES was shown to cause clear cell carcinoma, a rare vaginal tumor in girls and women who had been exposed to this drug in utero. The United States Food and Drug Administration subsequently withdrew DES from use in pregnant women. Follow-up studies have indicated that DES also has the potential to cause a variety of significant adverse medical complications during the lifetimes of those exposed.”
DES Action.org is a great resource for learning about this.
B. Thalidomide
Another bad drug of the past was Thalidomide, one of the most obscene stories of a bad drug possibly ever seen. Pregnant mothers were also encouraged to take Thalidomide in the post WWII era, and it causes extremely severe deformities and health problems.
Today, bad drugs have less of an immediate, noticeable effect: they often take time for the damage to become noticeable, which makes it very difficult to pin down chemicals as the definitive cause of an illness.
Take MiraLAX for example. According to an article from the Mind Unleashed titled “Laxative Given to Toddlers Linked to Neuropsychiatric Events: MiraLAX Exposed by Parents”:
“MiraLAX is an over the counter laxative that has been central in pharmaceutical practice for a few decades. It is a petroleum product: polyethylene glycol. A similar chemical is used in anti-freeze, ethylene glycol. Small amounts of highly toxic ethylene glycol are found in MiraLAX as well.
Originally intended for adults, today toddlers and young children are given it freely. Doctors “literally give it like water,” as described by Dr. Scott W. Cohen, a pediatrician in Beverly Hills, California.
Parents are currently raising awareness of it’s danger: this has been a long time coming.
It is associated with altering emotions toward “darkness,” paranoia and anxiety, anger, and many other symptoms. The FDA quietly acknowledged it’s danger as early as 2011, as you can see here.”
D. Vaccines during pregnancy
Today, mothers are still being poisoned during pregnancy. Mothers are encouraged to get flu shots, which is probably not good for the baby, if you understand what is in the vaccine. People are trying to quantify if vaccines during pregnancy are linked to miscarriage, stillbirth, and other problems.
“I dare say that the modern woman has handed over her inner compass. It’s as if we came from generations of master chefs – natural giants in the kitchen, using our senses and instincts to guide us toward nourishing preparations – but we have been recently convinced through the promise of technology and corporate prowess that processed food is more reliable, nutritious, and beneficial. We’ve been convinced that Hamburger Helper is better for our families than a homemade Bolognese.
The Medicalization of Pregnancy and Birth is no Exception
In this way, women have permitted doctors and pharmaceutical companies privileged access to their fierce and primitive drive toward protecting a pregnancy. They have been made to feel fear, convinced that they need the support of the apparatus of allopathic medicine to get them through this perilous trial.”
“Clearly, as a perinatal practitioner, I have concerns with even one vaccine administration in pregnancy; however, that women in 2009 were subject to a completely and entirely unstudied combo pack of interventions, the package insert of which clearly states,
“It is also not known whether these vaccines can cause fetal harm when administered to pregnant women or can affect reproduction capacity”
Goldman, the researcher and author of the aforementioned study, determined the following:
“Spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) and still birth rates determined to be proximally associated to vaccine delivery were analyzed by Moro et al for the flu seasons of 1990-2009 finding 1.9/million or an average incidence of 1.2 per year.
From this average to the first 5 months of the 2009/10 season in which women were recommended to receive both the typical flu vaccine and the H1N1, there were 57/million fetal losses reported.
Using a capture-recapture statistical tool that allows for researchers to control for the inherent limitations of a reporting system, 174 cases from VAERS and 67 cases from NCOW were pooled to identify an ascertainment-corrected rate of 1/1695 (590/million). This adjustment reflects the fact that VAERS is a gross underestimation of the actual incidence of adverse events – in this case representing only 13% of the vaccine-related fetal losses.”
E. Aluminum in Antacids
People wonder why they are poisoned with aluminum: among all the commonly known sources, antacid drugs are one of the greatest sources. Antacids given to people with stomach problems contain aluminum hydroxide, linked to Alzheimer’s and all the usual symptoms of aluminum poisoning.
One can look at this 2003 paper titled “Aluminium in over-the-counter drugs: risks outweigh benefits?.” Reading from it:
“It is now commonly acknowledged that aluminium toxicity can be induced by infusion of aluminium-contaminated dialysis fluids, by parenteral nutrition solutions, and by oral exposure as a result of aluminium-containing pharmaceutical products such as aluminium-based phosphate binders or antacid intake.
Over-the-counter antacids are the most important source for human aluminium exposure from a quantitative point of view. However, aluminium can act as a powerful neurological toxicant and provoke embryonic and fetal toxic effects in animals and humans after gestational exposure.”
Conclusion
As you can see, so many things do cause cancer: just about everything artificial, allopathic, and born from corporations we should never trust to look out for our wellbeing. Alternatives exist and are thriving, from mineral based sunscreens, to aloe vera for the skin, instead of toxic skin care products.
It must be understood how the FDA and regulatory agencies allow this: here’s an example of how a revolving door operates.
FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg had to resign over a racketeering scandal. Her husband’s hedge fund Renaissance Technologies owned stake in Johnson & Johnson, and that might explain why the FDA allowed them to continue selling a litany of toxic products.
That’s just one example of how regulatory authority works. We have the research available to us, and can learn for ourselves what is toxic and what isn’t.
Please share this with any person who needs a starting point in researching the toxicity of products before they use them.
found in fruit and vegetables that hold potential as yet another safe, effective and natural cancer cure. In 1995, Professor Dan Burke accidentally discovered that cancer cells contained an enzyme that was not found in normal healthy cells. Later on in 1997, after conducting extensive research with Professor Gerry Potter, he discovered that a certain type of polyphenyl (plant nutrient) found in fruit and vegetables was able to bind with this cancer enzyme – and subsequently destroy the cancer cell. The researchers decided to call this group of phytonutrients salvestrols (salve means to save and strol is derived from resveratrol, the first salvestrol). Being the medicinal part of the plant, theses salvestrols taste bitter, which unfortunately means they have been bred out of existence in some strains of fruit (e.g. apples) by large-scale agro-corporate farming, which constantly tries to make everything sweeter to sell more product. Salvestrols belong to another subcategory called phytoalexins, which are substances produced by plants to protect themselves against bacteria, viruses, fungi, insects and ultraviolet light.
Cancer Cells’ Weak Point: CYP1B1 Enzyme
The enzyme which marks cancer cells is called CYP1B1. This enzyme is a gene and protein which is present in all human cells, but which is only activated in cancer cells, not normal healthy cells. In a chemical reaction, the salvestrols interact with CYP1B1 to become cancer-killing agents, as this website states:
“Healthy tissue cells do contain the gene for CYP1B1, but under normal circumstances this gene does not appear to come to expression, or only scarcely does so. In-vitro research has shown that CYP1B1 can activate (pro)carcinogens. However, CYP1B1 is unlikely to play an important role in the development of cancer, because the enzyme is not active in normal cells. Burke’s research group found the CYP1B1 protein in all the possible types of human tumour cell lines. The extreme over-expression of CYP1B1 enzyme is a common characteristic of all forms of cancer that occur in humans … Professor Burke suspects that the CYP1B1 gene is ‘switched on’ in a mutated body cell in order to allow the tumour cell to be selectively removed (tumour suppressor gene).”
Brilliant! Like many other proven natural cancer cures (e.g. laetrile, B17 or amygdalin from apricot kernels), salvestrols are a targeted and selective cancer killer, unlike chemotherapy (derived from mustard gas used in World War 1), which is an indiscriminate killer of all cells.
The hallmark of cancer cells is that they don’t perform apoptosis or programmed cell death. In other words, they don’t listen to the body’s commands to stop growing. However, once you feed them salvestrols, then they will commit apoptosis.
A digital rendition or illustration of a cancer cell.
Fungicides: Death Sentence for the Salvestrol
Salvestrols are polyphenols (a large generic group), found throughout many fruits (e.g. citrus, berries, grape), most vegetables (e.g. cruciferous), olives and herbs. However, only organically grown food contains salvestrols. The only fruit and vegetables that produce salvestrols are organic fruit and vegetables. Why? It’s because, as mentioned, the fruit and vegetables produce salvestrols as a defense mechanism to fend off fungal attacks. However, conventional fruit and vegetables are sprayed with a heavy dose of pesticides, including fungicides, which means they don’t need to develop the phytochemicals (plant chemicals) that organic fruit and vegetables would to fend off attacks. It’s already done for them. The fungicide essentially makes the plant lazy, removing the necessity for it to develop complex defense mechanisms because it’s unlikely to get attacked.
Additionally, the fungicide neutralizes the effect of salvestrols. So even if conventional fruit and vegetables somehow survive being sprayed with fungicide poison and manage to grow salvestrols, they still won’t do any good as far as cancer prevention is concerned. They won’t interact with the CYP1B1 enzyme and kill the cancer cells because the fungicide will interfere with and prevent that process.
Spraying food with toxic pesticides including fungicides? Great idea.
Not All Food is Equal
What this means is that you, as an end user in this system, get what you choose and what you pay for. If you choose to eat sprayed fruit and vegetables, you’ll be getting produce without salvestrols and without the vital defense mechanisms which boost your health and protect you against cancer. On the other hand if you choose to eat organic fruit and vegetables, you’ll be getting produce with salvestrols, which your body will assimilate and utilize to improve your health and either help you defeat cancer or help ensure you never develop it.
The Theory that Cancer is a Fungus
This dovetails into an important point. Fungus is a natural part of living in this world. It is also a decomposer which attaches onto weak and dying organisms, be they plant or animal, and hastens their demise once their immunity is comprised. It may be the hidden cause of every disease and it may also be that cancer is a fungus. The latter theory has been proposed by Italian doctor Tullio Simoncini, who has been treating patients for decades with intravenous injections of sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO3 or baking soda). Other doctors have tried this approach successfully – some have pioneered approaches such as mixing the baking soda with maple syrup (which attracts the cancer cells) then administering it orally to patients. The highly alkaline NaHCo3 works by causing a rapid shift in the pH of the cancer cell, causing it to die.
Are salvestrols part of a grander conspiracy to taint our food supply and weaken us? Yes.
Salvestrols – Removed by Design
Just in case you think this is all an unfortunate coincidence, think again. The worldwide conspiracy cuts wider and deeper than most of us imagine. In this short segment taken from a larger presentation, David Icke explains how humanity is controlled by being kept in the dark. Those truly at the top of the pyramid know full well how the human body works, and realize the effect of synthetic chemicals and non-organic food on human health. This is more evidence of the scheme to make people sick and thus more controllable, which goes hand-in-hand with the depopulation agenda.
The lesson that salvestrols and CYP1B1 have to teach us is clear: the more we separate ourselves from the natural world, the more we use and ingest synthetic chemicals, the more we eat artificial food (GMOs), the more we embrace the idea of “Better Living Through Chemistry” (former motto of DuPont, the chemical company and Illuminati bloodline family), the more we will weaken ourselves, the sooner we will die and the more unfulfilled we will be.
*****
Makia Freeman is the editor of alternative media / independent news siteThe Freedom Articles and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com, writing on many aspects of truth and freedom, from exposing aspects of the worldwide conspiracy to suggesting solutions for how humanity can create a new system of peace and abundance.
The rate at which autism instances have risen in the last 40 years is simply staggering. In 1975, 1 in every 5,000 people developed autism. In 1985, it was 1 in every 2,500, and in 2005, it was 1 in every 166.
Today it is approximately 1 in every 68 children. (source)
“Children today are sicker than they were a generation ago. From childhood cancers to autism, birth defects and asthma, a wide range of childhood diseases and disorders are on the rise. Our assessment of the latest science leaves little room for doubt; pesticides are one key driver of this sobering trend.”
— October 2012 report by Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA) (source)(source)
The rate at which autism instances have risen in the last 40 years is simply staggering. In 1975, 1 in every 5,000 people developed autism. In 1985, it was 1 in every 2,500, and in 2005, it was 1 in every 166.
Today it is approximately 1 in every 68 children. (source)
“If it is an environmental cause that’s contributing to an increase, we certainty want to find it.”
– Craig Newschaffer, an epidemiologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (source)
Research continues to surface indicating that autism goes far beyond just genetics, and that we may need to consider multiple factors (like environmental toxins, prescription drugs, etc) when trying to figure out what’s going on, and why autism rates continue to climb exponentially.
“It’s time to start looking for the environmental culprits responsible for the remarkable increase in the rate of autism in California.”
– Irva Hertz–Picciotto, epidemiology professor at University of California, David (source)
Evidence is now pointing to the fact that agricultural pesticides (among various other environmental toxins) might play a large role in the rapid increase in autism rates over the past few decades. A senior researcher from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Dr. Stephanie Seneff is doing her part to create more awareness of these facts, which have yet to make big news in the world of mainstream medicine.
At a recent event sponsored by the holistic-focused Groton Wellness Organization, she stated that “At today’s rate, by 2025, one in two children will be autistic.” (source)
Seneff presented slides showing a remarkably consistent correlation between the rising use of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide (with its active ingredient glyphosate) on crops and the rising rates of autism. Her research also reveals that the side effects of autism mimic glyphosate toxicity and deficiencies.
Correlation Doesn’t Mean Causation, But…
Although the graph depicts a staggering correlation, it does not “prove” that the rise in autism is directly caused by glyphosate. On the other hand, we have a lot of information and research available that suggests it could be one factor (out of many) and Dr. Seneff argues that it is. Pesticides have been linked to a number of human health ailments, from Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s to cancer and autism. You can access some of those studies (out of many) here.
Dr. Seneff’s research has also led her to believe that vaccines containing aluminum may also be a culprit. You can read more about that, and access that research, here.
The Toxicity of Glyphosate and Autism
In Dr. Seneff’s lecture, she pointed to the fact that Monsanto commonly argues that glyphosate is not toxic (despite numerous studies proving otherwise) because our cells don’t have what is called the “shikimate” pathway. What’s important to note, however, is that our guts do indeed have this pathway and we depend on it to supply us with essential amino acids (among other things). Gut health is of utmost importance to overall health, so this is quite disturbing. Seneff also points to the fact that there are other ingredients within glyphosate that greatly increases its toxic effects.
It makes one wonder, doesn’t it? How could a corporation like Monsanto — a corporation charged with regulating no less than our entire global food supply — claim that glyphosate is safe despite all of the evidence that confirms that it’s not?
“It is commonly believed that Roundup is among the safest pesticides. This idea is spread by manufacturers, mostly in the reviews they promote, which are often cited in toxicological evaluations of glyphosate-based herbicides. However, Roundup was found in this experiment to be 125 times more toxic than glyphosate. Moreover, despite its reputation, Roundup was by far the most toxic among the herbicides and insecticides tested. This inconsistency between scientific fact and industrial claim may be attributed to huge economic interests, which have been found to falsify health risk assessments and delay health policy decisions”
— R. Mesnage et al., Biomed Research International, Volume 2014 (2014) article ID 179691
Keep in mind that the use of glyphosate rose 1500% from 1995 to 2005, and that 100 million pounds of glyphosate are used every year on more than a billion acres. (source)(source)
It’s even been found in the breast milk of mothers, and in urine samples of people across Europe. (source)
The main toxic effects of glyphosate as identified by Dr. Seneff include:
Kills beneficial gut bacteria and allows pathogens to overgrow
Interferes with function of cytochrome p450 (CYP enzymes)
Chelates important minerals (iron, cobalt, manganese, etc)
Interferes with synthesis of aromatic amino acids and methionine – leads to shortages in critical neurotransmitters and folate
Disrupts sulfate synthesis and sulfate transport
Pesticide formulations that are sold and used are up to 1,000 times more toxic than what regulators commonly claim. Roundup is in fact the most toxic of herbicides and insecticides used. There is a tremendous amount of evidence that also point to flawed safety evaluations. You can read more about that here.
“Adjuvants in pesticides are generally declared as inerts, and for this reason they are not tested in long-term regulatory experiments. It is thus very surprising that they amplify up to 1000 times the toxicity of their APs in 100% of the cases where they are indicated to be present by the manufacturer “
— R. Mesnage et al., Biomed Research International, Volume 2014 (2014) article ID 179691
Seneff notes a number of well-known “bio-markers of autism.” These include low serum sulfate, disrupted gut bacteria, inflammatory bowel, serotonin and melatonin deficiency, mitochondrial disorder, zinc and iron deficiency, and more. She also points to the fact that “These can all be explained as potential effects of glyphosate on biological systems.”
Dr. Seneff goes into much greater detail, and to access that science you can click HERE. To access most of her recent research of these topics you can click HERE. To view her entire lecture you can click HERE.
It’s also important to note here that a recent study conducted by researchers from RMIT university, published in the journal Environmental Research, found that following an organic diet for just one week significantly reduced pesticide exposure in adults by 90%.
Cynthia Curl, an assistant professor in the School of Allied Health Sciences Department of Community and Environmental Health at Boise State University, recently published a pesticide exposure study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. Results of her research indicated that, among individuals eating similar amounts of vegetables and fruits, the ones who reported eating organic produce had significantly lower OP pesticide exposure than those who normally consume conventionally grown produce. You can read more about that here.
“It is, in the deepest sense, a privilege as well as a duty to have the opportunity to speak out — to many thousands of people — on something so important.”
“Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others,” philosopher Alan Watts wrote in the 1950s as he contemplated the interconnected nature of the universe. What we may now see as an elemental truth of existence was then a notion both foreign and frightening to the Western mind. But it was a scientist, not a philosopher, who levered this monumental shift in consciousness: Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964), a Copernicus of biology who ejected the human animal from its hubristic place at the center of Earth’s ecological cosmos and recast it as one of myriad organisms, all worthy of wonder, all imbued with life and reality. Her lyrical writing rendered her not a mere translator of the natural world, but an alchemist transmuting the steel of science into the gold of wonder. The message of her iconic Silent Spring (public library) rippled across public policy and the population imagination — it led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, inspired generations of activists, and led Joni Mitchell to write a lyric as timeless as “I don’t care about spots on my apples / Leave me the birds and the bees / Please!”
A woman scientist without a Ph.D. or an academic affiliation became the most powerful voice of resistance against ruinous public policy mitigated by the self-interest of government and industry, against the hauteur and short-sightedness threatening to destroy this precious pale blue dot which we, along with countless other animals, call home.
Carson had grown up in a picturesque but impoverished village in Pennsylvania. It was there, amid a tumultuous family environment, that she fell in love with nature and grew particularly enchanted with birds. A voracious reader and gifted writer from a young age, she became a published author at the age of ten, when a story of hers appeared in a children’s literary magazine. She entered the Pennsylvania College for Women with the intention of becoming a writer, but a zestful zoology professor — herself a rare specimen as a female scientist in that era — rendered young Carson besotted with biology. A scholarship allowed her to pursue a Master’s degree in zoology and genetics at Johns Hopkins University, but when her already impecunious family fell on hard times during the Great Depression, she was forced to leave the university in search of a full-time paying job before completing her doctorate.
After working as a lab assistant for a while, she began writing for the Baltimore Sun and was eventually hired as a junior aquatic biologist for what would later become the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Her uncommon gift for writing was soon recognized and Carson was tasked with editing other scientists’ field reports, then promoted to editor in chief for the entire agency. Out of this necessity to reconcile science and writing was born her self-invention as a scientist who refused to give up on writing and a writer who refused to give up on science — the same refusal that marks today’s greatest poets of science.
When her older sister died in 1937, thirty-year-old Carson was left the sole provider for their mother and her two orphaned nieces. That year, she was asked to write a brochure for the Fisheries Bureau. When she turned in something infinitely more poetic than her supervisor had envisioned, he asked her to rewrite the brochure but encouraged her to submit the piece as an essay for The Atlantic Monthly. She did. It was accepted and published as Undersea — a first of its kind, immensely lyrical journey into the science of the ocean floor inviting an understanding of Earth from a nonhuman perspective. Readers and publishers were instantly smitten, and Carson expanded her Atlantic article into her first book, The Sea Around Her — the culmination of a decade of her oceanographic research, which rendered her an overnight literary success.
Against towering cultural odds, these books about the sea established her — once a destitute girl from landlocked Pennsylvania — as the most celebrated science writer of her time.
But the more Carson studied and wrote about nature, the more cautious she became of humanity’s rampant quest to dominate it. Witnessing the devastation of the atomic bomb awakened her to the unintended consequences of science unmoored from morality, of a hysterical enthusiasm for technology that deafened humanity to the inner voice of ethics. In her 1952 acceptance speech for the John Burroughs Medal, she concretized her credo:
It seems reasonable to believe — and I do believe — that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.
One of the consequences of wartime science and technology was the widespread use of DDT, initially intended for protecting soldiers from malaria-bearing mosquitoes. After the end of the war, the toxic chemical was lauded as a miracle substance. People were sprayed down with DDT to ward off disease and airplanes doused agricultural plots in order to decimate pest and maximize crop yield. It was neither uncommon nor disquieting to see a class of schoolchildren eating their lunch while an airplane aiming at a nearby field sprinkled them with DDT. A sort of blind faith enveloped the use of these pesticides, with an indifferent government and an incurious public raising no questions about their unintended consequences.
In January of 1958, Carson received a letter from an old writer friend named Olga Owens Huckins, alerting her that the aerial spraying of DDT had devastated a local wildlife sanctuary. Huckins described the ghastly deaths of birds, claws clutched to their breasts and bills agape in agony. This local tragedy was the final straw in Carson’s decade-long collection of what she called her “poison-spray material” — a dossier of evidence for the harmful, often deadly effects of toxic chemicals on wildlife and human life. That May, she signed a contract with Houghton Mifflin for what would become Silent Spring in 1962 — the firestarter of a book that ignited the conservation movement and awakened the modern environmental consciousness.
But the book also spurred violent pushback from those most culpable in the destruction of nature — a heedless government that had turned a willfully blind eye to its regulatory responsibilities and an avaricious agricultural and chemical industry determined to maximize profits at all costs. Those inconvenienced by the truths Carson exposed immediately attacked her for her indictment against elected officials’ and corporations’ deliberate deafness to fact. They used every means at their disposal — a propaganda campaign designed to discredit her, litigious bullying of her publisher, and the most frequent accusation of all: that of being a woman. Former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, who would later become Prophet of the Mormon Church, asked: “Why a spinster with no children was so concerned about genetics?” He didn’t hesitate to offer his own theory: because she was a Communist. (The lazy hand-grenade of “spinster” was often hurled at Carson in an attempt to erode her credibility, as if there were any correlation between a scientist’s home life and her expertise — never mind that, as it happened, Carson did have one of the most richly rewarding relationships a human being could hope for, albeit not the kind that conformed to the era’s narrow accepted modalities.)
Carson withstood the criticism with composure and confidence, shielded by the integrity of her facts. But another battle raged invisible to the public eye — she was dying.
She had been diagnosed with cancer in 1960, which had metastasized due to her doctor’s negligence. In 1963, when Silent Spring stirred President Kennedy’s attention and he summoned a Congressional hearing to investigate and regulate the use of pesticides, Carson didn’t hesitate to testify even as her body was giving out from the debilitating pain of the disease and the wearying radiation treatments. With her testimony as a pillar, JFK and his Science Advisory Committee invalidated her critics’ arguments, heeded Carson’s cautionary call to reason, and created the first federal policies designed to protect the planet.
Carson endured the attacks — those of her cancer and those of her critics — with unwavering heroism. She saw the former with a biologist’s calm acceptance of the cycle of life and had anticipated the latter all along. She was a spirited idealist, but she wasn’t a naïve one — from the outset, she was acutely aware that her book was a clarion call for nothing less than a revolution and that it was her moral duty to be the revolutionary she felt called to be. Just a month after signing the book contract, she articulates this awareness in a letter found in Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952–1964 (public library) — the record of her beautiful and unclassifiable relationship with her dearest friend and beloved.
Carson writes to Freeman:
I know you dread the unpleasantness that will inevitably be associated with [the book’s] publication. That I can understand, darling. But it is something I have taken into account; it will not surprise me! You do know, I think, how deeply I believe in the importance of what I am doing. Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent… It is, in the deepest sense, a privilege as well as a duty to have the opportunity to speak out — to many thousands of people — on something so important.
In that sense, the eventual title of Silent Spring was a dual commentary on how human hubris is robbing Earth of its symphonic aliveness and on the moral inadmissibility of remaining silent about the destructive forces driving this loss. Carson upheld that sense of duty while confronting her own creaturely finitude as she underwent rounds of grueling cancer treatment. In a letter to Freeman from the autumn of 1959, she reports:
Mostly, I feel fairly good but I do realize that after several days of concentrated work on the book I’m suddenly no good at all for several more. Some people assume only physical work is tiring — I guess because they use their minds little! Friday night … my exhaustion invaded every cell of my body, I think, and really kept me from sleeping well all night.
And yet mind rose over matter as Carson mobilized every neuron to keep up with her creative vitality. In another letter from the same month, she writes to Freeman about her “happiness in the progress of The Book”:
The other day someone asked Leonard Bernstein about his inexhaustible energy and he said “I have no more energy than anyone who loves what he is doing.” Well, I’m afraid mine has to be recharged at times, but anyway I do seem just now to be riding the crest of a wave of enthusiasm and creativity, and although I’m going to bed late and often rising in very dim light to get in an hour of thinking and organizing before my household stirs, my weariness seems easily banished.
Stirring her household was Roger — the nine-year-old orphan son of Carson’s niece, whom she had adopted and was single-parenting, doing all the necessary cooking, cleaning, and housework while writing Silent Spring and undergoing endless medical treatments. All of this she did with unwavering devotion to the writing and the larger sense of moral obligation that animated her. In early March of 1961, in the midst of another incapacitating radiation round, she writes to Freeman:
About the book, I sometimes have a feeling (maybe 100% wishful thinking) that perhaps this long period away from active work will give me the perspective that was so hard to attain, the ability to see the woods in the midst of the confusing multitude of trees.
With an eye to Albert Schweitzer’s famous 1954 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which appeared under the title “The Problem of Peace” and made the unnerving assertion that “we should all of us realize that we are guilty of inhumanity” in reflecting on the circumstances that led to the two world wars, she adds:
Sometimes … I want [the book] to be a much shortened and simplified statement, doing for this subject (if this isn’t too presumptuous a comparison) what Schweitzer did in his Nobel Prize address for the allied subject of radiation.
In June of that year, Carson shares with Freeman a possible opening sentence, which didn’t end up being the final one but which nonetheless synthesizes the essence of her groundbreaking book:
This is a book about man’s war against nature, and because man is part of nature it is also inevitably a book about man’s war against himself.
At that point, Carson was considering The War Against Nature and At War with Nature as possible titles, but settled on Silent Spring in September — a title inspired by Keats, Carson’s favorite poet: “The sedge is withered from the lake, / And no birds sing.”
Four months later, in January of 1962, she reports to Freeman the completion of her Herculean feat:
I achieved the goal of sending the 15 chapters to Marie [Rodell, Carson’s literary agent] — like reaching the last station before the summit of Everest.
Rodell had sent a copy of the manuscript to longtime New Yorker editor William Shawn, who gave Carson the greatest and most gratifying surprise of her life. Struggling to override her typical self-effacing humility, she relays the episode to Freeman:
Last night about 9 o’clock the phone rang and a mild voice said, “This is William Shawn.” If I talk to you tonight you will know what he said and I’m sure you can understand what it meant to me. Shamelessly, I’ll repeat some of his words — “a brilliant achievement” — “you have made it literature” “full of beauty and loveliness and depth of feeling.” … I suddenly feel full of what Lois once called “a happy turbulence.”
After Roger was asleep I took Jeffie [Carson’s cat] into the study and played the Beethoven violin concerto — one of my favorites, you know. And suddenly the tensions of four years were broken and I got down and put my arms around Jeffie and let the tears come. With his little warm, rough tongue he told me that he understood. I think I let you see last summer what my deeper feelings are about this when I said I could never again listen happily to a thrush song if I had not done all I could. And last night the thoughts of all the birds and other creatures and the loveliness that is in nature came to me with such a surge of deep happiness, that now I had done what I could — I had been able to complete it — now it had its own life!
Silent Spring was published on September 27, 1962 and adrenalized a new public awareness of the fragile interconnectedness of this living world. Several months later, CBS host Eric Sevareid captured its impact most succinctly in lauding Carson as “a voice of warning and a fire under the government.” In the book, she struck a mighty match:
When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence … it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth.
How tragic to observe that in the half-century since, our so-called leaders have devolved from half-truths to “alternative facts” — that is, to whole untruths that fail the ultimate criterion for truth: a correspondence with reality.
Carson, who was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, never lived to see the sea change of policy and public awareness that her book precipitated. Today, as a new crop of political and corporate interests threatens her hard-won legacy of environmental consciousness, I think of that piercing Adrienne Rich line channeling the great 16th-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, another scientist who fundamentally revolutionized our understanding of the universe and our place in it: “Let me not seem to have lived in vain.”
Let’s not let Rachel Carson seem to have lived in vain.
But it turns out Alex Jones is correct. As the lab science director of CWC Labs, I not only conduct mass spec analyses of pesticides and herbicides in foods, but I also have access to a massive library of published books describing the toxic effects of hundreds of different pesticides. Atrazine is widely documented as a “powerful chemical castrator” that transforms males into hermaphrodites, the animal kingdom version of a “metrosexual.” It’s also widely present in the U.S. water supply. It is undoubtedly one of the chemicals currently responsible for the mass feminization of men in modern society.
(Note to InfoWars and other indy media outlets: We can run research on any topic across over 1,000 printed reference books, using an automated system I built. So if you need supporting documentation on atrazine, glyphosate, BPA, medicinal herbs, vitamins or other molecules of interest, just ask me for a research compilation. In addition, my lab can easily detect atrazine in water, so if you want to grab water from Austin and have my lab test it, that’s a cinch. Imagine being able to publish a story, “Austin water supply found contaminated with feminization chemicals that turn men into metrosexuals…” We can literally run that research in just a few hours on various water samples from across the city.)
“The males became homosexuals and coupled with other males, adopting a feminized behavior… atrazine acted as a very powerful chemical castrator”
The most astonishing and relevant passage from this book is as follows, relating the findings from a brilliant scientist (Tyrone Hayes) who studied the effects of atrazine on males and the endocrine system:
“We observed that atrazine reduced the size of the larynx, which is the voice box in the males. Since they sing to seduce the females, this meant they were sexually handicapped. We also observed very low levels of testosterone among the adult males; some of them were hermaphrodites, which means they had both ovaries and testes. In certain cases, the males became homosexuals and coupled with other males, adopting a feminized behavior; sometimes they had eggs in their testes instead of sperm. Ultimately, atrazine acted as a very powerful chemical castrator that is biologically active at 1 ppb, and even 0.1 ppb.”
Tyrone Hayes maintains a very informative website called AtrazineLovers.com. (RELATED: We will soon be launching two news websites covering all this: Atrazine.news and Pesticide.news. Be sure to watch for them soon. We already run Glyphosate.news as well.) Not surprisingly, the pro-GMO, pro-pesticide industry has gone to great lengths to try to discredit and destroy Hayes, just like they do anyone who dares conduct actual science on agricultural chemicals or GMOs.
Atrazine: A “Powerful Chemical Castrator”
Excerpted from the book, bolding added for emphasis
During the New Orleans symposium, Tyrone Hayes evoked one of his latest studies showing that atrazine, an agricultural poison, provoked mechanisms characteristic of breast and prostate cancers in human cells exposed to doses similar to those found in the environment.* “You’ve all heard the good news,” he exclaimed. “The Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] has announced that it will reexamine atrazine’s scientific file! Let’s hope it will end up banning it just like Europe did five years ago!” Though the herbicide was banned by the European Union in 2004, it is still massively used throughout the United States, where approximately forty thousand tons are spread on countless farms growing crops such as corn, sorghum, sugar cane, and wheat every year.’’ Lauded as the “DDT for weeds” when it was put on the market in 1958, today atrazine is the principal contaminant of American surface and ground waters, much like in the majority of European countries (with France in the lead), despite the ban.
Two weeks before the New Orleans symposium, Lisa Jackson, the EPA director nominated by President Barack Obama in January 2009, had effectively announced that the agency would “conduct a new evaluation of the pesticide to assess any possible links between atrazine and cancer, as well as other health problems, such as premature births.” “This is a dramatic change,” said Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) (see Chapter 18). “There is growing evidence that atrazine could be a hazard to human health. This is a strong signal that the world is changing in regards to some of the most widely used chemicals.”
If there is one scientist who battled for atrazine’s ban in the United States, it is inarguably Tyrone Hayes, even if (as he explained to me during our meeting in his Berkeley laboratory on December 12, 2009) “this battle wasn’t a personal decision, but was imposed by events.” In 1998, he was contacted by Novartis (the company became Syngenta two years later after its merger with AstraZeneca), which offered him a “handsomely paid” contract to “verify if atrazine [was] an endocrine disruptor,” as Theo Colborn and her co-authors note in Our Stolen Future (see Chapter 16). For the industry, the matter was quite serious as, seven years earlier, a U.S. Geological Survey report had revealed that “atrazine exceeded drinking water standards in 27 percent of the samples” taken from the Missouri, Mississippi, and Ohio Bivers and tributaries. What’s more, in the 1980s, two studies conducted on mice and rats had indicated that exposure to the herbicide brought on breast and uterine cancers, lymphomas, and leukemia. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) judged the results sufficiently convincing and decided to classify atrazine as “possibly carcinogenic to humans” (group 2B) in 1991. As a result, the EPA, leaning on the Safe Drinking Water Act, decreased the atrazine standard to a maximum of 3 ug/l of water, or 3 ppb (parts per billion). In 1994, three studies established a link between rodents’ exposure to atrazine and mammary tumors. Then in 1997, one year after the publication of Our Stolen Future, an epidemiological study carried out in several rural Kentucky counties found a significant excess of breast cancer among the most exposed women (in correlation with the level of water contamination and proximity of the home to corn cultivations).
Thus began Novartis’ great strategic era. Its first tactic was tremendously effective, and brought about IARC’s downgrade of atrazine from group 2B to group 3 (not classifiable) in 1999. To justify the surprising decision, the UN agency experts relied on a line of reasoning I described in Chapter 10: “the mechanism by which atrazine increases the incidence of mammary gland tumors in rats is not relevant to humans.”
Novartis’ second effort revolved around Tyrone Hayes, a brilliant biologist (and the youngest tenured professor at Berkeley) and an amphibian enthusiast who named his daughter Kassina, after an African frog species. “Frogs are my entire life,” he explained to me in his laboratory, surrounded by thousands of jars filled with amphibians. “I grew up in the country, in South Carolina, and I was always fascinated by their ability to metamorphose—from an egg to a tadpole, and then to an adult frog.”
“Why do frogs provide an interesting model from which to study the effects of endocrine disruptors?” I asked.
“They’re a perfect model!” responded the biologist. “First of all, because they’re very sensitive to hormones that enable the activation of genes necessary for their various metamorphoses; and then, because they possess exactly the same hormones as humans, such as testosterone, estrogen, or the thyroid hormone.”
“How did you go about your study?”
“I should clarify that this process was closely monitored by Novartis, and then Syngenta. Initially, we raised frogs from the Xenopus laevis family in water reservoirs to which we had added different doses of atrazine, similar to what’s found in field drainage ditches and up to thirty times lower than the existing U.S. standard (3ppb)—meaning levels that a human being might find in tap water. To give you an idea, that’s the equivalent of a grain of salt in a reservoir of water. We observed that atrazine reduced the size of the larynx, which is the voice box in the males. Since they sing to seduce the females, this meant they were sexually handicapped. We also observed very low levels of testosterone among the adult males; some of them were hermaphrodites, which means they had both ovaries and testes. In certain cases, the males became homosexuals and coupled with other males, adopting a feminized behavior; sometimes they had eggs in their testes instead of sperm. Ultimately, atrazine acted as a very powerful chemical castrator that is biologically active at 1 ppb, and even 0.1 ppb.”
“Do you know if wild frogs were presenting the same problems?”
“That was actually the second stage of our study: we set out with a refrigerated truck across Utah and Iowa where we collected eight hundred young leopard frogs (Rana pipiens) in ditches alongside fields, near golf courses or riverbanks. We dissected them and observed exactly the same dysfunctions that we had seen in the laboratory frogs. It was very upsetting, and that’s when I understood that the decline in North American and European frog populations was due to pesticide contamination that affected their reproduction systems.”
“How do you explain this phenomenon?”
“Atrazine stimulates an enzyme called ‘aromatase,’ which transforms the masculine hormone, testosterone, into the female hormone, estrogen. As a result, the estrogen produced by the aromatase leads to the development of female organs, like ovaries or ovules in the testes. However, the levels of aromatase are also linked to the development of breast or prostate cancers. An epidemiological study conducted in a Syngenta atrazine factory in Louisiana, published in 2002, actually indicated a significant excess of prostate cancer among workers.”
“How did Syngenta react?”
“Ah!” sighed Tyrone Hayes. “I was very naive at the time! At first, the company asked me to repeat my study to verify that I would obtain the same results. They offered me 2 million dollars for it and, initially, I accepted . . . Then, I understood their strategy—they wanted to drag things out to gain some time and stop me from publishing. I finally terminated the contract and I published my results in 2002.18,19 After that, it was war! And I have to say that I never could have imagined that it would be so violent: Syngenta wrote to the dean of UC Berkeley, used the press to discredit me, added a link on its website to junkscience.com, Steven Milloy’s site, where I ended up on the list of ‘junk scientists’ [see Chapter 8]. Today, it makes me laugh because I know that appearing on that list is proof that I was doing good work! They then paid scientists to conduct new studies that, of course, were unable to reproduce my results. Their goal was to create doubt, and it worked, at least in the United States where the EPA ultimately renewed its approval of atrazine in 2007.”
In fact, in October 2007, the EPA produced a report that concluded: “Atrazine does not adversely affect amphibian gonadal development: no additional studies are required.” Meaning that the unstoppable machine created to destroy any and all uncomfortable truths had, once again, worked marvelously.
At the height of the drama, Tyrone Hayes published an article in BioScience in which he deciphered the immutable cogs that 1 have described throughout this book: manipulations of science, the funding effect, defamation campaigns, the public authorities’ complacency, media brainwashing, etc.
Pesticide Mixtures Enhance Individual Effects
“Industry has increased efforts to discredit my work, but my laboratory continues to examine the impacts of atrazine and other pesticides on environmental and public health,” writes Tyrone Hayes on his website, ironically named atrazinelovers.com. “My decision to stand up and face the industry giant was not a heroic one. My parents taught me, ‘Do not do the right thing because you seek reward . . . and do not avoid the wrong thing because you fear punishment. Do the right thing, because it is the right thing.’”
“My quarrels with Syngenta marked a turning point in my career,” explained the Berkeley researcher, “because that’s when I began to specialize in a little-explored field: the effects of pesticide mixtures. The leopard frogs that I collected from fields in the Midwest weren’t exposed uniquely to atrazine, but rather to a combination of several substances. However, scientific literature is generally only interested in the toxicological effects of pesticides at relatively high doses (in the realm of parts per million), but rarely in low doses and even less so in mixtures of low doses, like those that exist in our everyday environment, namely in tap water and the fruits and vegetables we eat.”
This “omission”—on the whole quite surprising, and which also characterizes the regulatory system of chemical products—was similarly highlighted by the U.S. Geological Survey in a 2006 report that is all the more remarkable because it openly describes the pollution of America’s surface and ground waters: “Because of the widespread and common occurrence of pesticide mixtures, particularly in streams, the total combined toxicity of pesticides in water or other media often may be greater than that of any single pesticide compound that is present,” writes Robert Gilliom, the principal author. He adds that their findings indicate that the study of mixtures should be an absolute priority.
And so Tyrone Hayes once again hopped aboard his refrigerated truck to cross Nebraska and collect thousands of liters of “chemical brew” flowing through industrial cornfields. Once he returned to Berkeley, he identified nine recurring molecules: four herbicides, including atrazine and alachlor (or
Lasso, which caused Paul Frangois’s poisoning; see Chapter 1), three insecticides, and two fungicides. When I met him, he was working on another mixture composed of five pesticides, including Roundup and chlorpyrifos. The scientist conducted each study in two ways: he raised frogs in reservoirs filled with the “brew” from the fields, as well as in the mixture he reconstituted in his laboratory in order to compare the results. And in both cases, the results were very troubling.
“When we mixed the substances, we noticed effects we hadn’t seen with products taken separately,” he explained. “First off, we observed weakened immune systems in the frogs due to thymus disorders, which meant they were more susceptible to, for example, meningitis, and that they died of diseases more often than frogs in the control group. That immune weakness can explain, in part, the population declines. But added to it is the disruption to reproductive systems, similar to what I observed with atrazine on its own. Finally, the mixtures had an effect on metamorphosis time and larva size. And yet, the doses we were using were up to a hundred times lower than the residue level authorized in water.”
“What can we conclude about humans from that?”
“We have no idea!” responded Tyrone Hayes. “But what’s incredible is that the pesticide evaluation system has never taken into account the fact that substances can interact or accumulate, or even create new molecules. It’s even more surprising given that pharmacists have known for centuries that it’s imperative to avoid mixing certain medications, at the risk of exposing oneself to serious side effects. For that matter, when the FDA authorizes a new drug, it always insists that the medicinal contraindications be detailed in the user instructions. Clearly, this kind of precaution is difficult to implement for pesticides. Imagine the EPA explaining to farmers: you can use pesticide A, as long as your neighbor at the farm next door doesn’t use pesticide B or C! It’s impossible! And, if it’s impossible, it means that these products have no business in the fields. In the meantime, knowing the ‘chemical body burden’ that characterizes every citizen in industrialized countries, we can effectively fear the worst.”
Get the book to read more
The book you want to get on this is called: Our Daily Poison – From Pesticides to Packaging How Chemicals Have Contaminated the Food Chain and Are Making Us Sick by Marie-Monique Robin, published in 2014. Click here to pick up the book at BN.com.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone