Medical school professor explains why we have serious reasons to review vaccine policy
Jeff Hays Films
Terry Wahls, M.D.
I’m often asked the question about vaccines and I can make some observations and raise more questions.
There’s interest, a lot of growing enthusiasm for the Hygiene Hypothesis.
The Hygiene Hypothesis:
A lack of early childhood exposure to infectious agents, symbiotic microorganisms and parasites, increases susceptibility to allergic diseases by suppressing the natural development of the immune system.
Societies where the children are still getting their typical infections, Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Chicken Pox. As babies and toddlers, these society’s as adults have much less autoimmunity and the presumption is that there’s some important messaging that happens between these early childhood infections that we get from bacteria, viruses and parasites that speak to our immune cells that may help regulate a healthy immune response so later in life there’s less autoimmunity.
That’s a very important hypothesis. We may be altering the maturation process of our immune cells and increasing the risk of autoimmunity.
We have some other issues that I have concerns about, the vaccines are most effective when we use a live agent but when you use a live agent there will be some individuals whose immune functions are so compromised that that live vaccine could kill them or seriously harm them. So science has in the interest of not creating harm now used a killed infectious agent but our bodies know it’s dead, we don’t really mount much of an immune response.
So again, scientists wanting to help, decided that we have to give something that’s irritating to the immune system to get it to react to this dead infecting agent. These irritating compounds are generally fairly toxic. We usually had to use some mercury components, some aluminum components but whatever components we use will have some toxic effects.
Our vaccines are studied in their clinical trials one at a time or in a small number of vaccines at a time but when their scheduled there are many more vaccines clump together and I don’t know that we’ve had studies that look at these adjuvants that are added to a killed vaccine that had really identified how much adjuvant is safe in a single day or is safe in a lifetime. I think those are un-resolved questions.
Another factor that I worry about; it’s my recollection during medical school that I had read, the government decided that vaccines made such good public health policy that they would indemnify the vaccine makers from liability because of the public health benefits and that we needed to have the vaccines produced so we created more financial incentives to decrease the financial risk for vaccine production.
The unintended consequences of that is the development of vaccines that have less immediate public health benefit in terms of mortality. As we start creating vaccines for diseases that are not fatal but are inconvenient. Most of these vaccine studies are short term, immediate safety, we don’t have any vaccine studies that look over the life span of the human.
So I think there are unknowns, there certainly are public health benefits I will not disagree with but I think there are these public health risks that have not been adequately measured and quantified.
Bumbling science: global warming and an incredible lightness of bee-ing
By Timothy Birdnow | Birdnow’s Aviary | July 16, 2015
Here is a piece of pseudo-scientific idiocy that caught my attention. This Fox News/LiveScience article tries to claim that bumblebees are disappearing because of, you guessed it, global warming!
From the article:
Climate change is causing wild bumblebees to disappear from large swaths of their historical range, which could spell disaster for pollinating crops in Europe and North America, new research suggests.
As global temperatures have risen, bumblebees have disappeared from the warmest regions they occupy, but have not spread northward to take advantage of new habitat, the study finds.
“They just aren’t colonizing new areas to track rapid, human-caused climate change,” study co-author Jeremy Kerr, a biologist at the University of Ottawa, said at a news conference.”
One minor problem: the planet has not warmed since the latter part of the 1990s.
There is another problem that should be immediately evident:
Kerr and his colleagues looked at historical records of the habitat ranges for 67 bumblebee populations in Europe and North America between 1901 and 1974, when climate warming was negligible, and between 1974 and 2010, when climate change accelerated. On its southern edge, the bees’ range has shrunk 186 miles, or about 5.6 miles every year, Kerr said.
Yet despite warming in northern latitudes, bumblebees haven’t figured out a way to take advantage of the now less-frigid northern climes. The study, which was published July 9 in the journal Science, did not show any correlation between land-use practices or pesticide use and bumblebee populations.
Bees are dying out in the southern end of their range because of the rise of extreme heat waves.
“If you imagine a car that starts running out of coolant and starts blowing steam out of the front of the hood, that’s kind of like an analogy for what bumblebees do when it gets too hot,” Kerr said..”
Hmm. I suppose that Kerr doesn’t realize that the 1930s were actually a warmer decade than any subsequent one. Kerr doesn’t bother with this technicality in his study, simply assuming it was cooler in the good old days. (See the temperature map of July 2012 compared to July 1936, for instance. Why didn’t we witness this same loss of bumblebees as a result of the natural warming at that time? Frankly, I think Kerr and the other AGW alarmists are the ones blowing steam out of the front of the hood.)
So, despite a decided lack of planetary warming and a failure of bumblebees to die off in the ’30s, we are still yet to believe they are not moving into new territory as the Arctic and Antarctic allegedly warm. Why?
Could it be that those areas aren’t actually warming?
The bumblebee – genus Bumbus, also known as Bumbini – is twenty-five to forty million years old, far older than humanity. In all of that time, was the planet cooler than it is now? It certainly was not during the Eocene:
At the start of the Eocene, the continents were close to where they are now, but the average annual temperature in arctic Canada and Siberia was a balmy 18° C (65° F). The dominant plants up there were palm trees and cycads. Fossil monitor lizards (sort of like alligators) dating back to this era have been found in Svalbard, an island north of Greenland that’s now covered with ice all year. Antarctica was home to cool temperate forests, including beech trees and ferns. In particular, our Earth had no permanent polar ice caps!
The Eocene lasted from 55 to 34 million years ago – certainly within the upper estimate for the age of Bumbini. And it was still certainly warmer during the Oligocene (34 to 24 my) than it is now, although it was much cooler than the Eocene or the even hotter Paleocene. Bumblebees developed and thrived during this period. They have done quite well. Now that their number is dropping, it is immediately blamed on “global warming,” a warming that is not happening.
It should also be pointed out that the bumbles did not die out after the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age – a serious warming period. They did not die out at the end of the Little Ice Age in the 19th century.
Maybe the bees don’t want to move north – or south – because it’s getting too cold?
Antarctic sea ice has been growing for years, as indeed so too has land ice. The Alfred Wegener Institute station in Antarctica has concluded that there has been no temperature increase anywhere near where it has been measuring.
And this paper makes it quite clear that Antarctic temperatures have dropped over recent years.
However, “Although previous reports suggest slight recent continental warming,” they declare that “our spatial analysis of Antarctic meteorological data” demonstrated “a net cooling over the entire Antarctic continent between 1966 and 2000, particularly during summer and autumn,” when ice melt would be most likely to occur. A study of temperatures and ecosystem response in the McMurdo Dry Valleys indicated a cooling of 0.7°C per decade between 1986 and 2000.
Antarctic ecosystems show clear evidence of cooling, suggesting that the temperature measurements reported by Doran et al are occurring widely.”
Furthermore, ten years of Icesat data shows that Antarctic ice has been growing. Ice core data confirms this.
In fact, outside the Antarctic Peninsula – a region subject to ocean currents and weather patterns – the only Antarctic ice disappearing is in West Antarctica, and it is clear that this disappearance is caused by volcanism under the sheet.
It should be pointed out that Arctic sea ice has come back in recent years, too.
So what does it all mean? It means that the bumblebees aren’t stupid enough to immigrate to an icebox, and that this story is pure garbage, a work of fiction. That the bumbles are dying is not in dispute, but global warming clearly has little or nothing to do with it.
The point of stories like this is to politicize everything and anything to drive an agenda. The author knows that the average person won’t look past the story itself, and perhaps not past the first paragraph or two. It is intended to leave an impression, and coupled with the other stories written in the same way, it is intended to inflate the AGW meme to critical mass: “see, all the evidence is overwhelming.” It is not intended to actually stand up to close scrutiny.
Cold realities of the German Weather Service’s warmed up press releases
By Pierre L. Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | July 12, 2015
Germany’s DWD National Weather Service has developed a nasty habit of putting out warmed up press releases for announcing monthly mean data, and then later very quietly revising the data downwards.
Result: the public believes that warming is happening when in fact there really isn’t any.
German skeptic site wobleibtdieglobaleerwaermung (whereistheglobalwarming) writes a post titled: “What’s wrong with the DWD? Once again a downward correction. June 2015 was 0.2° Celsius colder than reported in the press releases”.
It describes how the June 2015 mean temperature for Germany was overstated by 0.2°C in its press release. It adds:
Also in the two earlier months of May and April, and the entire spring of 2015, the press releases reported a mean temperature that was elevated 0.2°C. DWD correction: May and spring 2015 were 0.2°C less ‘warm’ than announced in the press releases – spring 2015 now 1.4°C colder than a year earlier.
The overly hasty DWD press release announcing the June 2015 data states:
”… The first month of the summer with a nationwide mean temperature of 16.0 °C was 0.6°C above the international valid reference period of 1961 to 1990. Using the 1981 to 2010 reference period the deviation was still 0.3°C…”
Here the wobleibtdieerderwaermung site also points out yet another sloppy error made by the DWD: the difference between the two reference periods for June is in fact 0.4°C, and not 0.3°C, citing a 2014 DWD press release here.
So, did the DWD issue a correction to inform the public of the true June 2015 result, that it was in fact cooler then they had claimed earlier? The wobleibtdieerderwaermung writes:
At the DWD homepage http://www.dwd.de/ one finds at a well hidden location, after a total of seven (7) clicks, the value of 15.8 °C for June in Germany – all the way down, to the right.”
In other words, the DWD made sure to bury the real results, to keep them as much out of sight from the public as they could.
wobleibtdieerderwaermung suggests that the DWD ought to issue a new press release with the following content so that the public can be properly informed:
… The first month of the summer with a nationwide mean temperature of 15.8 °C was 0.4°C above the international vaild reference period of 1961 to 1990. Using the 1981 to 2010 reference period the deviation was only 0.0°C, and thus was exactly the mean for the WMO reference period… a climate warming in Germany’s June 2015 is thus not detectable over the last 35 years.”
So what’s compelling the DWD to engage in the habitual deceptive behavior? wobleibtdieerderwaermung speculates that all this probably has nothing to do with error and has more to do with “political intentions”.
Yet another government institution that we can no longer believe. Little wonder trust in government is near an all-time low.
Earth awaits ‘mini ice age’ in 15 years, solar cycle study suggests
RT | July 12, 2015
Earth is facing the prospect of a ‘mini ice age’ this century, with our sun’s activity projected to fall 60 percent in the 2030s, British astrophysicists say, based on the results of new research that they claim allows exact predictions of solar cycles.
Our planet is just 15 years from a new ‘mini ice age’ that could cause extremely cold winters characterized by the freezing of normally ice-free rivers as well as by year-round snow fields in areas that have never witnessed such climate conditions before, a group of astrophysicists claim.
The scientists could draw such a conclusion based on a new model of the sun’s activity that reportedly enables the researchers to make “extremely accurate predictions” of changes in solar activity.
Although, the fact that the sun’s activity varies within 10-12 year long cycles was first discovered almost two centuries ago, in 1843, all the previously existing explanatory models failed to fully explain the fluctuations within each cycle as well as between the cycles.
Until now, the astrophysicists thought that the variations of the solar activity depended on the dynamo caused by convecting fluid deep inside the sun.
The latest study conducted by a research team from Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, and led by Professor Valentina Zharkova demonstrated that the variations in the Sun’s activity are caused by two dynamo processes – one deep in the convection zone of the sun and one near its surface.
The research team analyzed three solar activity cycles that cover the period from 1976 to 2008 studying magnetic field activity of the sun during this time by using a technique called principal component analysis of the magnetic field observations from the Wilcox Solar Observatory in California.
The scientists discovered magnetic waves in two different layers of the Solar interior that “fluctuate between the northern and southern hemispheres of the Sun.”
“We found magnetic wave components appearing in pairs, originating in two different layers in the Sun’s interior. They both have a frequency of approximately 11 years, although this frequency is slightly different, and they are offset in time,” said Professor Zharkova.
Later, they also compared their findings concerning the intensity of the Sun’s activity with each year’s data on the average number of sunspots – a strong indicator of solar activity.
As a result, the team managed to create a very accurate model of predicting the solar activity fluctuations.
“Combining both waves together and comparing to real data for the current solar cycle, we found that our predictions showed an accuracy of 97 percent,” said Zharkova.
The study findings were presented at the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno on July 9 and published in the Royal Astronomical Society papers.
The model demonstrates that solar activity will fall by 60 percent by 2030 as the magnetic waves inside the Sun will become increasingly more desynchronized during the next two cycles, especially during cycle 26, which covers the decade between 2030 and 2040.
“In cycle 26, the two waves exactly mirror each other – peaking at the same time but in opposite hemispheres of the Sun. Their interaction will be disruptive, or they will nearly cancel each other,” Professor Zharkova said.
“Effectively, when the waves are approximately in phase, they can show strong interaction, or resonance, and we have strong solar activity. When they are out of phase, we have solar minimums. When there is full phase separation, we have the conditions last seen during the Maunder minimum, 370 years ago,” she added.
The Maunder minimum is a name of a period between 1645 and 1715 characterized by prolonged low solar activity as well as by extremely cold winters in Europe and North America as it also correlates with a climatic period between 1550 and 1850 called the ‘Little Ice Age.’
The Warped World of the GMO Lobbyist
By Colin Todhunter | CounterPunch | July 7, 2015
There’s a massive spike in cancer cases in Argentina that is strongly associated with glyphosate-based herbicides. These herbicides are a huge earner for agribusiness. But don’t worry, Patrick Moore says you can drink a whole quart and it won’t harm you. Who needs independent testing? He says people regularly try to commit suicide with it but fail. They survived – just. So what’s the problem? Perfectly safe. Patrick Moore says he is ‘not an idiot’. So he must be right. Right?
Anyway, all that scare mongering about GMOs and glyphosate is a conspiracy by a bunch of whinging lavishly funded green-blob types. Former UK environment minister Owen Paterson said as much. He says those self-serving anti-GMO people are damaging the interests of the poor and are profiting handsomely. They are condemning “billions” to lives of poverty.
He voted for the illegal invasion of Iraq, which has led to the death of almost 1.5 million Iraqis. His government has plunged millions into poverty and food insecurity in the UK. He now wants to help the poor by giving them GM courtesy of self-interested, corporations and their lavishly paid executives. What was that about self-serving, lavishly funded groups? As a staunch believer in doublespeak, hypocrisy and baseless claims by self-appointed humanitarians with awful track records, Paterson’s sound-bite smears and speeches are good enough for me.
So with that cleared up, hopefully we can move on.
Then there’s all that ‘anti-capitalist twaddle’ (another pearl of wisdom from Patrick Moore) about smallholders being driven from their lands and into poverty due to a corporate takeover aimed at expanding (GM) chemical-intensive agriculture. I showed Mr Moore a paper by an economics professor who had studied the devastation caused by the above in Ethiopia. That’s where the ‘anti-capitalist twaddle’ retort came in. As I’m also a staunch believer in the power of baseless, ill-informed abuse, I was once again convinced.
What about all that rubbish about GM not having enhanced the world’s ability to feed itself? You know, all that stuff about the way it has been used has merely led to greater food insecurity. Nonsense. I watched a prime-time BBC programme recently. Some scientist in a white coat in a lab said that GM can feed the world. He’d proved it in his lab. In reality (not in a lab), the fact it hasn’t done anything of the sort over the past 20-odd years doesn’t matter. He wore a white coat and held GM patents, so he definitely knows best!
I once read that industrialised agriculture is less productively efficient than smallholder agriculture that feeds most of the world. And then I read that the world can feed itself without GMOs. According to all of this, it is current policies and the global system of food production that militate against achieving global food security.
That’s just a big old load of rubbish put together by a bunch of conspiracy mongers. Who are these people? Food and trade policy analysts, political scientists, economics professors and the like. A bunch of whining anti-capitalist promoters of twaddle. None of them have studied molecular biology so how can they possibly be qualified to talk on this? I’d rather listen to a man in a lab who says GM can feed the world. He’s much more qualified to speak on politics, trade, the environment or anthropology than a bunch of lefties who don’t know one side of a petri dish from the other.
I happen to believe a profitable techno-fix is the way to go. A techno-fix that comes courtesy of the same companies whose global influence and power are helping to destroy indigenous agriculture across the world. But this is for the good of the traditional smallholder because these companies really, really care about the poor. Okay, okay, I know the top execs over at Monsanto are bringing in a massive annual cheque – but $12.4 million per year helps motivate a CEO to get out of bed in the morning and to develop empathy with the poor – unlike that elitist, self-serving green blob lot who rake in big money – according to hero-of-the-poor, the handsomely rewarded millionaire Owen Paterson… err, let’s swiftly move on.
To divert your attention away from all that scare mongering, conspiracy theory twaddle, I want you to concentrate solely on the science of GM and nothing else. But only on the version of ‘science’ as handed down from the great lawgiver in St Louis which creates it in its own image, not least by dodging any problematic questions that may have prevented GM from going on the market in the first place. Some troublemaker recently wrote a book about that, but someone said it wasn’t worth reading – so I didn’t bother (‘Altered Genes, Twisted…’ something or other – the word escapes me; it doesn’t appear in my lexicon).
So how about joining like-minded humanitarians and the handsomely-paid people over at big bioworld? We believe in mouthing platitudes about freedom and choice while serving interests that eradicate both. And let me add that scientists know that anyone who disagrees with them is just plain dim. C S Prakash recently posted a claim that implied such on Twitter. He’s a molecular biologist, so it must be true. Of course, there are scientists who disagree with us but they are quite clearly wrong – wrong methodology, wrong findings, wrong career turn – we’ll make sure of that!
In finishing, let me make the case for GM clear, based on logic and clear-headed rationality. There are those who are just too dim to understand any of the issues to do with GM so they should put up, shut up or go away and read or write about conspiracy theories on their blogs or in their peer-reviewed non-science journals that aren’t worth the paper they are written on given that the ‘peers’ in question are probably also a bunch of left-leaning wing nuts.
By comparison, unlike those self-serving ideologues, we are totally non-political. Okay, we might be firmly supporting a neoliberalism that is dominated by unaccountable big corporations which have captured policy-making space nationally and internationally, but any discussion of that is to be avoided by labelling those who raise such matters as politically motivated. We get you to focus on ‘the science’ – that is ‘our science’ – and nothing else. The fact that some of us tend to label anyone who disagrees with us as anti-science, anti-capitalist, socialists or enemies of the poor (or even ‘murdering bastards‘) says nothing at all about our political agenda.
And the lavish funds and powerful strategic position of big agribusiness means the pro-GMO lobby can smear, exert huge political influence and also restrict choice by preventing the labelling of GM food. You see, too much choice confuses people. We take the public for fools who will swallow anything – hopefully GMOs and our sound-bite deceptions.
So rests the case for GMOs. Eloquently put? I certainly think so. But I would say that, wouldn’t I? I’m paid to.
Colin Todhunter is an extensively published independent writer and former social policy researcher based in the UK and India.
New Study by Leading Authority on Public Health: Fluoridating the Water “Does Not Reduce Cavities”
By Matt Agorist | The Free Thought Project | July 1, 2015
Fluoridation, Americans are told, is necessary for the prevention of tooth decay. We must drink it and we must give our children fluoridated water in order for everyone to have a healthy smile — or so we have been advised for the last 60 years.
A whopping 43 studies have linked fluoride ingestion with a reduction in IQ. A study out of the Harvard School of public Health concluded, “children in high-fluoride areas had significantly lower IQ scores than those who lived in low-fluoride areas.”
Even more independent studies have linked the associated health risks of fluoride to interfering with the endocrine system and increasing the risk of impaired brain function; two studies in the last few months, for example, have linked fluoridation to ADHD and underactive thyroid.
Dozens more studies show the ineffectiveness of fluoride ingestion in preventing dental caries; they actually show an increase in dental fluorosis instead of a reduction in decay.
Approximately 1.2 grams of sodium fluoride will kill an adult human being. That was the low estimate that Dominic Smith ingested when he died from an overdose of fluoridated water at Hooper Bay, Alaska on May 23, 1992. Approximately 200 mg will kill a small child.
Approximately 72% of all water supplies in the United States have fluoride dumped into them
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this highly poisonous substance is sourced from the waste products of the fertilizer industry.
Most fluoride additives used in the United States are produced from phosphorite rock. Phosphorite is mainly used for manufacturing phosphate fertilizer. Phosphorite is refluxed (heated) with sulfuric acid to produce a phosphoric acid-gypsum (calcium sulfate-CaSO4) slurry.
The heating process releases hydrogen fluoride (HF) and silicon tetrafluoride (SiF4) gases, which are captured by vacuum evaporators. These gases are then condensed to a water-based solution of approximately 23% FSA.
Approximately 95% of FSA used for water fluoridation comes from this process. The remaining 5% of FSA is produced in manufacturing hydrogen fluoride or from the use of hydrogen fluoride to etch silicates and glasses when manufacturing solar panels and electronics.
In other words, instead of fertilizer and electronic companies paying to dispose of their wasteful byproducts in a responsible manner, they are given your tax dollars and this once toxic waste is magically transformed into a benefit for your teeth.
If the fact that fluoride lowers your IQ, is linked to ADHD, is an endocrine disrupter, is poisonous, is a hazardous bi-product of phosphate fertilizer production, and is being given to you without your consent, doesn’t get you riled up, then maybe the fact that the most highly regarded group of scientists in the world in assessing the effectiveness public health policies putting out a study showing that fluoridating the water supply “does not reduce cavities to a statistically significant degree in permanent teeth,” will help to change your mind.
“From the review, we’re unable to determine whether water fluoridation has an impact on caries levels in adults,” says study co-author Anne-Marie Glenny, a health science researcher at Manchester University in the United Kingdom.
According to Newsweek, the authors also found only two studies since 1975 that looked at the effectiveness of reducing cavities in baby teeth, and found fluoridation to have no statistically significant impact here, either.
Newsweek reports:
“Frankly, this is pretty shocking,” says Thomas Zoeller, a scientist at UMass-Amherst uninvolved in the work. “This study does not support the use of fluoride in drinking water.” Trevor Sheldon concurred. Sheldon is the dean of the Hull York Medical School in the United Kingdom who led the advisory board that conducted a systematic review of water fluoridation in 2000, that came to similar conclusions as the Cochrane review. The lack of good evidence of effectiveness has shocked him. “I had assumed because of everything I’d heard that water fluoridation reduces cavities but I was completely amazed by the lack of evidence,” he says. “My prior view was completely reversed.”
There is no evidence supporting the purported benefits of fluoridating the water supply, but its use continues
This study is yet another blow to the unethical and immoral process of forcing individuals to consume a deadly product against their will.
The fact that fluoridation is still happening with the mounds of evidence against speaks to the incompetent nature of the state and the special interests lining their pockets in order to dump their toxic waste into the US water supply.
Even more upsetting, is the fact that when you tell people about the negative effects of consuming fluoride you are somehow labeled a conspiracy theorist; as if the mountain of evidence backing up your claims is non-existent.
Many people have no idea that their toothpaste has a poison warning!
They’ve ignored the Harvard study and the many like it, they’ve ignored the thousands of dental professionals who’ve come out against it, and they have ignored the unethical significance associated with mass medication without consent. Will the government and the naysayers finally come to their senses and stop ignoring this problem now that the Cochrane Collaboration, which is widely regarded as the gold standard of scientific rigor in assessing effectiveness of public health policies has confirmed that it’s pointless? We remain optimistic.
After 8 Years of Delay, EPA Finally Agrees to Test Dangers of Monsanto’s Favorite Pesticide
By Steve Straehley | AllGov | June 29, 2015
Glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, will finally undergo analysis for its effects on endangered species by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), thanks to the persistence of the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD).
The group has been trying for eight years to get the EPA to look at glyphosate, along with atrazine and two chemicals similar to atrazine: propazine and simazine. Glyphosate was found two months ago by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer to be a probable human carcinogen and was banned for sale in garden centers in France earlier this month.
“This settlement will finally force the EPA to consider the impacts of glyphosate—widely known as Roundup—which is the most commonly used pesticide in the United States, on endangered species nationwide,” said Brett Hartl, CBD’s endangered species policy director. “With more than 300 million pounds of this stuff being dumped on our landscape each year, it’s hard to even fathom the damage it’s doing.”
Roundup appears to be responsible for the 90% drop in the number of monarch butterflies in the United States. The butterflies feed on milkweed, which has been just about eliminated because of Roundup use in fields near butterflies’ habitats.
Monsanto spokesman Robb Fraley said Roundup meets standards set by regulatory and health authorities. However, the EPA hasn’t ever taken a close look at glyphosate’s effect on endangered species.
Atrazine chemically castrates frogs and may be linked to increased risks of thyroid cancer, reproductive harm and birth defects in humans, according to CBD. “The EPA should have banned this years ago,” Hartl said. Up to 80 million pounds of atrazine are used each year in the United States on corn, sugarcane and sorghum, as well as lawns and golf courses.
The EPA’s agreement is only the beginning of a long, slow process. The agency has agreed to complete its assessments by 2020.
To Learn More:
Big Win for Environmentalists Will Force EPA to Study Glyphosate (by Elizabeth Warmerdam, Courthouse News Service )
Settlement: EPA to Analyze Impacts of World’s Two Most Widely Used Pesticides on 1,500 Endangered Species (Center for Biological Diversity)
UN Report Links California’s Favorite Herbicide, Monsanto’s Roundup, to Cancer (by Ken Broder, AllGov California )
EPA Sued over Not Protecting Decimated Monarch Butterflies from Monsanto (by Noel Brinkerhoff and Ken Broder, AllGov California )
EPA Approves Rise in Glyphosate Residue for Monsanto’s Herbicide (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov )
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Sanctions, War and the Policy of Dual Containment
By SASAN FAYAZMANESH | March 17, 2008
It is now nearly three decades since the Unites States adopted the policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq. While much has been written about the containment of Iraq, there has been very little in-depth analysis of this policy when it comes to Iran. In a book that is going to be released on March 31, 2008, entitled The United States and Iran: Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual Containment (Routledge), I attempt to address this shortcoming by investigating when and why the US policy of containment of Iran came about, how it evolved, and where it stands today.[1] To the extent that Israel has been involved in US policy making, the study will also include the role that Israel has played in the containment of Iran. Also, since the fate of Iran has been inextricably linked to that of Iraq, occasionally the investigation will overlap with the containment of Iraq.
The policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq originated during the Carter Administration, but it was not until the Clinton Administration that the expression “dual containment” became popular. … continue
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