Tag Archives: death

Agrochemical drift causing diseases and death in Argentina and Georgia

Pesticide poisoning has rapidly increased in Argentina as Monsanto-seed pesticided crops ramped up. Meanwhile in Georgia, 90+% of common crops already are doused in pesticides. What effects are all those poisons having on our own children and adults?

Michael Warren and Natacha Pisarenko wrote for AP today, Argentines link health crisis to agrochemicals,

Argentine farmworker Fabian Tomasi wasn’t trained to use protective gear as he pumped pesticides into crop dusters. Now at 47, he’s a living skeleton.

Schoolteacher Andrea Druetta lives in a town where it’s illegal to spray agrochemicals within 550 yards of homes, and yet soy is planted just 33 yards from her back door. Recently, her boys were showered in chemicals while swimming in their backyard pool.

Sofia Gatica’s search for answers after losing her newborn to kidney failure led to Argentina’s first criminal convictions for illegal spraying last year. But 80 percent of her neighbors’ children surveyed carry pesticides in their blood.

Meanwhile, German researchers found pesticides in all samples of urine, and back in the U.S.A. and Canada, researchers found pesticide metabolites in 95% of schoolchildren tested.

90+% of cotton, soybeans, peanuts, and corn around here are doused in agrochemicals, and even Continue reading →

Insecticides are killing the honeybees

Is corporate profit worth wiping out honeybees?

Brian Wallheimer wrote in ScienceDaily 12 Jan 2012, Honeybee Deaths Linked to Seed Insecticide Exposure,

Analyses of bees found dead in and around hives from several apiaries over two years in Indiana showed the presence of neonicotinoid insecticides, which are commonly used to coat corn and soybean seeds before planting. The research showed that those insecticides were present at high concentrations in waste talc that is exhausted from farm machinery during planting.

The insecticides clothianidin and thiamethoxam were also consistently found at low levels in soil — up to two years after treated seed was planted — on nearby dandelion flowers and in corn pollen gathered by the bees, according to the findings released in the journal PLoS One this month.

“We know that these insecticides are highly toxic to bees; we found them in each sample of dead and dying bees,” said Christian Krupke, associate professor of entomology and a co-author of the findings.

The authors are careful to say they don’t claim to have found the only cause of honeybee deaths, because they can’t prove that. They do seem to have proved specific insecticides are one cause.

Is wiping out honebees worth the profits of a very few large agrobusinesses that sell these poisons?

Who sells this stuff, anyway? Bayer, Arysta, and Valent sell clothianidin, and Syngenta (SYT) sells thiamethoxam. What’s Syngenta’s excuse?

How do we feed a growing world population?
By poisoning honeybees, apparently.

-jsq

Jamie Oliver on Food Education

Jamie Oliver is a cook from England. He’s trying to organize an intervention into the food system that’s killing us.

We spend our lives being paranoid about death, murder, homicide, you name it, it’s on the front page of every paper, CNN…. Look at homicide at the bottom, for God’s sake!

Every single one of those ones in the red is a diet-related disease. Any doctor, any specialist, will tell you that.

The top three are heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Number 6 is diabetes. Those are the ones in red on Jamie Oliver’s graph. Homicide is number 15. See CDC for numbers. ( In 2006 72,449 people died of diabetes and 18,573 of homicide. You’re almost 4 times as likely to die of diabetes. And about 40 times more likely to die of heart disease.)
I want to show a picture of my friend Brittney. She’s sixteen years old. She’s got six years to live. Because of the food that she’s eaten. She’s the third generation of Americans that hasn’t grown up within a food environment where they’ve been taught to cook at home or in school. Or her mum. Or her mum’s mum. She has six years to live!
More pictures of people with very round faces and rounder bodies:
This is a normal family, guys!.
We need to change normal. That’s what Jamie Oliver wants to do.

Obesity leads to diabetes and heart disease. And what leads to obesity? Lack of exercise combined with food stuffed with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), salt, and fat in massive portions.

Fast food has taken over the whole country, we know that.
Time to take it back.
I wish I could come up here today and hang up a cure for AIDS or cancer, you’d be fighting and scrambling to get to me. This, all this bad news, is preventable. That’s the good news. It’s very preventable.
How? Vote with your food purchases. Demand a food ambassador in every supermarket. Demand big food businesses back food education. Get the government to work with the fast food purveyors to wean us off the fat, sugar, and salt. Schools, ages 4-whenever: proper fresh food cooked from local sources on site. Every child should leave school knowing how to cook ten recipes that will save their life. Corporate American should feed their staff properly. You can care and be commercial.

That’s his prescription. Doesn’t sound so hard, does it?