Let us embalm you ! Formaldehyde is not ok in our clothing or our food !
For years, the chemical industry has been winning a political battle to keep formaldehyde from being declared a known carcinogen.
The industry’s chief lobby group, the American Chemistry Council, has persuaded members of Congress that the findings of both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services were wrong and should be reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences.
In 2011, the academy did indeed criticize the EPA’s report on formaldehyde for being unclear. The chemical industry then used that critique to delay dozens of other ongoing evaluations of potentially toxic chemicals.
But on Friday, the academy issued a second report, which found in effect that government scientists were right all along when they concluded that formaldehyde can cause three rare forms of cancer.
“We are perplexed as to why today’s report differs so greatly from the 2011” report, Cal Dooley, president and chief executive officer of the American Chemistry Council, said in a statement titled “The Safety of Formaldehyde is Well-Studied and Supported by Robust Science.”
Part of the disparity is that in the 2011 report, Congress asked the academy only to critique the EPA’s draft assessment rather than evaluate the dangers of formaldehyde itself. The panel concluded that the EPA’s report was too long, repetitive and lacked explanation.
But after reviewing the scientific evidence itself, the academy concluded on Friday that formaldehyde is indeed a known carcinogen.
Formaldehyde is widely used in wood products and clothing.
via National Academy of Sciences agrees with EPA that formaldehyde causes cancer | Center for Public Integrity.
Environmental toxins – Michael Skinner’s reproductive biology lab at Washington State University first reported in 2005 that injecting pregnant rats with an endocrine disruptor fungicidecaused sperm abnormalities that persisted in the male progeny for at least 4 generations [4]. The effects on reproduction correlate with altered DNA methylation pattern in the germ line (though the methylation differences vary widely among the animals, and failed to satisfy his critics [5]).
Subsequently, they found that insecticides DDT and permethrin, jet fuel, plastic additives phthalates and bisphenol A, and dioxin can all trigger trans-generational health effects in rats such as obesity and ovarian disease, and each resulted in a different pattern of methylation in sperm DNA, according to Skinner.
via Sperm-Mediated Inheritance of Acquired Characters.
Detection of Glyphosate Residues in Animals and Humans
Glyphosate (N-phosphonomethyl glycine) is registered as herbicide for many food and non-food crops as well as non-crop areas where total vegetation control is desired. The predominating uses of glyphosate, in descending order, are stubble management, pre-sowing application and pre-harvest application (desiccation). Glyphosate is also used to prevent weeds in fields with glyphosate resistant genetically modified (GM) crops like soybean, rapeseed, corn, etc. Since 1996 the amount and the number of genetically engineered crops dramatically increased worldwide. It is estimated that 90% of the transgenic crops grown worldwide are glyphosate resistant [1]. The rapidly growing problem of glyphosate-resistant weeds is reflected in steady increases in the use of glyphosate on crops. Steams, leaves and beans of glyphosate resistant soy are contaminated with glyphosate. Moreover, due to the intensive use of glyphosate it was frequently detected in water, rain and air.
via Detection of Glyphosate Residues in Animals and Humans – detection-of-glyphosate-residues-in-animals-and-humans-2161-0525.1000210.pdf.
One little piglet was born with only one large eye. A second piglet was missing an ear. A third piglet had a large hole in its skull. A fourth piglet had a monstrously huge “elephant tongue.” A female piglet was born with testes. Still others had malformed limbs, spines, skulls and gastrointestinal tracts.
The pigs in question belonged to a Danish pig farmer. For three years he had fed his pigs ordinary, non-genetically modified soy. When he ran out, he bought the cheaper genetically modified (GM) soy pig feed. His herdsman, unaware of the feed switch, immediately noticed that the pigs lost their appetite and that the piglets developed diarrhea. Even worse was the sudden and shocking increase in birth defects. The farmer, eager to understand the cause, had 38 of the deformed pigs euthanized and tested for glyphosate, the herbicide used on the GM soy. The results were published in the April 2014 issue of the Journal of Environmental and Analytic Toxicology. The samples of lung, liver, kidney, brain, gut wall, heart and muscle all tested positive.
Glyphosate is the world’s most frequently used herbicide.
via One Little Piggy Had Birth Defects: Is Monsanto’s Roundup to Blame?.
The GMO Fight Ripples Down the Food Chain – WSJ
Two years ago, Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc. initiated a plan to eliminate genetically modified ingredients from its ice cream, an effort to address a nascent consumer backlash and to fulfill its own environmental goals.
This fall, nearly a year behind schedule, it expects to finish phase one, affecting its flavorful “chunks and swirls” like cookie dough and caramel. The only part left to convert: the milk that makes ice cream itself. Thanks to the complexities of sourcing milk deemed free of genetically modified material, that could take five to 10 more years.
“There’s a lot more that goes into it than people realize,” said Rob Michalak, Ben & Jerry’s director of social mission.
Two decades after the first genetically engineered seeds were sold commercially in the U.S., genetically modified organisms—the crops grown from such seeds—are the norm in the American diet, used to make ingredients in about 80% of packaged food, according to industry estimates. (Take a quiz about GMOs.)
Corporate Intelligence
Q&A: What Do I Need to Know About GMO Food?
Now an intensifying campaign, spearheaded by consumer and environmental advocacy groups like Green America, is causing a small but growing number of mainstream food makers to jettison genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. In addition to Ben & Jerry’s, a subsidiary of Unilever ULVR.LN +0.63% PLC, General Mills Inc. GIS +0.89% this year started selling its original flavor Cheerios without GMOs. Post Holdings Inc. took the GMOs out of Grape-Nuts. Boulder Brands Inc. BDBD +1.27% ‘s Smart Balance has converted to non-GMO for its line of margarine and other spreads. Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. CMG +1.13% is switching to non-GMO corn tortillas.
“Non-GMO” is one of the fastest-growing label trends on U.S. food packages, with sales of such items growing 28% last year to about $3 billion, according to market-research firm Nielsen. In a poll of nearly 1,200 U.S. consumers for The Wall Street Journal, Nielsen found that 61% of consumers had heard of GMOs and nearly half of those people said they avoid eating them. The biggest reason was because it “doesn’t sound like something I should eat.”
via The GMO Fight Ripples Down the Food Chain – WSJ.
Our seeds are seeds of resistance; let us plant them together.
Vandana Shiva’ http://bit.ly/CallToAction2014
“We have not said no to science. Nobody can say no to science.
Yes we have to take proper caution, we have to take proper action. But you cannot deny it. We are not living in Galileo’s times. Galileo was telling the truth and he was punished.”
With genetically modified organisms, we could be having another Galileo moment. American biotechnology corporation Monsanto and its lobbyists are today’s Church. And independent scientists speaking the truth about GMOs and their impact on society, health and environment are today’s Galileos.
GMOs are mired in controversy because their introduction is based on violation of law, democracy and science.
In India, the debate on GMOs started with the illegal introduction of Bt cotton by American biotechnology corporation Monsanto in 1998.
It intensified when Monsanto/Mahyco tried to introduce Bt brinjal (eggplant) in 2010. And when the then environment minister Jairam Ramesh tried to introduced a moratorium, he was removed.
via The Galileo syndrome? | The Asian Age.
The Ebola Strain Links African Outbreak To A Lab Escape
As newly arrived patients are treated at US hospitals in Atlanta and New York, the most alarming aspect of the spreading Ebola outbreak across four West African countries is the strain’s probable origin as an escapee from a medical-research laboratory.
As early as May, a prophetic warning came from Heinz Feldman, former head of the Canadian laboratory that created the ZMapp drug-cocktail used to treat missionary doctors Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol. Now serving as chief virologist at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana, Feldman has urged a halt to international shipments of infected tissue and pressed for the formation of secure national laboratories in every country to handle samples of contagious pathogens (The New England Journal of Medicine).
The virologist, who provided medical aid to Sierra Leone, disclosed that it requires a 14-day period between shipping a medical sample from Liberia, hub of the pandemic, to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, before receiving a diagnosis. In the interval, physicians depend only physical symptoms as an indicator of the specific disease affecting patients, most of whom suffer multiple diseases and chronic disorders. The delay can be fatal to other patients and medical staff in cases of ebola virus infection.
Besides the long delays in a limbo of uncertainty, another potential problem is the mishandling of medical samples from clinics in isolated villages via informal transport networks of visiting doctors and couriers sent to the air-cargo offices. The odds of a medical technician or deliveryman accidentally breaking a container and self-infecting are not improbable, and in rebellion-torn regions like western Africa a small package en route can easily fall into the hands of marauding bands of rebels or criminal elements. The risks of inadvertent infection are unacceptably high.
Inefficient transport of medical samples could explain why the current Western African outbreak is not of the endemic (local-originated ) variant Ivory Coast ebola (EBO-C1). Instead, the now-prevalent virus is the foreign ZEBOV, or Zaire ebola, the most virulent of the four types of this pathogen.
via The Ebola Strain Links African Outbreak To A Lab Escape.
U.S. regulators on Tuesday said they are leaning toward approval of a new line of herbicide-tolerant crops developed by Monsanto Co even though they could increase problematic weed resistance for farmers.
Under the draft “environmental impact statement” (EIS) by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the agency said its analysis shows the new genetically modified cotton and soybean plants should be approved.
St. Louis-based Monsanto, said the APHIS move was “a noteworthy sign of progress.”
“It is an important step in the regulatory process and we are encouraging farmers to urge APHIS to complete this action as soon as possible,” Michelle Vigna, Monsanto’s product manager, said in a statement.
Monsanto developed the new soybeans and cotton to resist a new herbicide that combines dicamba and glyphosate and which Monsanto is branding as Roundup Xtend. The “Roundup Ready Xtend crop system” is aimed at combating the millions of acres of weeds that have grown resistant to Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup, which has been used extensively on the company’s biotech corn, soybeans and cotton.
APHIS also on Tuesday issued a final EIS for genetically altered corn and soybean plants developed by Dow AgroSciences, a unit of Dow Chemical. That EIS also states that the agency intends to approve the products. APHIS has already said in January that it was leaning toward approval for Dow’s products.
Dow has developed what it calls Enlist corn and soybeans that resist a new herbicide developed by Dow that includes both glyphosate and 2,4-D.
A final decision is expected after a 30-day public review period, the agency said.
American farmers are “one step closer to obtaining a critical tool needed to manage resistant and hard-to-control weeds,” Dow said in a statement.
Both Monsanto’s and Dow’s new cropping systems have seen regulatory decisions delayed by intense opposition from many consumer, environmental and farmer groups who say there are a host of concerns with both products.
The groups say using more herbicides on weeds will only increase weed resistance over the long term. And increased herbicide use also brings increased risks of health problems and environmental pollution, they say.
“We are outraged,” said Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, senior scientist with the Pesticide Action Network North America. “Despite all of this public outcry, what these decisions show is that USDA is much more interested in working with Dow and Monsanto and getting their products to market than in protecting the public.”
via USDA leaning toward approval of Monsanto’s new GMO beans, cotton | Reuters.
Awaiting a decision on legal reforms from the courts, anti-GMO activists in Costa Rica have taken the fight over transgenic crops to a grassroots level. The latest symbolic victory for those opposed to genetically modified organisms happened on July 25, when President Luis Guillermo Solís signed a decree naming native corn as cultural heritage, a designation managed by the Culture Ministry.
“This is a very important tool for us,” Fabián Pacheco, a member of anti-GMO group Bloque Verde, told The Tico Times. “Our traditional species of corn carry with them years of history and folklore. This will help us protect them.”
History of GMOs in Costa Rica
Industrial agriculture giant Monsanto has had GMO farms in Costa Rica since 1991, and today it has 443.1 hectares of GMO cotton, soybeans, pineapples and bananas. In 2012, the company filed a request to grow 35 hectares of genetically modified corn. Due to its open-air pollination process, corn seeds can travel as far as 800 meters from the original crop.
Recommended: What you need to know about GMOs in Costa Rica
via Awaiting a court decision, anti-GMO activists gain symbolic ground — The Tico Times.
A public library in small Pennsylvania town offered a new public resource for its patrons: a seed library. That is, until the state Department of Agriculture pulled the rug out from under the plan.
Launched on April 26, the seed library at Mechanicsburg’s Joseph T. Simpson Public Library would have held all heirloom, and preferable organic, seed. Its first seed trove, with help from the Cumberland County Commission for Women, came from Seed Savers Exchange, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving heirloom seeds.
Library patrons could “check out” the seeds to plant, and, if all went well, at the end of the plant’s growing season, they’d save its seeds and return them to the library to replenish the stock. If the crop failed or the borrowers were just unable to save seeds, they were allowed to bring back store-bought heirloom seeds instead.
In the process of this seed library circulation, patrons would be bringing a new use to the library space, exchanging seeds with their community members and practicing the art of saving seeds — something farmers have done for years but which stands at odds with proprietary seeds.
“People have been really excited to have this opportunity to borrow seeds,” Adult Services Director Rebecca Swanger told local news ABC27 in May. “That way they don’t have to purchase a whole packet of seeds and end up not using a lot of them.”
ACTION ITEM – CONTACT Darr
Darr explained that the Seed Act primarily focuses on the selling of seeds — which the library was not doing — but there is also a concern about seeds that may be mislabeled (purposefully or accidentally), the growth of invasive plant species, cross-pollination and poisonous plants.
The department told the library it could not have the seed library unless its staff tested each seed packet for germination and other information. Darr said that was clearly not something staff could handle.
“This is not our core mission,” she said. “We thought we were doing a good thing in helping the Cumberland County Commission for Women (who requested the idea and the library’s participation).”
CONTACT THE DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE
According to reporting by the Carlisle Sentinel on July 31, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture sent a letter to the library stating that the seed library violated the state’s Seed Act of 2004.
While the Act focuses on seeds that are sold, Cumberland County Library System Executive Director Jonelle Darr told The Sentinel that there could also be a problem with seeds being mislabeled and potentially invasive, and noted that the Department indicated it would “crack down” at other seed libraries within the state.
The Sentinel continues:
[Cumberland County] commissioner Barbara Cross noted that such seed libraries on a large scale could very well pose a danger.
“Agri-terrorism is a very, very real scenario,” she said. “Protecting and maintaining the food sources of America is an overwhelming challenge … so you’ve got agri-tourism on one side and agri-terrorism on the other.”
But not all towns seem to agree with Cross’ take that seed libraries pose a danger, as a wave of emerging seed libraries is emerging in towns across the country including Alameda and Richmond, California, Basalt, Colorado and LaCrosse, Wisconsin.
“Seed Libraries are vital to communities,” Stephanie Syson, Basalt Food Garden Manager, told Common Dreams. “Seed Libraries offer a common place for community members to share seed that is grown locally, in celebration of cultural heritage and regional diversity. In addition seed libraries offer a chance for low income residents to access vegetable seeds and thus provide much needed nutrition to their families.”
Syson emphasized that “a Seed Library is NOT a seed company and should not be regulated in the same manner as one. There are never any ‘sales’ of seed. The seed is offered as a community asset to be freely shared and enjoyed. Community members understand that the seed does not have a guarantee of germination rates. Through multiple free workshops per year, our community is re-gaining the lost skill of seed saving. This skill is important to our culture as well as our future food security.”
It makes sense, really, that these public institutions would be involved in seed libraries. As the Duluth, Minnesota seed library states in its values: “Public libraries play a vital role in communities as a repository for a diversity of ideas and shared knowledge for the public good. Similarly, seed is a public resource and shared legacy – it must be managed in a manner that benefits the public good.”
via ‘Agri-Terrorism’? Town’s Seed Library Shut Down | Common Dreams | Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
In a field in the English countryside, a new source of fish oil is growing. Rothamsted Research in Hertfordshire, U.K., recently began a field trial of camelina flax (Camelina sativa) plants genetically modified to produce long chain omega-3 fatty acids—the primary component of “fish oil.”
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The field trial gained approval in April from the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), the U.K. administrative body that regulates genetically modified crops, and the researchers will harvest their first crop this month or next.
via Fish Oil Could (One Day) Come From Plants | Science | Smithsonian.
THE first glyphosate-resistant wild radish (Raphanus raphanistrum L.) populations have been identified by researchers from the Australian Herbicide Resistance Initiative (AHRI) at The University of Western Australia.
Resistance was confirmed following tests on plants grown from seeds obtained near Mingenew and Carnamah in WA’s grainbelt, where wild radish was not controlled following repeated glyphosate applications.
At the recommended glyphosate dose for wild radish control in Australia, the Mingenew and Carnamah-derived populations had survival rates of 63 per cent and 86 per cent respectively.
Dose response on the progeny of each population showed that glyphosate resistance is inherited, with progeny requiring three-and-a-half to four-and-a-half times more glyphosate for control compared to the three known susceptible populations in the study.
“Wild radish is the most economically damaging weed in Australian grain cropping, and is listed in the top 180 worst weeds worldwide,” AHRI PhD student Michael Ashworth says.
“The identification of these glyphosate-resistant wild radish populations is another example of the significant threat that glyphosate resistance and weed evolution pose to the sustainability of modern farming systems.
“Our findings serve to re-emphasise the importance of diverse weed control strategies.
“Proactive and integrated measures for resistance management need to be developed to diversify control measures away from glyphosate and advance the use of non-herbicidal techniques.”
Several factors make wild radish problematic for WA farmers, including its ability to germinate over a wide range of environmental conditions and its flexible life cycle.
via Sight set on resilient weed.