A story that is to touch our heart...and spur us to
ACTION... ACTION... ACTION...
YES, beyond words...Loss that screams... WHY??
Watch, feel, share...
Rose Marie Raccioppi
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Sunday, September 3, 2017
NO NO to Toxic Pesticides...
Dear Friends, Family and Followers...
YES, a grassroots movement initiated, by Rose Marie Raccioppi, led to legislative protection... A law representing the Precautionary Principle held by Rockland County, New York, relating to the public lands of Rockland County, has been in place since 2008... a precursor to the pesticide restrictions on parkland, and school grounds. YES, change begins with a commitment, ongoing action, awareness and revelation of effect!!
NOW it is the time, the pressing need for each home owner, each land, owner, each local farm owner, each business owner, to NOT use toxic pesticides on their property grounds. My neighbor is NOT to have the 'right' to poison my property, my body, my children, my wellbeing from the runoff of toxic pesticides such as Roundup by Monsanto. Our environment, our health, are not to be adversely compromised!! We are called upon to revisit the documented harm, and as responsible consumers eliminate the use of poisons that have been shown to have ill effects upon our growing children and our community populace.
Rockland Co. NY Legislature Passes Non-Toxic Landscape Act
Thursday, June 19th, 2008
(Beyond Pesticides, June 19, 2008) Rockland County, NY legislators passed a bill on June 17, 2008 to eliminate the use of toxic pesticides on all county-owned or leased land. Rose Marie Raccioppi, the community organizer behind the bill, is a member of Beyond Pesticides, the National Pesticide-Free Lawn Coalition, and Orangetown’s Environmental Committee. She brought her concerns about pesticide exposure to the Rockland County Legislature last year, and advocated strongly for the passage of the Rockland County Non-Toxic Landscape Maintenance Act. “This is the beginning of what is hoped to be a continuing campaign,” Ms. Raccioppi said. “We hope it moves from county to towns to school districts and eventually, the consciousness of the individual homeowner.” As the law currently stands in New York, and most other states, municipalities may not pass legislation regulating the use of pesticides on private land and buildings, reserving governance of such matters to the state government. However, towns and counties throughout the U.S. (See Daily News of April 15, May 12, May 13, and June 16, 2008) are passing regulations restricting the use of pesticides on publicly-owned land.
Friday, September 1, 2017
Dr. Mercola and Dr. Bush on Soil Microbes (Full Interview)
YES... the message of Nature's Game is BALANCE...not destruction, not manipulation, nor defiance of its laws. Heed well the call...
BALANCE... the call to...
Beauty
Awareness
Love
Appreciation
Nurturance
Creation
Evolution ... of time, nature, and divine ordinance.
Awareness
Love
Appreciation
Nurturance
Creation
Evolution ... of time, nature, and divine ordinance.
Love it is,
Rose Marie Raccioppi
ATTENTION!! ATTENTION!! ATTENTION!! Allow yourself to be fully aware of the ill effects of GMOs...
ATTENTION!! ATTENTION!! ATTENTION!!
Allow yourself to be fully aware of the effects of GMOs ... you, our children are being adversely effected... I watched this last evening and certainly feel compelled to bring this forward.
Dr. Zach Bush gifts us with a most learned, riveting and enlightening presentation, YES, A MUST see, a must listen!!
Yours in health, awareness, wellbeing,
Farmers are posting startling pictures on social media: fields of beans and vegetable gardens withering away.
Scant Oversight, Corporate Secrecy Preceded US Weed Killer Crisis
Farmers are posting startling pictures on social media: fields of beans and vegetable gardens withering away.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - As the U.S. growing season entered its peak this summer, farmers began posting startling pictures on social media: fields of beans, peach orchards and vegetable gardens withering away.
The photographs served as early warnings of a crisis that has damaged millions of acres of farmland. New versions of the herbicide dicamba developed by Monsanto and BASF, according to farmers, have drifted across fields to crops unable to withstand it, a charge authorities are investigating.
As the crisis intensifies, new details provided to Reuters by independent researchers and regulators, and previously unreported testimony by a company employee, demonstrate the unusual way Monsanto introduced its product. The approach, in which Monsanto prevented key independent testing of its product, went unchallenged by the Environmental Protection Agency and nearly every state regulator.
Typically, when a company develops a new agricultural product, it commissions its own tests and shares the results and data with regulators. It also provides product samples to universities for additional scrutiny. Regulators and university researchers then work together to determine the safety of the product.
In this case, Monsanto denied requests by university researchers to study its XtendiMax with VaporGrip for volatility - a measure of its tendency to vaporize and drift across fields.
The researchers interviewed by Reuters - Jason Norsworthy at the University of Arkansas, Kevin Bradley at the University of Missouri and Aaron Hager at the University of Illinois - said Monsanto provided samples of XtendiMax before it was approved by the EPA. However, the samples came with contracts that explicitly forbade volatility testing.
“This is the first time I’m aware of any herbicide ever brought to market for which there were strict guidelines on what you could and could not do,” Norsworthy said.
The researchers declined to provide Reuters a copy of the Monsanto contracts, saying they were not authorized to do so.
Monsanto’s Vice President of Global Strategy, Scott Partridge, said the company prevented the testing because it was unnecessary. He said the company believed the product was less volatile than a previous dicamba formula that researchers found could be used safely.
“To get meaningful data takes a long, long time,” he said. “This product needed to get into the hands of growers.”
‘JEOPARDIZE THE FEDERAL LABEL’
Monsanto employee Boyd Carey, an agronomist, laid out the company’s rationale for blocking the independent research at a hearing of the Arkansas Plant Board’s Pesticide Committee in the summer of 2016.
A meeting summary by the Arkansas Legislature’s Joint Budget Committee described Carey’s testimony as follows: “Boyd Carey is on record on Aug. 8 stating that the University of Arkansas nor any other university was given the opportunity to test VaporGrip in fear that the results may jeopardize the federal label.”
Efforts to reach Carey were not successful. Monsanto declined to comment on his testimony.
To be sure, complaints about damaged crops are still under investigation and there is no evidence that independent testing of XtendiMax’s volatility would have altered the course of the crisis. But it would have given regulators a more complete picture of the formula’s properties as they decided if and how to let farmers use it, agriculture experts said.
In the end, the EPA approved the product without the added testing in September. It said it made its decision after reviewing company-supplied data, including some measuring volatility.
“EPA’s analysis of the data has shown reduced volatility potential with newer formulations,” the EPA said in a July 27 statement.
However, EPA spokeswoman Amy Graham told Reuters the agency is “very concerned about the recent reports of crop damage” and is reviewing restrictions on dicamba labels.
Monsanto Chief Technology Officer Robert Fraley said, “We firmly believe that our product if applied according to the instructions on the label will not move off target and damage anyone.”
STATES APPROVE WITHOUT MORE TESTING
Companies can limit independent testing because the substances are proprietary. When samples are provided to researchers, lawyers hammer out contracts detailing how testing will be conducted and results will be handled, but rarely do agreements limit what the products can be tested for, according to researchers interviewed by Reuters.
For instance, BASF, which introduced its rival herbicide, Engenia, around the same time, said it allowed several university researchers to evaluate its “off-target impact and application parameters.”
Norsworthy, of the University of Arkansas, confirmed he had been permitted by BASF to study Engenia for volatility and that the results showed less volatility than previous dicamba formulations. BASF says its product is safe when properly applied.
The EPA did not answer questions about whether it noticed a lack of input from university researchers about XtendiMax’s volatility or whether it requested such testing.
It also did not address whether the lack of independent research played into its decision to give the product an abridged two-year registration, less than the 20 years experts say is more common. The agency did the same for BASF’s Engenia.
“The EPA placed time limits on the registration to allow the agency to either let it expire or to easily make the necessary changes in the registration if there are problems,” Graham, the EPA spokeswoman, said.
After the EPA signed off, Monsanto sought approval from individual states, which determine whether agricultural products are suitable for their climates and geographies.
To help them do that, Monsanto shared its XtendiMax testing results with state regulators. But it only supplied that data in finished form, Monsanto’s Carey told the Arkansas Plant Board meeting, meaning it withheld underlying data that could be analyzed independently by the regulators.
Only Arkansas wanted more. Terry Walker, the director of the Arkansas Plant Board, said the state asked Monsanto for extra testing, but the company refused.
“As the system progressed and it got closer to EPA approval, the board kept asking for local data,” Walker said. “That did not happen.”
Monsanto’s Fraley said the company could not honor Arkansas’ request within the EPA’s timeline. “Given the timing of the approval… there simply wasn’t the opportunity to do the additional testing,” he said.
Arkansas blocked Monsanto’s product because of the lack of extra volatility testing by universities, but approved BASF’s because it had not limited such testing and the results were acceptable. Thirty-three other states - every other state where the products were marketed - approved both products.
After Arkansas blocked XtendiMax in December, crop damage began to appear in the state anyway. Investigators trying to determine the cause of the damage are considering a range of possibilities including problems with or improper use of Engenia or illegal use of XtendiMax or earlier formulations. In July, the state banned all products containing dicamba.
Some states including Illinois, Missouri and Tennessee said they do not seek the more data if products pass EPA scrutiny.
“The EPA is the federal agency responsible for approving and registering pesticides for sale and use,” said Missouri Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Sarah Alsager. “The Department does not perform field testing or solicit local input.”
Some states are now forming task forces to determine what should be done about the damage.
On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 9:19 AM, Mitchel Cohen mitchelcohen@mindspring.com [sprayno] <sprayno@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
Miracle weed killer dicamba was supposed to save farms; instead, it’s devastating them
EDITED by Laurel Hopwood <lhopwood@roadrunner.com>, Sierra Club
by Caitlin Dewey, 8/30/17
The damage across the Midwest - sickly soybeans, trees and other crops - has become emblematic of a deepening crisis in American agriculture.
Farmers are locked in an arms race between ever-stronger weeds and ever-stronger weed killers.
The dicamba system, approved for use for the first time this spring, was supposed to break the cycle and guarantee weed control in soybeans and cotton. The herbicide - used in combination with a genetically modified dicamba-resistant soybean - promises better control of unwanted plants such as pigweed, which has become resistant to common weed killers. The problem is that dicamba has drifted from the fields where it was sprayed, damaging millions of acres of unprotected soybeans and other crops in what some are calling a man-made disaster. Critics contend that the herbicide was approved by federal officials without enough data, particularly on the critical question of whether it could drift off target.
As dicamba use has increased, so too have reports that it "volatilizes,â" or re-vaporizes and travels to other fields. That harms nearby trees, as well as nonresistant soybeans, fruits and vegetables, and plants used as habitats by bees and other pollinators.
According to one 2004 assessment, dicamba is 75 to 400 times more dangerous to off-target plants than the common weed killer glyphosate, even at very low doses. It is particularly toxic to soybeans - the very crop it was designed to protect - that haven't been modified for resistance.
Kevin Bradley, a University of Missouri researcher, estimates that more than 3.1 million acres of soybeans have been damaged by dicamba in at least 16 states, including major producers such as Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota. That figure is probably low, according to researchers, and it represents almost 4 percent of all U.S. soybean acres.
"It's really hard to get a handle on how widespread the damage is," said Bob Hartzler, a professor of agronomy at Iowa State. "But I've come to the conclusion that [dicamba] is not manageable."
Critics say that the approval process proceeded without adequate data and under enormous pressure from state agriculture departments, industry groups and farmers' associations. Those groups argued that farmers desperately needed the new herbicide to control glyphosate-resistant weeds. Such weeds have grown stronger and more numerous over the past 20 years - a result of glyphosate overuse.
State weed scientists expressed unanimous concern that dicamba is more volatile than manufacturers have indicated.
Regulators did not have access to much of this data. Although Monsanto and BASF submitted hundreds of studies to the EPA, only a handful of reports considered volatility in a real-world field setting, as opposed to a greenhouse or a lab, according to regulatory filings. Under EPA rules, manufacturers are responsible for funding and conducting the safety tests the agency uses to evaluate products.
And although pesticide-makers often supply new products to university researchers to conduct field tests in varied environments, Monsanto acknowledged it did not allow that testing on its commercialized dicamba because it did not want to delay registration, and scientists said BASF limited it.
Frustrated scientists say that allowed chemical companies to cherry-pick the data available to regulators.
Environmental Working Group's Scott Faber says farmers have become "trapped on a chemical treadmill" driven by the biotech industry. Many farmers say they think they could not continue farming without new herbicide technology.
"We're on a road to nowhere," said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. "The next story is resistance to a third chemical, and then a fourth chemical - you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see where that will end. The real issue here is that people are using ever-more complicated combinations of poisons on crops, with ever-more complex consequences."
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Wednesday, August 30, 2017
Pesticides linked to birth abnormalities in major new study
‘The sheer size of the study, and the meticulous way it has been carried out, suggest that there is an environmental hazard for mothers resident in an area with large scale pesticide usage’
Ian Johnston
Science Correspondent
@montaukian
Tuesday 29 August 2017
High exposure to pesticides as a result of living near farmers’ fields appears to increase the risk of giving birth to a baby with “abnormalities” by about 9 per cent, according to new research.
Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, compared 500,000 birth records for people born in the San Joaquin Valley between 1997 and 2011 and levels of pesticides used in the area.
The average use of pesticides over that period was about 975kg for each 2.6sq km area per year.
But, for pregnant women in areas where 4,000kg of pesticides was used, the chance of giving birth prematurely rose by about 8 per cent and the chance of having a birth abnormality by about 9 per cent.
Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers compared this to the 5 to 10 per cent increase adverse birth outcomes that can result from air pollution or extreme heat events.
“Concerns about the effects of harmful environmental exposure on birth outcomes have existed for decades,” they wrote.
“Great advances have been made in understanding the effects of smoking and air pollution, among others, yet research on the effects of pesticides has remained inconclusive.
“While environmental contaminants generally share the ethical and legal problems of evaluating the health consequences of exposure in a controlled setting and the difficulties associated with rare outcomes, pesticides present an additional challenge.
“Unlike smoking, which is observable, or even air pollution, for which there exists a robust network of monitors, publicly available pesticide use data are lacking for most of the world.”
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They said exposure to pesticides varied greatly in the San Joaquin Valley, with more than half of the births in places where there were no pesticides used in the area.
“For most births, there is no statistically identifiable impact of pesticide exposure on birth outcome. Yet, for individuals in the top 5 per cent of exposure, pesticide exposure led to 5 to 9 per cent increases in adverse outcomes,” they said.
“The magnitude of effects was further enlarged for the top 1 per cent, where these extreme exposures (more than 11,000kg over gestation) led to an 11 per cent increased probability of preterm birth, 20 per cent increased probability of low birth weight, and about a 30g decrease in birth weight.
“For birth abnormalities, being in the high versus low pesticide exposure group for cumulative pesticide use over gestation increased the probability of a birth abnormality by about 9 per cent (5.8 per cent of births have a birth abnormality in this sample).”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/pesticides-feed-world
Levels of pesticide use depended to a large degree on the types of crops being grown.
“Commodities such as grapes receive nearly 50kg per hectare per year of insecticides alone in the San Joaquin Valley region, while other high value crops such as pistachios receive barely one third of that amount,” the researchers said.
They were unable to isolate the roles of different chemicals used in the study.
“Doing so is extremely challenging, because many chemicals are used in conjunction or in close spatial or temporal windows,” the paper said.
Commenting on the study, Professor Alastair Hay, an environmental toxicologist at Leeds University, said it had been “very well conducted”.
“This study will be picked over carefully by regulatory agencies, as indeed it should be,” he said.
“The sheer size of the study, and the meticulous way it has been carried out, suggest that there is an environmental hazard for mothers resident in an area with large-scale pesticide usage and that investigation of measures to mitigate exposures to the chemicals are needed.”
He said it was not clear which pesticides had been used, but added that the study was “likely to have wide applicability in view of the type of crops sprayed”.
“And given that the risk is clearly in the area most heavily exposed which you would expect to see if the problem were reall there are clear messages that mitigation measures are needed,” Professor Hay said.
Dr Christopher Connolly, a neurobiologist at Dundee University, said the study reported “a significant increase in adverse birth effects that relate to high level pesticide use”.
“However, the devil is in the detail, and the detail is missing which pesticide(s) are responsible for these effects??” he said.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/pesticides-birth-abnormalities-linked-pregnancy-study-san-joaquin-valley-california-farms-a7918636.html
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
ROUNDUP ... proof of harm...
Roundup Now Proven to Cause Liver Disease, and it’s in Your Food
Waking Times -
In addition to the other documented risks of Monsanto’s Roundup, a cutting-edge study using molecular profiling reveals that it also causes liver disease, even at doses currently approved by regulators.
Researchers at King’s College London have discovered that the popular weedkiller Roundup causes non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). The two-year study performed on rats tested the effect of real-world glyphosate doses currently permitted by regulators. This is the first time that science has shown a direct causal link between the consumption of an extremely low dose of Roundup and a serious disease.
The study, conducted by Dr. Michael Antoniou et.al. and published in Scientific Reports, states:
Overall, metabolome and proteome disturbances showed a substantial overlap with biomarkers of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and its progression to steatohepatosis and thus confirm liver functional dysfunction resulting from chronic ultra-low dose glyphosate-based herbicides (GBH) exposure.
Regulators commonly accept toxicity studies in rats as indicators of risks affecting human health, thus, the results of this latest report have grave implications for human health.
The Roundup Addiction
Shockingly, according to the United States Geological Survey, over 2.6 billion pounds of Roundup herbicide were dumped onto USA’s farmland and food supply from 1992 to 2012. Roundup is the most-popular glyphosate-based herbicide (GBH) sold worldwide. Hundreds of millions of pounds are sprayed around the world each year.
The proliferation of glyphosate use in big agriculture has had many environmental ramifications, and the quality of soil is being impacted globally. Farmers now face hundreds of glyphosate-resistant superweeds, increasing their costs and requiring use of many more herbicides. Roundup has been found in rain and air samples, and glyphosate residues have been found in human breast milk and urine, as well as tap water and all types of food, including milk, eggs and baby food. A recent FDA study even found high levels in many popular foods.
“New testing conducted by an FDA-registered food safety lab found alarming levels of the chemical glyphosate (known as Monsanto’s Roundup weed-killer) in several very common foods. This independent research reveals that many popular foods have over 1000 times the glyphosate levels that have been established to be harmful.” [Source]
Many scientific studies have shown that exposure to GBHs such as Roundup can lead to serious health problems, such as cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, kidney disease, and Celiac disease. This newest study showing a causal link between Roundup and liver disease is one of the most compelling due to extremely low doses being tested.
Very Low Doses of Roundup Cause Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease
The research conducted at King’s College London by Dr. Antoniou and his team was one of the first to take into consideration the effects of exposure to glyphosate amounts currently permitted by regulators. The researchers were concerned that results from other glyphosate toxicity studies “were obtained at doses far greater than general human population exposure.
“Doses tested were typically over the glyphosate acceptable daily intake (ADI), which is currently set at 0.3 mg/kg bw/day within the European Union (1.75 mg/kg bw/day in the USA) based on hepatorenal toxicity measurements after chronic exposure in rats.”
To address this problem, the team administered Roundup via drinking water at a concentration of 0.1 parts per billion (ppb), or 0.05 microgram/Liter (μg/L). This equals a daily intake of 4 ng/kg bw/day, much lower than the acceptable daily intake in Europe and the USA.
Regardless of the extremely low Roundup concentration, which was thousands of times below what is permitted by regulators, the researchers found the following:
The results showed that Roundup caused an increased incidence in signs of anatomical pathologies, as well as changes in urine and blood biochemical parameters suggestive of liver and kidney functional insufficiency.
Dr. Antoniou adds:
“Our results also suggest that regulators should reconsider the safety evaluation of glyphosate-based herbicides.”
Based on this latest study, one would think it obligatory for regulators to reconsider the acceptable daily intake levels for glyphosate-based herbicides. Are these findings sufficient to set in motion even bigger changes?
Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD)
The new study highlights the question of whether Roundup is an unrecognized risk factor leading to an increase in NAFLD, which affects about 25% of the population in the USA. It is just as common throughout Europe.
NAFLD symptoms include fatigue, weight loss, nausea, abdominal pain, jaundice, itching of the eyes, spider-like blood vessels, and swelling in the legs and abdomen. Over time, NAFLD can progress to more serious conditions such as non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, where the liver can swell and become damaged, as well as the irreversible liver cirrhosis.
Considering the high levels of glyphosate contamination of our food and water supply, it seems wise to take proactive action in keeping the liver healthy. Some ways to reduce the risk of NAFLD and even heal a fatty liver are offered by Dr. Mark Hyman. He is the chairman of the Institute for Functional Medicine and author of The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet:
- Eliminate all high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS),
- Get rid of white, processed flour and eliminate or greatly reduce starch,
- Add healthy fats,
- Improve your metabolism through exercise,
- Supplement intelligently, with herbs as milk thistle, and supplements such as glutathione and magnesium.
- Eat detoxifying, liver-repairing super foods, such as broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, and leafy veggies (1-2 cups per day)
- Power up with protein, including nuts, seeds, eggs, fish, chicken or grass-fed meat (about 4-6 ounces with each meal)
On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 9:04 AM, szukidavis@aol.com [ActionGreens] <ActionGreens-noreply@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
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