I'm looking at a new newsweek right now and there's a little blurb about toxic chemicals in americans. One is dimethylphosphate. It was detected in most americans. They say it has been shown to cause cancer in lab animals, but they don't know how it affects humans. Alrite, this scares me for a few reasons. First of all, why do the animal testing if you can't even apply it? Why give rats and monkeys and dogs cancer if you can't even reach any sort of conclusion from it? Second, if it is causing cancer and birth defects in several species of lab animals, then I think it'd be safe to say it probably is having the same affect in humans. Now I realize that this country depends on industry, and that includes intensive factory agribusiness, but the fact that this stuff is in all our bodies is a testament to the favoring of business over the common good (just look at the recent co2 and arsenic rulings!) To think that people are dying of cancers and various other diseases just because it's cost effective to use these chemicals! Sorry, but I just needed to get all that out.

-- Elizabeth (Lividia66@aol.com), March 26, 2001

Answers

Know what else is scary? Places where they paid inspectors off so they could dump chemicals down the drain or in a creek. Then there are the trucks that open the valve and drive around rural areas. How about the fact that most government standards are place on what most people can tolerate, not accept, tolerate.

I truly believe this is why more people are having Epstein Barr, Fibromyalgia, Lupus, Chronic Fatigue, Closed Building Syndrome, Cancer and others. Not to mention children who have ADD and ADHD. Our bodies are becoming too overloaded by chemicals and do not have ways to clean them out. Didn't I hear somewhere that they no longer have to emblam a body right away because of all the formaldehyde absorbed? Hey, just look at the ingredients of a Tweenie.

-- Dee (gdgtur@goes.com), March 26, 2001.

For any of you who get Wisconsin Public Television, there's a Bill Moyers special on at 8pm (I think that's the time) tonight about this very topic. The previews looked pretty interesting.

-- Rose Marie Wild (wintersongfarm@yahoo.com), March 26, 2001.

There is another active thread also discussing this subject. See "PBS Program - March 26 - Exposure to Chemicals"

-- Lynn Goltz (lynngoltz@aol.com), March 26, 2001.

Saw the PBS show.... Always knew I liked Bill Moyers! Saw the interview afterwards where the attorney and the guy representing the chemical industry (their 'spin' doctor) made complete fools of themselves...

It is also interesting to note that it wasn't until all these synthetic chemicals came into play that we had so many mass murders, kids killing kids, child abuse etc... I know these things have all been around forever, and that reporting and communications are soooo much better too.... But. We didn't have the sheer number of incidents that we do now.....

-- Sue Diederich (willow666@rocketmail.com), March 27, 2001.

Sue, how did you like the smarmy, greasy chemical company rep's saying something about when he was with the EPA. That fox wasn't guarding the henhouse, he was in it!

Considering the source of the current first family's (deliberately not capitalized) fortunes is the oil industry, I don't see anything changing in the next 4 years either, do you?

-- marilyn (rainbow@ktis.net), March 27, 2001.

The attitude that prevails concerning pesticides amazes me. We live across the street from a cherry orchard. Last spring the aerial sprayer didn't bother to turn off the spray as he went over our home as well as many neighbors.Not once, but on three different occasions. We try to be good neighbors and understand all about drift but this was a bit too much. We called the state and requested a bit of government interference. The spraying could have been done in a manner which sould have taken us out of the flight path but since no one had complained in 15 years, why bother. So when I hear how the people who use these chemicals are highly trained and regulated, I say B S. The sprayer was faced with possible termination of his license so we withdrew the complaint so as not to impact the livlihood of many people in the area. In the future , I would assume he would be more careful. I have to laugh when I hear the 'sheep' assume that big business or the govt' will take care of the interest of the little guy without prompting. We recently were looking at an issue of old life magazines which showed a pic of a government spray truck coming down some east coast beach advertising how the DDT they were spraying was making life so much better for 'the little people'. Next to the vehicle were swimming suit clad people happy in the fact that they could trust the experts. Hmmmm.

-- jz (oz49us@yahoo.com), March 27, 2001.

When I lived in NC, the soybean field about 50' from our house always got aerial sprayed. When we moved there and planted a garden right next to the house, the first fly-over killed it. Wonder what it did to us.

-- Elizabeth (Lividia66@aol.com), March 27, 2001.

Yes, Elizabeth. And when I was a kid in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the spray trucks would come around regularly and fog the neighborhoods for mosquitos. We did go in the house because it smelled, but NOT because we were told to! I'm pretty pollyanna about most things because it's become just too big, too scarey, too late.... but I start to get rather doomsdayish when I hear so much about Mad Cow and the recent hoof & mouth outbreaks. I just boo-hoo when I see huge loads of sheep off to be destroyed on the news. Here in NM we are having a 'little' problem with arsenic in the water. Hmmm, wonder where that came from? Mining, maybe? And you know that when the city gov starts to warn people that they're going to be fined for watering their stupid lawns at noon (it's a desert, folks), that it's already too late, we ARE out of water. Lots of mental gymnastics on my part, but, I start to think to myself, "what have we done?" I ramble. dh in nm

-- debra in nm (dhaden@nmtr.unm.edu), March 28, 2001.

Read the post below title Interesting Article on Mad Cow Disease.... The guy who wrote is implicates organophosphates with the disease. Truly interesting.

Working in the environmental industry, I am frustrated daily be EPA's misguided attempts at pollution control. It has taken EPA how many years to reach the conclusion that there are some chemicals (Persistent Biological Toxins or PBT) that just don't belong in our environment and should have been banned years ago at the manufacturing level. This was common knowledge -- but money and agribusiness won out. At the same time (and even now), EPA inspectors were (and are) most concerned with red-tape minutia that don't impact or help the environment and human health one bit.

Why? There is a culture in EPA of simplemindedness -- policemen and politicians out to get you (for career advancement) rather than solve the difficult problems. In my experience, EPA is more concerned with the easy kills (beating up small business) than getting to the root of the problems. For example, small businesses are routinely cited for not taping closed boxes of spent fluorescent tubes and sealing drums of empty aerosol cans (hazardous wastes) even though they are trying to do the right thing and properly dispose of the wastes. I remember one time where a business was filtering paint stripper to reuse it by letting the solids settle in a barrel and only disposing of the solids; EPA said "No" that it was unpermitted recycling, forcing the company to buy new solvent every single time rather than using the same thing over and over. At the same time, landscape companies across the country are spraying God-knows-what to keep the golf courses pretty and households routinely dump really nasty chemicals (paint strippers, old pesticides, solvents, etc) down the drain.

I agree wholeheartedly with EPA's mission (else I wouldn't be in this business) but cringe at their methods, lack of foresight, and lack of common sense. There are some good things at EPA (Brownfields program, pollution prevention initiatives, etc) but they are sadly overshadowed by a dog-eat-dog mentality that promotes advancement only by "getting" someone rather than solving a problem.

This careless attitude only adds fuel to the current anti- environmental (Republican) backlash. I found it interesting that EPA recently announced that they could not comply with a new regulation requiring them to consolidate all of their legal requirements for small businesses in one place on the internet. If EPA can't figure out their own bureaucracy, then how can they expect small businesses to? This red tape is largely paperwork that ends up gathering dust on a shelf and doesn't help the environment one bit. It is also red tape that gives the environmental movement a bad name. This red tape is sadly leading George W. Bush to a victory in dismantling 30 years of environmental progress on truly important issues such as global warming and biological toxins.

-- Michael Nuckols (nuckolsm@wildak.net), March 29, 2001.

Now hear this! I am all for using as few chemicals as is possible. As a matter of fact I would prefer none... I garden organically, am somewhat of a health freak, very aware of all of the chemical sensitivity, carcinogenic, hormonal imbalance, ADD, autism, allergies, gastro intestinal difficulties, ad nauseum correlations between the use odf pesticides and chemical dumping, but for CRYIN OUT LOUD, what in the heck does Dubya Bush have to do with it???? Try smacking Monsanto, Dow, Cargill, Tyson, point where it originates and stop polarizing people along a stupid two party system line of "reasoning". It's hogwash, and it only causes people to line up opposite each other when there are REAL things they can agree on and fight for/against together with out the mamby pamby stupidity of democrats vs. republicans...come on, please.

-- Doreen (animalwaitress@excite.com), March 29, 2001.

Doreen, I agree that Bush is not to blame for all this, but I definitely believe he will happily turn a blind eye to it. Not that most politicians wouldn't, but it just seems, with him revoking all the decent environmental stuff previous administrations have tried to establish, he's obviously catering to the big companies, including Dow and all the other bad guys. I'm really not trying to turn it into a dem vs. rep issue, if he were a democrat doing this, I would be just as upset.

-- Elizabeth (Lividia66@aol.com), March 29, 2001.

Have you read and reviewed the entire legislation? There are things which sound good and are definitely not. I haven't read the entire agreement that he just spurned, yet I honestly don't think that any law is going to protect us from this garbage that is being thrown into the environment. The EPA is so full of faux pas it isn't even funny. There are many places to start with this, but we have to stop lobbying first before we can pretend that our laws are going to be anything that is effective in any kind of fight. Knowlege is the most important weapon. It's best to work at a grass roots level to distribute it as well or you end up with bureaucracies which are notoriously inefficient and compromised. Sorry, it just is counter productive to enter into the dem pub arena, and unless Bush starts to do things through executive orders to bypass legislation there is truly little that he can do besides send something back to congress. If he takes to the king's edicts like Mr. Bill was so fond of doing then we can hang him high with REASON. I expect that he may, but he hasn't yet.

-- Doreen (animalwaitress@excite.com), March 29, 2001.

I find it hideous that we are now saddled with the likes of Gale Norton, Bush's gift to the anti-environmental agenda. Besides catering to Bush's proposed opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, this woman recently worked as a registered lobbyist for NL Industries -- formerly known as National Lead Company -- which is a defendant in cases involving scores of waste disposal sites and at least a dozen more cases involving children poisoned by lead paint.

She also founded the Coucil of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy -- who are actually a group sponsored by mining, chemical, and chlorine industries.

Whose pocket do you think she's in? Who appointed her? SHE is going to protect the health of our environment? This strikes me as asking the fox to guard the hens.

-- julie f. (rumplefrogskin@excite.com), March 30, 2001.

Good heavens, folks, you've lived in this country long enough to know that if you eat it, drink it, smoke it, breathe it or screw it, you're gonna die....or get cancer!!!

Just heard a report about rickets in children. Once vitamin D was added to the milk, the disease was gone. Rickets is back, and they're blaming it on the milk substitutes like soy.

-- ~Rogo (rogo2020@yahoo.com), March 30, 2001.