Originally published January 25 2006
Novelist raises the alarm about synthetic pesticide use and its impact on public health
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Novelist Audrey Schulman discusses the dangerous contamination of the environment with synthetic pesticides and the risks to public health that these chemicals and their testing pose.
According to the U.S. EPA, about 5 billion pounds of pesticides were used in the U.S. in 2001.
We're still on a learning curve that began in the 1940s.
Today, each new active ingredient must pass more than 100 safety tests to be legally registered.
At the EPA website, I found a seemingly thorough list of tests that examined chemicals' effects on birds, mammals, fish, invertebrates, and plants.
I called EPA press officer Enesta Jones, who said she had no problem with manufacturers overseeing safety experiments.
(The agency's role does not include enforcement of the tolerance levels it establishes, a duty that falls to the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture.)
Now, I've always been impressed with science, which seems to be one of the few fields that hasn't recently suffered some large scandal.
They are rarely published in peer-reviewed journals, and must often be requested through the Freedom of Information Act, a process that can take years.
A professor of developmental endocrinology at the University of California-Berkeley, Hayes published an article in BioScience (yes, it's peer-reviewed) in which he compared several previous experiments performed by others on the effect of atrazine on frogs' sexual differentiation.
Every one of the Syngenta-funded studies concluded that atrazine did not affect amphibian gonads, while all but one of the independent studies found that the chemical did have an effect, sometimes at the level of one-tenth part per billion in water.
And here's more: last year, Alan Lockwood, professor of neurology and nuclear medicine at the State University of New York at Buffalo, published an analysis in the (peer-reviewed) American Journal of Public Health of the pesticide tests on humans that he could get access to through FOIA.
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