Pesticide Ban - Canada

Why must Canada be so progressive? I heart Ontario. They rock !

"Ontario's cosmetic pesticide ban took effect last week. Homeowners can still buy pesticides to control wasps, mosquitoes, fleas on pets, house pests or plants that are poisonous to the touch like poison ivy. But Ontario's ban outlaws the cosmetic use of about 250 products on lawns, parks, gardens and schoolyards."

For the full article

Now if NYS can only get as far we will be moving into a new era.

Uber Urban Wild Life - Take a Look

From our third floor window my toddler and I watched a very healthy cardinal feed its large baby. There is a lot of wild life to be observed in a city. Attracting particular animals to a city yard is not that hard.

Here are some animals that may be in your east cost back yard.

Birds: Cardinals, Blue Jays, House Finch, Yellow Finch, Sparrow, Starling, Robin, Swallows, Turkeys, Warblers, Red Tail hawk, Cooper's hawk

Mammals: rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels, bats

Amphibians: frogs, salamanders, toads

Insects: stick bugs, praying mantis, lady bugs, sulphur butterflies, Karner Blue Butterflies, ants, etc


Wild life is good for the neighborhood...Why?

Well, to start with predators eat pest meaning people have less work to do to remove vermin. If we provide habitation for one brown bat, it will eat 3000 mosquitoes in one night. The insects called praying mantis, stick bugs and ladybugs eat the insects that kill garden plants. The Northern Leopard Frogs eat mosquitoes. These frogs are also an indicator of water and air quality, the worse the quality the lower the number of frogs. Needless to say these animals are low in numbers.

The first year I saw a Coopers Hawk was truly the beginning of my appreciation of urban wild life. The hawk was was sitting just 20 feet above ground in a maple tree. Its long banded tail signaled to me that this was not a typical bird, and the way is was perched signified this was a hawk. The following year it found a mate and raised a baby in a nest three stories up in a neighborhood Silver Maple. I watch all summer long as the two parents fed their offspring rat after rat. There were very few rats that year in our neighborhood. A neighbor saw me and I turned to tell him that this small predator was a hawk. He responded with it made a loud ruckus, the cawing it did was so that the fledgling bird could follow its parents as they swooped and dove between buildings. I responded with, I watched the baby bird eat a half dozen large rats each day and maybe the added noise was a small price to pay for the removal of the rats. (There is always someone like this in a neighborhood.) This photo is the bird eating a pigeon in the Silver Maple that is in my back yard the year after it raised its baby. These hawks are considered rare in New York. So, plant a tree in your front yard that will grow tall, attract nesting birds that eat rats, and be inspired by this jet-fighter-like flying bird.

Nature Balancing Nature

A neighborhood reap the rewards if a few simple steps are taken by each homeowner.

1. Buy predatory insects so they can eat other pest insect.
2. Plant a maple, sycamore, or other large tree for perches for hawks to hunt from or nest on.
3. Do not rototiller a yard. It turns up dormant weed seeds and it kills earth worms.
4. Do not use pesticides on your yard, besides that it causes breast cancer, it kills the insects birds need to eat.
5. Plant bushes and brush. This is for shelter for song birds that eat weed seeds and insects.
6. Nesting boxes for birds.
7. Shelter boxes for butterflies.
8. Shelter boxes for bats.
9. Provide water supply; pond, rain garden, bird bath, etc.

Reports & understanding them

One point I would like to make about reading reports. Not all reports are created equal. Here are a few points you should look for in a report.

1. Who wrote it? Was it a University Professor? A Medical University? The Government?
Or someone who is paid to be bias like a radio talk show host, lobbyist or corporation?

2. Population size? or sampling. The population size is important...usually the bigger the better.

3. Was the paper peer reviewed? Did other scientist read and approve the paper?

4. Increased Risk: When a report says there is an increased risk they mean from the "base line" or standard chances of getting something. For instance if the standard rate of getting a cancer is 1 in a 100,000 and the risk went up 60%....then the chances of getting the cancer increased to 1.6 people out of 100,000. If the risk went up 100% then the chances of getting the cancer is 2.0 people out of 100,000 (or 1 in 50,000)

Pesticides & more & more Cancer

Prostate Cancer Risk Doubles in Pesticide Applicators

SOURCE: Occupational Environmental Medicine, 56(1):14-21, 1999

OBJECTIVES: Although the primary hazard to humans associated with pesticide exposure is acute poisoning, there has been considerable concern surrounding the possibility of cancer and other chronic health effects in humans. Given the huge volume of pesticides now used throughout the world, as well as environmental and food residue contamination leading to chronic low level exposure, the study of possible chronic human health effects is important.

METHODS: This was a retrospective cohort study, analyzed by general standardized mortality ratio (SMR) of licensed pesticide applicators in Florida compared with the general population of Florida. A cohort of 33,658 (10% female) licensed pesticide applicators assembled through extensive data linkages yielded 1874 deaths with 320,250 person-years from 1 January 1975 to 31 December 1993.

RESULTS: Among male applicators, prostate cancer mortality (SMR 2.38 (95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.83 to 3.04) was significantly increased. (The increase being from 1.83 to 3.40)

(Mortality ratio of 2.38. This is a ratio of the odds of getting the disease or the multiplier.)

No cases of soft tissue sarcoma were confirmed in this cohort, and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma was not increased. The number of female applicators was small, as were the numbers of deaths. Mortality from cervical cancer and breast cancer was not increased.

Additional subcohort and exposure analyzes were performed.

Fleming LE, Bean JA, Rudolph M, Hamilton K
Mortality in a cohort of licensed pesticide applicators in Florida.
Department of Epidemiology and Public Health
University of Miami School of Medicine, FL 33101, USA.
lfleming@mednet.med.miami.edu

Home, Pesticides & more Cancer

Common Weed Killer (Roundup) Shows Evidence of
Environmental and Health Problems SOURCE: Organic Gardening, July, 2000

Thousands and thousands of acres in the United States are being sprayed annually with nearly 50 million pounds of Roundup, a broad-spectrum herbicide designed to kill any plant it hits, unless the plant has been genetically altered to tolerate the chemical. Roundup has accounted for half of Monsanto's corporate profits in recent years. Now the company has expanded its Roundup market by genetically engineering "Roundup Ready" soybeans, corn, and other crops. Monsanto's advertising campaigns have convinced many people that Roundup is safe, but the facts simply do not support that conclusion. Independent scientific studies have shown that Roundup is toxic to earthworms, beneficial insects, birds and mammals. Plus it destroys the vegetation on which they depend for food and shelter. And although Monsanto claims that Roundup breaks down into harmless substances, it has been found to be extremely persistent, with residue absorbed by subsequent crops over a year after application. Roundup show adverse effects in all standard categories of toxicological testing, including medium-term toxicity, long-term toxicity, genetic damage, effects on reproduction, and carcinogenicity. Here is some of the research that demonstrates the ways that Roundup's active ingredient, glyphosate, adversely affects plants and animals:

In a study conducted by T.B. Moorman and colleagues at the USDA Southern Weed Science Laboratory in Stoneville, Mississippi, glyphosate reduced soybeans' and clover's ability to fix nitrogen. A study conducted by G.S. Johal and J.E. Rahe of the Center for Pest Management at Simon Frase University in Burnaby, British Columbia, found that glyphosate made bean plants more susceptible to disease. At Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, D. Estok and colleagues found that glyphosate reduces the growth of beneficial soil-dwelling mycorrhizal fungi.

Moving up to mammals, sperm production in rabbits was diminished by 50 percent when they were exposed to glyphosate, in research conducted by M.I. Youset and colleagues at the University of Alexandria in Egypt and the University of Tromso in Norway.

Brand-new evidence suggests that Roundup may cause cancer. The study, published in Environmental and Molecular Mutagenesis (vol. 31 pp. 55-59, 1998), found that an unidentified chemical in Roundup caused genetic damage in the livers and kidneys of mice exposed to the herbicide. The researchers believe additional experiments are needed to determine which chemical in the Roundup mixture is causing the damage. They point out that this will be very difficult because "the precise composition of the mixture...is not available due to protection by patent regulation." In other words, Monsanto doesn't have to reveal to the public exactly what chemicals are in Roundup.

In California, where pesticide-related illness must be reported, Roundup's active ingredient (glyphosate) was the third most commonly reported cause of pesticide illness among agricultural workers, and the most common cause of pesticide illness in landscape workers. According to two New Zealand toxicologists, the symptoms experienced by workers exposed to Roundup included eye and skin irritation, headaches, nausea and heart palpitations.

Homes, Pesticides & Neuroblastoma

Neuroblastoma Linked to Homes Treated with Pesticides

SOURCE: Epidemiology: 12(1):20-26, January, 2001

One of the largest studies to date has found that pesticide use around the home can more than double the chance of a child developing neuroblastoma.

Neuroblastoma accounts for approximately 10% of all childhood tumors. There are 550 new cases in the United States each year, with an annual incidence rate of 9.2 cases per million children under 15 years of age. This works out to approximately 1 per 100,000 children under age 15 on a national level. (These rates were reported in the book "Principles and Practice of Pediatric Oncology, Lippincott-Raven, 1997). It is a very serious cancer as approximately 60% of children over age 1 who develop neuroblastoma do not live 3 years even when receiving treatments of radiation and chemotherapy. Children under age 1 have a more positive prognosis. As statistics show that neuroblastoma rates have increased over the past 50 years, it is reasonable to assume environmental factors may be involved.

One of the largest collaborative efforts among 7 Universities and medical facilities worked together to determine what extent pesticide use in the home could increase child neuroblastoma rates. 390 neuroblastoma children and 460 non-cancer controls were included in the study. Investigators questioned both parents regarding use of pesticides in and around the home.

Results showed that using pesticides in and around the home resulted in a 60% increased likelihood of children developing the disease (Odds Ratio=1.6). Looking at pesticide use for the lawn and garden only resulted in an increased risk of 120% (Odds Ratio=2.2) when the mother had applied pesticides in the yard and 50% higher (Odds Ratio=1.5) when the father had applied pesticides in the yard.

(Chem-Tox Note: Outdoor pesticides are much different from indoor pesticides as they include fungicides and herbicides some of which have been reported to contain dioxin).

Julie L. Daniels, Andrew F. Olshan, Kay Teschke, Irva Hertz-Picciotto, Dave A. Savitz, Julie Blatt, Melissa L. Bondy, Joseph P. Neglia, Brad H. Pollock, Susan L. Cohn, A. Thomas Look, Robert C. Seeger, Robert P. Castleberry
Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, University of British Columbia, University of Texas, University of Minnesota, University of Florida, Northwestern University, Department of Experimental Oncology, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and University of Alabama