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Showing posts with label toxic. Show all posts

Saturday, 5 November 2011

10 Most Toxic Places on Earth

Any substance, no matter how seemingly benign it may be, can cause damage to an organism. Something as simple as water can easily become toxic since toxins are dose dependent. As the old saying goes, a couple of drops of poison can kill off an entire pond. Though we do our best to avoid toxic places, some areas of the world are so sick we, as humans, can not continue to ignore them. Here is an eyeopening glimpse into the 10 Most Toxic Places On Earth:

10. Karachay

Karachay, a small lake nestled in the Ural mountains in Western Russia, is home to a nuclear waste dumping site so radioactive it has been declared the most polluted locale on the planet. During the early 1950s, the Soviet Union began ditching radioactive waste from Mayak, a nuclear waste storage and reprocessing facility in Ozyorsk, into Lake Karachay. Many years later, the Worldwatch Institute on nuclear waste rendered the area "the most polluted spot on Earth." Radiation levels at the lake are so high that one hour of exposure is considered lethal. The accumulated levels of radioactivity are around 4.44 exabequerels (EBq) with 3.6 EBq of Caesium-137 and 0.74 EBq of Strontium-90. To give better perspective of how toxic Karachay is, the 1986 Chernobyl disaster released between 5 to 12 Ebq of unconcentrated radioactivity. Talk about melt your face off...

9. Aral Sea

The Aral Sea, located in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, was one of the world's four largest lakes until the waters that fed it were diverted for Soviet Union irrigation projects. By 2007, the Aral Sea shrank to a mere 10% of its original size and split into four basins. The resulting devastation to the areas surrounding the sea were catastrophically life threatening to the ecosystem, economy, and people residing near the lake. Toxic chemicals from weapons testing, industrial projects, pesticides, and fertilizer have runoff and been swept by winds into nearby lands and surrounding areas.

People nearby not only suffer from lack of fresh water but also cancer, lung disease, digestive disorders, antibiotic resistant tuberculosis, liver, eye, and kidney disorders, and of course, unusually high mortality rates. To worsen matters, salt from the lake is not only toxic but has a higher salinity than sea water, with levels from what remains of the South Aral measured in excess of 100g/L versus sea water salinity of 35 g/L. The huge plains of what used to be the waters of the Aral Sea are now exposed, causing toxic dust storms and wreaking havoc on crops and humans. Worse yet, the Aral Sea is suspected of contributing to global warming.

8. Fresh Kills Landfill

Staten Island is a borough of New York City, home not only to nearly half a million people, but also home to what was once one of the largest landfills known to man. In 1947, garbage from New York City and its surrounding suburbs was transported to Fresh Kills estuary located in Western Staten Island. The landfill was supposed to be just a temporary solution to what would become a longstanding waste problem. During the second part of the 20th century, the site grew to be 2,200 acres of trash stacked 25 meters taller than the Statue of Liberty. For decades, throes of rats, wild dogs, and other parasitic beasts called Fresh Kills home, feeding off decaying debris and chasing off workers of the landfill.

On March 22, 2001, the Environmental Protection Agency shut down Fresh Kills (and briefly reopened the area post 9/11 to sift through remnants of Ground Zero.) Remarkably, just two years following its shutdown, development to reclaim wetlands and reuse the site for a public parkland were unveiled, wrapped in a tidy 30 year plan destined to include room for nature trails, community events, outdoor dining, and sports fields. Beware if you plan your picnic at Fresh Kills and watch for disease carrying rats. Oh and remember that smell is just methane gases released from decomposing trash beneath your feet.

7. Yamuna River

The Yamuna is located in India and flows from the Yamunotri Glacier nestled in the Lower Himalayas and supplies water for 57 million people. As one of the largest tributaries of the Ganges River, the Yamuna travels approximately 855 miles through the entire Ganges Basin to places like Uttarakhand, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Predesh, and all the way to Delhi. The Yamuna is considered sacred by Hindus and popular lore states the Yamuna has the potential to free believers from the torments of death. A quick water test may cause believers to reconsider. The Yamuna has "reasonably good quality water" unless you're downriver from Wazirabad. From that point on, copious amounts of fertilizer, sewage drains, trash, herbicides, pesticides, and commercial or industrial have polluted the stream so to speak. It seems the Yamuna collects more than just glacier water as it winds through Bharat. Approximately 58 percent of Delhi's waste is sunk directly into its waters. Care for a garbage swim?

6. La Oroya

La Oroya is literally a smelted mining town located in the Peruvian Andes. Since 1922, the young and old living in La Oroya have breathed in toxic emissions and lived in toxic waste created by the poly-metallic smelter plant owned by a Missouri based company called Doe Run Corporation. La Oroya is home to not only the world's most critical levels of air pollution but also to the highest blood levels known to any children on the planet. An astoundingly astronomical NINETY NINE percent of the children who run and play in La Oroya have blood levels which exceed acceptable limits to qualify for lead poisoning. The plant is reportedly expected to decrease emissions and clean up any residual contamination. Like that will help poor kids who died or now live suffering with heart, bone, intestinal, reproductive, behavioral, and nervous system development issues caused by lead poisoning!

5. Kabwe

Kabwe-Ka Mukuba translates to "ore" or "smelting" so it follows that Kabwe is a mine located in Zambia. Though Kabwe outgrew its former name of Broken Hill, the mine has long been rendered one of the worst places on Earth. Originally one of the largest mining complexes, now Kabwe is a barren mess. Once all of the lead, zinc, silver, manganese, cadmium, vanadium, and titanium were extracted from Kabwe, the Blacksmith Institute found Broken Hill to be more than broken. It seems heavy metal tailings (or waste rock) from the mine, primarily zinc and lead, found their way into water supplies, affecting nearly 210,000 people. Additionally, lead and cadmium have been absorbed in areas around the mine, rendering the ground unusable for crops. Blood level lead concentrations in children of Kabwe are up to ten times U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards. The only good news from the whole mess may perhaps be the mine was officially shut down. Better news is the 1921 find of a human skull known as Broken Hill Man or Rhodesian Man, classified as Homo rhodesiensis or Homo heidelbergensis.

4. West Virginia Mountaintop Removal Mining

Disclaimer: tree huggers beware, this will give you nightmares. The most efficient means of completely obliterating purple mountain majesties is happening right in West Virginia's Appalachian Mountains. Though it seems cool to blow apart a mountain to find coal inside, mountaintop removal mining is perhaps the most destructive force caused by man. The process of mountaintop removal begins with clear cutting forests, removing soil, and making way for an 8 million pound dragline to push through rock to get to the coal. Machines then dig out layers upon layers of coal and dump the remains of the former mountaintop (aptly called "overburden") into valleys, blocking off over 1,200 miles of Appalachian headwater streams and rivers.

To further the ecological burden of a removed mountaintop, the process has been proven to increase erosion (a pretty nasty process when it occurs naturally) and increase polluted runoff. What's left after mountaintop removal mining is a COMPLETELY barren mountain, incapable of EVER sustaining life again.

3. Dzerzhinsk

Where was the only place on Earth where a death rate can exceed its birth rate by 260 percent during 2003? Dzerzhinsk. Located in Nizhy Novgorod Oblast, Russia along the Oka River, at approximately 250 miles east of Moscow, Dzerzhinsk is hands down the most chemically polluted place on Earth per the Guinness Book of World Records. Once Russia's primary chemical weapons production site, Dzerzhinsk is now home to approximately 300,000 tons of chemical waste dumped between 1930 until 1998.

The Blacksmith Institute found during a 2007 study that the life expectancy for men is 42 years and 47 years for women, compliments of dioxins, sarin, leeisite, sulfur mustard, hydrogen cyanide, phosgene, lead, phenol, and other chemicals in the air and water of the city. Additionally, the Ecology Committee of the Russian State Duma has ranked Dzerhinksk as one of the top ten cities with disastrous ecological conditions but the city administration claims otherwise. Local officials insist that pollution levels are moderate. Water tests, however, revealed contaminates were 17 million times higher than levels rendered safe by EPA standards. Better stick to beer if you're traveling through.

2. Matanza-Riachuelo River Basin

The Matanza-Riachuelo River is 64 kilometers long and home to 3.5 million people. Unfortunately, the people along the Matanza have only one source of water, straight from the place synonymous with pollution. The Matanza is filled with illegal sewage pipes draining directly into the river. Additionally, along Mantanza-Riachuelo's banks are 13 slums and 42 open garbage dumps. Residents and tourists have reported strong odors released from chemical residue and methane gas emitting from the River. Reports garnered attention from the Blacksmith Institute during 2007 and the Matanza-Riachuelo ranked on the list of the "Dirty Thirty" most polluted places in the world. The Matanza conjures that silly phrase "if it's yellow, let it mellow" but if it's stinkin', you might be sinkin'... into a puddle of toxicity.

1. Japan

Constant worry and conflicting reports from various world powers have caused mass confusion over the radioactive nightmare brewing in Japan, compliments of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The course of history changed when Fukushima, Japan's nuclear power plant located in the towns of Okuma and Futaba in the Futaba Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, was rendered as stable as an unmedicated bipolar sociopath by none other than Mother Nature. With a crisis looming in excess of $300 billion bucks, underground threats in the form of aftershocks, the upcoming typhoon season, and, of course, ever rising radiation levels, things on this planet will never be the same.

Things are so bad the Japanese government, notorious for denying the obvious, issued evacuation orders from areas within 20 kilometers of the crippled plant and stated anyone who enters the zone will be arrested. Hey folks, if a government makes it illegal to be within a certain distance of a leaking nuclear reactor, shouldn't we be asking more questions? Just how green is nuclear energy again?

From brainz @ http://brainz.org/10-most-toxic-places-earth/

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Saturday, 3 July 2010

The Dangers of Vaccines Toxic Mercury Injected Into Children

The Dangers of Vaccines

Toxic Mercury Injected Into Children

(MMR HPV Autism Gardasil Swine Flu H1N1Thimerosal)

Health authorities claim vaccines are safe and that they prevent infectious diseases. Yet these claims are contradicted by statistics and medical studies. See study links & Part 2 @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyaVxYYVfQE

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Thursday, 22 April 2010

The Perils of Plastic

Chemicals in plastics and other products seem harmless, but mounting evidence links them to health problems — and Washington lacks the power to protect its citizens…

By Bryan Walsh

Young children are subjected to plastics in their every day life such as eating utensils, plates, bowls that might contain dangerous toxins.

Photograph by James Day for TIME

On the first Earth Day, celebrated 40 years ago this month, the U.S. was a poisoned nation. Dense air pollution blanketed cities like Los Angeles, where smog alerts were a fact of life. Dangerous pesticides like DDT were still in use, and water pollution was rampant — symbolized by raging fires on Cleveland's Cuyahoga River…. But the green movement that was energized by Earth Day — and the landmark federal actions that followed it — changed much of that. Today air pollution is down significantly in most urban areas, the water is cleaner, and even the Cuyahoga is home to fish again. Though climate change looms as a long-term threat, the 40th anniversary of Earth Day will see a much cleaner country.
But if the land is healing, Americans may be sickening. Since World War II, production of industrial chemicals has risen rapidly, and the U.S. generates or imports some 42 billion lb. (19 billion kg) of them per day, leaving Americans awash in a sea of synthetics. These aren't the sorts of chemicals that come to mind when we picture pollution — huge plants spilling contaminated wastewater into rivers. Rather, they're the molecules that make good on the old "better living through chemistry" promise, appearing in items like unbreakable baby bottles and big-screen TVs.
Those chemicals have a habit of finding their way out of everyday products and into the environment — and ultimately into living organisms. A recent biomonitoring survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found traces of 212 environmental chemicals in Americans — including toxic metals like arsenic and cadmium, pesticides, flame retardants and even perchlorate, an ingredient in rocket fuel. "It's not the environment that's contaminated so much," says Dr. Bruce Lanphear, director of the Cincinnati Children's Environmental Health Center. "It's us." (See pictures of the world's most polluted places.)
As scientists get better at detecting the chemicals in our bodies, they're discovering that even tiny quantities of toxins can have a potentially serious impact on our health — and our children's future. Chemicals like bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates — key ingredients in modern plastics — may disrupt the delicate endocrine system, leading to developmental problems.
A host of modern ills that have been rising unchecked for a generation — obesity, diabetes, autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder — could have chemical connections. "We don't give environmental exposure the attention it deserves," says Dr. Philip Landrigan, director of the Children's Environmental Health Center at New York City's Mount Sinai Medical Center. "But there's an emerging understanding that kids are uniquely susceptible to environmental hazards." (See the top 10 household toxins.)
If scientists were slow to arrive at that conclusion, Washington has been even slower. The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), the 34-year-old vehicle for federal chemical regulation, has generally been a failure. The burden of proving chemicals dangerous falls almost entirely on the government, while industry confidentiality privileges built into the TSCA deny citizens and federal regulators critical information about how substances are made and what their effects are. In the years since the TSCA became law, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been able to issue restrictions on only a handful of chemicals and has lacked the power to ban even a dangerous carcinogen like asbestos.
But change is coming. The Obama Administration is taking a closer look at chemicals, with the EPA late last month launching a new investigation into BPA. More important, Congress may finally be ready to act. New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg is expected to draft legislation soon that would give the TSCA the teeth it needs. "It's obvious that the system doesn't work," says Lautenberg. "We can't permit this assault on our children's health — and our own health — to continue." (See pictures of the effects of global warming.)

The Low-Dose Threat

His name was Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim, known to his contemporaries as Paracelsus and to students of science as the "father of toxicology." The 16th century Swiss physician pioneered the use of chemicals in medicine. His dictum "The dose makes the poison" — that even toxic substances can be safe as long as the amount remains below a certain threshold — is still a bedrock principle for modern toxicologists.
That helps explain why industrial chemicals never received the stricter regulatory oversight that drugs and pesticides did. Even if the chemicals used to help make a plastic bottle could infiltrate the human body, the thinking went, surely the dose would be too low to do any harm. But as biomonitoring improved — we can now detect human exposure levels as small as one part per trillion, or about one-twentieth of a drop of water in an Olympic-size swimming pool — scientists realized that people were carrying far more chemicals than we'd thought.
At the same time, scientists learned that some toxins could harm at extremely low levels; the limit considered safe for lead, which can directly reduce IQ, has been lowered from 60 micrograms per deciliter of blood in 1970 to 10 micrograms today. Some chemicals like BPA may have strange effects even at very low doses. Invented in 1891, BPA has been used since the 1940s to harden polycarbonate plastics and make epoxy resin, used in the lining of food and beverage containers, among other products. Polycarbonates can be identified by the recycling number 7 on the bottom of some plastics containing it. Other plastic ingredients — including potentially dangerous ones — are also indicated by the recycling number, known as the resin identification code.
BPA does its job well, and today some 6 billion lb. (2.7 billion kg) of the chemical are produced globally each year. The problem is, BPA is also a synthetic estrogen, and plastics with BPA can break down, especially when they're washed, heated or stressed, allowing the chemical to leach into food and water and then enter the human body. That happens to nearly all of us; the CDC has found BPA in the urine of 93% of surveyed Americans over the age of 6. If you don't have BPA in your body, you're not living in the modern world. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2009.)
The levels observed are considered well below the federal safety threshold of 50 micrograms per kg of body weight per day. But that recommendation was made 22 years ago, and in the time since, scientists have learned more about the effects of even a bit of BPA. In 1998, Patricia Hunt, a geneticist at Washington State University, found that female mice dosed with BPA had serious reproductive problems, including defective eggs. More recently, she published a study showing that the offspring of mice exposed to BPA while pregnant can end up with corrupted eggs, a situation that leads to trouble for their offspring. "That's a powerful effect," says Hunt. "You disrupt three generations with one exposure."
As a synthetic estrogen, BPA can mimic hormones, those powerful chemicals, like testosterone and adrenaline, that run the body. Tiny amounts of hormones produce immense biological and behavioral changes, so it stands to reason that a chemical that mirrors a hormone might do the same, especially if a human being were exposed to it during critical periods of development, like the first trimester of gestation. (Children are particularly vulnerable to chemical exposure, not just because their smaller bodies are developing rapidly but also because they eat and drink more relative to their body weight than adults.) That's exactly what dozens of scientists have found in animal studies, linking fetal BPA exposure in rodents to everything from mammary cancer to male genital defects and even neurobehavioral problems.
Nor is BPA the only industrial chemical in common use that may mess with the endocrine system. Phthalates — a class of chemicals used to soften polyvinyl chloride plastics, found in products ranging from shower curtains to cosmetics to intravenous-fluid bags — have been shown to disrupt hormones in animals and have been linked to reduced sperm counts and other marks of feminization in male rodents. Ditto for a class of long-lived chemical fire retardants known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), used in electronics, polyurethane foam and other plastics, though they're being phased out. (PBDEs can remain in the body for years. BPA and phthalates are excreted within a day or so, but their ubiquity means we're exposing ourselves anew almost daily.)
While there are fewer studies of endocrine disrupters in humans than in animals, the ones that have been conducted have begun to show worrying associations. Higher levels of phthalates and other endocrine disrupters have been linked to earlier breast development in girls — a possible risk factor for breast cancer — and endocrine disrupters are a suspect in the rise in hypospadias, a correctable deformity of the urethra in boys. A 2008 study by Shanna Swan, director of the Center for Reproductive Epidemiology at the University of Rochester, found that boys born to women with high phthalate exposure during pregnancy were more likely to have genital abnormalities like undescended testicles and smaller penises than those born to women who had lower exposure. "I worry what will happen to these children as adults, whether they'll have reproductive problems," says Swan. "We're trying to piece that question together."
The science around endocrine disrupters is far from settled. Studies like Swan's show a correlation between phthalate exposure and developmental defects, but that doesn't mean the chemicals are causing the problems. Industry defenders point out that human exposure to BPA and phthalates is still well below safety levels set by the government and that health agencies around the world say the chemicals are safe for humans. And some peer-reviewed studies fail to show a positive connection between endocrine disrupters like BPA and health defects. "I think the research [on BPA] has been overhyped," says Richard Sharpe, an investigator at the Centre for Reproductive Biology at the Queen's Medical Research Institute in Edinburgh. "If you restrict the question to its estrogenic effects, I just don't see them."
The scientific consensus, however, has been moving away from the idea that BPA is completely safe. When researchers began raising alarms about BPA in the late 1990s, they were in the minority. Under the Bush Administration, the FDA reviewed the chemical and ruled it safe. But that report was criticized by the agency's own science-review board for relying almost exclusively on industry-funded studies. In 2008 Canada deemed infant exposure to BPA potentially unsafe and banned the sale of baby bottles that use the chemical — a step later taken by a number of American states and major retailers, including Walmart. Though European regulators declared BPA safe in a 2008 assessment, last month Denmark enacted a ban on BPA in baby bottles.
In 2009 the International Endocrine Society released a statement declaring that endocrine disrupters were a significant concern for public health and called for regulation to reduce human exposure. And even the FDA has changed its tune somewhat: in January the agency expressed "some concern" over BPA as the Obama Administration launched a $30 million study of the chemical. "Especially given that children in the early stages of development are exposed to BPA, the data and the research deserve a closer look," Dr. Josh Sharfstein, the FDA's principal deputy commissioner, told reporters at the time.
The woman in charge of that closer look is Linda Birnbaum, head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the National Toxicology Program. A scientist who has spent decades in government service, Birnbaum isn't quite ready to give up on Paracelsus' axiom, but she knows that toxicology has to catch up with the real world.
Scientists must realize that the body doesn't encounter a single chemical in isolation — though that's how tests are done — but a number of chemicals in combination, which might interact in unpredictable ways. The dose may still make the poison, but we'll never know unless we test the chemical soup we actually experience in the world — unless, that is, we find the environmentally relevant dose. "There's been a tendency to ask the old questions in the old way," says Birnbaum. "But if it's dark and you only look for your keys under the lamppost and they're not right there, you'll never find them."
Good science means widening that search, asking not only which chemicals may play a role in illnesses — essentially, where else the keys might be — but also how those chemicals do their damage. Certain substances — including BPA and some phthalates — seem to be able to switch in vitro cells from becoming connective tissue to becoming fat cells, and a 2009 study from Belgium found that children exposed to higher levels of toxic chemicals like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) before birth were fatter than those who had lower exposure. Even autism, which remains a mystery, may have environmental triggers. (Vaccines have been repeatedly exonerated in autism debates, a conclusion that's accepted even by scientists who see the possibility of other environmental risk factors in the condition.)
And a recent study by Swan found that women who had higher levels of phthalate exposure during pregnancy were more likely to have children with behavioral problems. None of this is proof, but all of it is worrisome. "We need to know where these chemicals are and what they're doing to us," says New York Representative Louise Slaughter, author of legislation that would establish a new research program focused on endocrine disrupters. "We shouldn't be in the dark."

http://greeneartharticles.com/images/PlasticPollution/Marine_debris_on_Hawaiian_coast.jpg

Failure to Protect

If you want to market a new drug, you need to convince the FDA — in multiple tests, over the course of years — that it won't cause serious harm. If you want to sell a new pesticide, you need to prove the same thing. The burden of proof is on manufacturers to make the grade, and government regulators are the final judge.
But if you want to market a new chemical for use in a product — even one that will come into contact with children or pregnant women — it's up to the EPA to prove that it's unsafe, using whatever data are provided by the chemical company, with little power to ask for more. And if it's one of the 62,000 chemicals that were already in use when the TSCA went into effect in 1976 — a category that includes BPA — chances are it was never really tested by the government at all. "Chemicals are deemed safe until the EPA can prove that they are dangerous," says Richard Wiles, executive director of the nonprofit Environmental Working Group. "It's completely backward."
The result is a catch-22 for regulators and an information vacuum for consumers. Chemical companies don't have to develop toxicity data or submit it to the EPA for an existing product unless the agency finds that it will pose an unreasonable risk to human health or the environment — which is difficult to do if the agency doesn't have much data in the first place. The EPA can issue rules requiring testing, but that can take years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars — which helps explain why the agency has required testing for only about 200 of the 83,000 chemicals in the TSCA inventory and has issued restrictions on just five. (Companies have voluntarily agreed to provide the EPA with some data about the most common chemicals, but there's no guarantee that the data will be timely or complete.)
The TSCA also gives the industry wide latitude to claim confidentiality on products, so nearly 17,000 of those chemicals are virtual trade secrets. It's no surprise that the Government Accountability Office has reported that the TSCA is in desperate need of reform. "The only fix is to change this law or modernize it," says EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.
The good news is that more than 30 years after the TSCA was signed, the pieces may finally be in place for much needed retooling. Jackson has made chemical-safety reform one of the top priorities of her energetic administration, and on Capitol Hill, the tenacious, 86-year-old Lautenberg and Illinois Representative Bobby Rush are pushing to craft an update to the TSCA and may have legislation ready to introduce after the Easter break. Even the chemical industry has admitted a need to reform the TSCA and is ready to negotiate. "Science has advanced a long way since the TSCA was adopted, and we recognize that more can be done to create a system that people have comfort and confidence in," says Cal Dooley, president and CEO of the American Chemistry Council.
But agreeing on the need for reform is a long way from agreeing on how to reform. One model might be the safety laws recently put into place by the European Union, called REACH, which shift the burden of proof to industry, requiring chemical companies to prove that their products don't harm human health or the environment and to obtain special authorization for any chemicals of very high concern. The American chemical industry has reservations about a REACH-style program in the U.S., citing the cost of additional regulations, but such a change could represent a long-overdue safety step. "It would make a major difference if we could do for chemicals what we do now for pesticides and drugs," says Richard Denison, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund.
Reform alone, though, won't defuse the basic debate over how much of an impact chemicals really are having on human health — and when protective measures may go too far. Nearly everything we buy, sell and use depends on chemicals, and the industry employs 803,000 Americans. Replacing the keystone ingredients of modern life would be challenging, not to mention costly. And smarter regulation won't change the fact that the science on chemicals and health — especially for complex endocrine disrupters — will never be clear-cut, no matter how many studies each side carries out.
"You can ban BPA all you want, but if there are no better materials, you'll just move to the next case," says Joel Tickner, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts' School of Health and Environment. "We need solutions that will be win-win."
One such solution may lie in the new field of green chemistry, in which chemicals are designed in a way that minimizes hazardous risk from the start. Less a practice than a philosophy, green chemistry seeks to sidestep the debate altogether by engineering products not only to be nontoxic but also to leave no dangerous residue and to use less energy.
The EPA's Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards recognize achievements in sustainable design like a new biocatalytic process for cosmetics that uses no toxic solvents, and at last month's annual meeting of the American Chemical Society, more than 1,600 of 12,000 presentations were dedicated to sustainability. "There'll be a day in the future when all chemistry is going to be green," says John Warner, director of the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry. "In that world we'd never need regulation again."
But even Warner admits that such a day is far off. Meanwhile, we'll need to decide just how cautious we want to be as a society. "Science isn't just about data," says the NIEHS's Birnbaum. "It's about the interpretation of data." That interpretation, ultimately, won't be up to scientists. It will be up to us. The lesson of Earth Day, 40 years on, is that smart policy — fired by popular will — can make a difference that we can see. The question is whether we'll bring the same passion to environmental threats that are invisible but could be just as dangerous.

From - http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1976909_1976908,00.html

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Saturday, 20 March 2010

Monsanto: The evil corporation in your refrigerator

by Bob Cesca

When we consider the rogue's gallery of devilish, over-sized, greedy and disproportionately powerful corporations, we generally come up with outfits like Microsoft, Bechtel, AIG, Halliburton, Goldman-Sachs, Exxon-Mobil and the United States Senate. Yet somehow, Monsanto, arguably the most devilish, over-sized, greedy and disproportionately powerful corporation in the world has been able to more or less skulk between the raindrops -- only a household name in households where documentaries like Food Inc. are regarded as light Friday evening entertainment. My house, for example. But for the most part, if you were to ask an average American for their list of sinister corporations, Monsanto probably wouldn't make the cut.

It should.

Founded by Missouri pharmacist John Francis Queeny in 1901, Monsanto is literally everywhere. Just about every non-organic food product available to consumers has some sort of connection with Monsanto.

Anyone who can read a label knows that corn, soy and cotton can be found in just about every American food product. Upwards of 90% of all corn, soybeans and cotton are grown from genetically engineered seeds, also known as genetically modified organisms (GMOs). These genetically enhanced products appear in around 70% of all American processed food products. And Monsanto controls 90% of all genetically engineered seeds. In other words, Monsanto controls -- and owns patents on -- most of the American food supply.

When you consider, as Walletpop originally reported, that one-in-four food labels is inaccurate, that the F.D.A.'s testing is weak at best, then how can we trust one corporation to have so much control over our produce? The answer is, we can't.
Recently, a study by the International Journal of Biological Sciences revealed that Monsanto's Mon 863, Mon 810, and Roundup herbicide-absorbing NK 603 in corn caused kidney and liver damage in laboratory rats. Scientists also discovered damage to the heart, spleen, adrenal glands and even the blood of rats that consumed the mutant corn. A "state of hepatorenal toxicity" the study concluded.

This hasn't slowed down Monsanto's profit machine. In 2008, Monsanto cleared over $2 billion in net profits on $11 billion in revenues. And its 2009 is looking equally as excellent.
Author and food safety advocate Robyn O'Brien told me, "Monsanto is expecting gross margins in Q2 2010 of 62%, its corn and soy price mix to be up 8-10% and its glyphosate revenue to expand to an estimated $1 billion in gross profit by 2012, enabling Monsanto to further drive R&D into seeds and to price those seeds at a premium – further driving price increases on the farm and in the grocery stores."

This, O'Brien says, in the same year when farm income declined by around 34%.

Because Monsanto claims that its GMOs create higher yields and therefore comparatively higher revenues per acre for struggling American farmers, they're certainly a tempting option. On the surface, that is. Monsanto controls its seeds with an iron fist, so even if you happen to own a farm next to another farm upon which Monsanto seeds are used, and if those seeds migrate onto your land, Monsanto can sue you for royalties.

Additionally, if you use seeds from crops grown from Monsanto seeds, a process known as "seed cleaning," you also have to pay royalties to Monsanto or it will sue you. All told, Monsanto has recovered $15 million in royalties by suing farmers, with individual settlements ranging from five figures to millions of dollars each.

Back in 2004, farmer Kem Ralph served eight months in jail and was fined $1.3 million for lying about Monsanto cotton seeds he was hiding in his barn as a favor to a friend. They weren't even his seeds (yeah, that's what they all say!). By way of comparison, the fine in Ralph's home state of Tennessee for, say, cocaine possession, is $2,500.

In keeping with the Orwellian nature of modern marketing, one of the first phrases you see on the front page of the Monsanto website is "we help farmers." Funny. In a cruelly ironical way, that is.

In fairness, the argument in support of Monsanto is generally "it makes more food for lower prices." Of course this is a red herring. Basic economics proves that choice and competition create lower prices. Not monopolies. This applies not only to American grocery stores, but also in terms of feeding developing nations where food is scarcer. Moreover, stronger Monsanto herbicides, compatible with herbicide resistant seeds, are giving rise to mutant Wolverine-ish super weeds that have adapted and are rapidly spreading through the air to farms that don't use Monsanto GMOs, destroying obviously vulnerable crops. Say nothing of the inevitable mutant bugs that will adapt to the pesticides that are implanted into the Monsanto Mon 810 genetic code. And if further studies indicate similar organ damage in humans, the externalized costs to health care systems will begin to seriously out-weigh the benefits of cheaper food.

Ultimately, there are better, healthier ways to make cheaper food. Until then the best thing we can do is to demand further investigations and buy organic products whenever practical.

And if you can't afford to buy organic, O'Brien recommends, "A great first step, given how pervasive these ingredients are in processed foods that often use these ingredients to extend shelf life, is to reduce your exposure to processed foods and stick with pronounceable ingredients and foods that your grandmother would have served her kids."

Meanwhile, let's endeavor to make Monsanto a household name. But not in a good way.

On January 15, the Obama Justice Department launched an anti-trust investigation against the corporate behemoth over its next generation of genetically modified "Roundup Ready" soybean seeds. The very next day, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms, which challenges the safety of genetically modified agricultural products -- the centerpiece of the Monsanto empire. If the investigation fails, farmers will have to switch over to the next generation of Roundup Ready seeds in 2014. And the cycle of corporate abuse and monopolization will continue.