With thanks to the Independent 26.6.06:

Forestry experts have called for a census of London’s beleaguered horse chestnut trees to assess damage caused by drought, pest attack and disease.

…the use of a homeopathic spray to combat bleeding canker infection and pest infestation has so far yielded positive results. “The trial that’s been running for two years is showing very good results… You can’t spray any kind of toxic chemicals in these public areas, so homeopathics are perfect for the job”.

Read about more scientific research into homeopathy

As The Independent revealed on Thursday, at least one in 10 horse chestnut trees in Britain is believed to have been affected by an environmental “triple whammy,” which is being compared in impact to the outbreak of Dutch elm disease which swept the country in the 1970s. The trees are being attacked by a combination of cankers killing the bark and leaf-moth larvae destroying foliage.

David Rose, a spokesman for the Forestry Commission, said yesterday: “It is imperative that we have a proper survey of the problem across London as it is the area of Britain worst hit by this. It is something that we would be willing to co-ordinate.”

His calls were backed by the London Assembly’s Liberal Democrat spokesman on the environment, Mike Tuffey. “Once we know the size of the epidemic we can nip it in the bud.”

Calls for a rescue plan for the iconic tree, which has provided generations of children with ammunition for annual autumn conker fights, have become increasingly urgent since The Independent revealed the scale of the problem. Mark Spencer, a tree expert at the Natural History Museum, said yesterday: “Because of conker fights and the incredible impact horse chestnuts have on the way London looks any changes could be dramatic”.

Carrying out a census however, would be a costly process. Mr Rose, said: “Larger-scale work would need additional resources but could yield interesting results.”

Meanwhile it emerged yesterday that a treatment being developed in the Netherlands could hold the key to saving Britain’s horse chestnut. The chestnuts which line the boulevards of The Hague face a similar threat to Britain’s trees. But the use of a homeopathic spray to combat bleeding canker infection and pest infestation has so far yielded positive results.

“The trial that’s been running for two years is showing very good results, and we seem to be the only people actually doing anything” said Glen Atkinson, the inventor of the treatment and founder director of Bdmax, the company which is marketing the spray. “You can’t spray any kind of toxic chemicals in these public areas, so homeopathics are perfect for the job.”

But experts in Britain are pessimistic about the chances of saving those trees which have already succumbed to disease or been infested by the leaf miner moth.

Chris Prior of the Royal Horticultural Society said: “Unfortunately there is nothing that can be done about the leaf miner, and it’s very unlikely there’ll be any action that can be taken against cankers as well.”

One tree officer from a London borough also voiced scepticism over a possible Dutch “miracle cure”. He said: “If something worked we’d be very keen to use it, but I’m not sure how it could tackle both problems at once. It sounds a bit too good to be true.”

With thanks to The Telegraph 7.8.09:

Forget, for a moment, the impassioned debate over the healthiness of organic food that has been raging merrily since the Food Standards Agency published its controversial report last week.

There is a much more important issue to consider, one that has hardly figured in the argument. Can organic farming do much to feed an increasingly hungry world? Almost everyone assumes that it can’t. It is seen as something purely for the health conscious Western middle classes.

But the counter intuitive truth is very different.

Study after study show that organic techniques can provide much more food per acre in developing countries than conventional chemical based agriculture.

One report – published last year by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) – found that 114 projects, covering nearly two million African farmers, more than doubled their yields by introducing organic or near organic practices.

Another study – led by the University of Essex – looked at similar projects in 57 developing countries, covering three per cent of the entire cultivated area in the Third World, and revealed an average increase of 79 per cent.

And research at the University of Michigan concluded that organic farming could increase yields on developing countries’ farms three fold.

It seems hard to believe. Indeed, Achim Steiner, UNEP’s executive director, says the report gave him the biggest surprise of any that have crossed his desk. After all, it’s not long since all our farms were organic through sheer necessity, and the advent of chemicals has since dramatically increased yields in intensive Western style agriculture.

On examination, it becomes easier to understand. Really intensive use of agricultural chemicals, as in East Anglia or the US Midwest, still produces the most food. But few Third World farmers can afford to buy that much fertiliser and pesticides. The amount they do use will shrink as the prices rise with that of oil.

Organic farming, meanwhile, has come a long way since the days when it was dismissed as “muck and magic”, with the development of increasingly sophisticated techniques.

Professor Jules Pretty, of Essex University, who has studied the issue for more than 20 years, says: “Methods used by organic farmers can dramatically increase yields over those achieved by low intensity conventional agriculture.”

Even more important, as the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development points out, going organic almost always boosts the incomes of small Third World farmers, because they no longer have to buy expensive chemicals.

This is vital, as three quarters of the world’s poorest people depend on small scale agriculture to eke out a living.

Those that have land often do not have enough, so have to buy food as well; half of the word’s undernourished people are smallholders and their families.

The landless are even worse off, and have to seek work as labourers. Again, a switch to organic agriculture can help, for it employs many more people, creating more than 170,000 jobs in 2007 in Mexico alone.

Providing and increasing incomes is the most effective way to combat hunger, which is rarely caused by an absolute shortage of food.

People normally go hungry because they cannot afford to buy the food that is produced.

Even the Western organic boom is helping people out of poverty. Exports of chemical free food from China, for example, soared from $1 million in the mid-1990s to over $150 million today.

And some of the poorest and most marginalised areas of the Third World, where few chemicals have ever been used, have often been able to cash in first.

Going organic will also pay long term dividends, for it builds up soil where conventional farming often depletes it, and stores more water in the ground in what will be an increasingly thirsty world.

Last year, the world’s biggest and most authoritative study – the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development – backed organic agriculture as part of a “radical change” in the way the world grows its food.

Certainly, the present over concentration on intensive agriculture has not succeeded even in reducing the number of people going hungry – this year it topped one billion for the first time.

None of this is to argue for a moment that all farming should be organic, as some of the most fundamentalist environmentalists insist.

The immediate drop in Western harvests alone would be catastrophic, and cause hundreds of millions more to go hungry as food prices increased.

A better balance needs to be struck if the world is to be fed. And working out what that should be makes the arguments of the past week seem pretty small potatoes – whether organic or not.

With thanks to the MailOnline 5.1.09:

Fizzy drinks sold by Coca-Cola in Britain have been found to contain pesticides at up to 300 times the level allowed in tap or bottled water.

A worldwide study found pesticide levels in orange and lemon drinks sold under the Fanta brand, which is popular with children, were at their highest in the UK.

The research team called on the Government, the industry and the company to act to remove the chemicals and called for new safety standards to regulate the soft drinks market. The industry denies children are at risk and insists that the levels found by researchers based at the University of Jaen in southern Spain are not harmful.The researchers tested 102 cans and bottles of soft drinks, bought from 15 countries, for the presence of 100 pesticides. The UK products were bought in London, Cambridge, Edinburgh, St Andrews and at Gatwick Airport.

The experts said the levels found were low under the maximum residue levels allowed for fruit, but they were ‘very high’ and ‘up to 300 times’ the figure permitted for bottled or tap water.

The chemicals detected included carbendazim, thiabendazole, imazalil, prochloraz, malathion and iprodione. They are mainly applied to fruit after harvest to stop it developing fungal infections and rotting.

A total of 19 products were bought in the UK, all made by Coca-Cola.

Two orange drinks bought in the UK contained imazalil at 300 times the limit permitted for a single pesticide in drinking water.

Two similar products contained 98 times the legal drinking water limit for thiabendazole.

The average level of the total pesticide contamination of the British drinks was 17.4 parts per billion  -  34.6 times the EU maximum residue level for water.

Coca-Cola GB insisted the products are safe. A spokesman said: ‘All of the drinks tested meet the safety regulations relating to food products made from agricultural ingredients, which include drinks with fruit juice as an ingredient.

‘The generally miniscule levels that were detected were well within the acceptable daily intake levels and these findings should reassure consumers there is no safety issue here.’

With thanks to New Scientist 12.1.09:

A comprehensive survey of the drinking water for more than 28 million Americans has detected the widespread but low-level presence of pharmaceuticals and hormonally active chemicals.

Little was known about people’s exposure to such compounds from drinking water, so Shane Snyder and colleagues at the Southern Nevada Water Authority in Las Vegas screened tap water from 19 US water utilities for 51 different compounds. The surveys were carried out between 2006 and 2007.

The 11 most frequently detected compounds – all found at extremely low concentrations – were:

• Atenolol, a beta-blocker used to treat cardiovascular disease

• Atrazine, an organic herbicide banned in the European Union, but still used in the US, which has been implicated in the decline of fish stocks and in changes in animal behaviour

• Carbamazepine, a mood-stabilising drug used to treat bipolar disorder, amongst other things

• Estrone, an oestrogen hormone secreted by the ovaries and blamed for causing gender-bending changes in fish

• Gemfibrozil, an anti-cholesterol drug

• Meprobamate, a tranquiliser widely used in psychiatric treatment

• Naproxen, a painkiller and anti-inflammatory linked to increases in asthma incidence

• Phenytoin, an anticonvulsant that has been used to treat epilepsy

• Sulfamethoxazole, an antibiotic used against the Streptococcus bacteria, which is responsible for tonsillitis and other diseases

• TCEP, a reducing agent used in molecular biology

• Trimethoprim, another antibiotic

The concentrations of pharmaceuticals in drinking water were millions of times lower than in a medical dose, and Snyder emphasises that they pose no public health threat.

He cautions, though, that “if a person has a unique health condition, or is concerned about particular contaminants in public water systems, I strongly recommend they consult their physician”.

Christian Daughton of the EPA’s National Exposure Research Laboratory says that neither this nor other recent water assessments give cause for health concern.

“But several point to the potential for risk – especially for the fetus and those with severely compromised health.”

Daughton says the contamination surveys help people realise how they are intimately and inseparably connected with their environment.

“The occurrence of pharmaceuticals in the environment also serves to make us acutely aware of the chemical sea that surrounds us,” he says.

Modern life

While the US government regulates the levels of pathogens in US drinking water, there are no rules for pharmaceuticals and other compounds, apart from one: the herbicide atrazine. The atrazine levels measured by Snyder and colleagues were well within federal limits.

Snyder says water utilities could make drinking water purer. But the costs of “extreme purification” – far beyond what is needed for safety alone – are huge in terms of increased energy usage and carbon footprint. Ultra-pure water might not even be safe, adds Snyder.

The widespread occurrence of pharmaceuticals and endocrine disruptors reflects improved detection techniques, rather than greater pollution, says Snyder. Contamination is a fact of modern life, he adds.

“As we continue to populate and aggregate, our wastes will certainly accumulate where we live,” he says. “We as a species have decided to live a modern life, with pharmaceuticals, plastics, transportation – therefore we must accept that there will be a certain degree of contamination.”

Journal reference: Environmental Science and Technology, in press

At last, there maybe some respite from this waste of time and unwanted intrusion…

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The origins of petroleum and oil and natural gas are the decayed remains of dead people and animals!

Natural gas, oil and petroleum are formed from the soft parts of billions and billions of dead animals and dead people decaying in restricted environments deep underground.So we are driving around on the remains of our ancestors and all living things on the planet.

How bloody awful!

All the wars fought over oil are really about who gets to own the residue of our own kind!

How typically cannibalistic of us!

I am also shocked to see how many organic and natural foods sold in health food shops are all packaged in PLASTIC!!

If anyone still doubts the syphillitic nature of our current civilisation, they must be living in a percipitory panopticon!

Sponsor a tree to offset your carbon emissions or as a present or in memorium – or just because you want too…

Homeopathy Action Trust exist to help you!

‘Health disaster’ in French Caribbean linked to pesticides by John Lichfield in Paris

The indiscriminate use of toxic pesticides on banana plantations in the French Caribbean has left much of the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe poisoned for a century to come, a report to the French parliament warned yesterday.

The two islands and their 800,000 inhabitants faced a “health disaster”, with soaring rates of cancer and infertility, said Professor Dominique Belpomme, a French cancer specialist.

Based on present trends, half the men of Martinique and Guadeloupe were likely to develop prostate cancer at some point in their lives, Professor Belpomme said.

Birth defects in children were also becoming far more common, he warned.

Tests have shown that every child born in Guadeloupe is contaminated with chlordecone, a highly toxic pesticide also known as kepone, which was banned in many countries in 1979.

It was used legally in France until 1990 and in the French Caribbean until 1993. But it was used illegally often sprayed by aeroplanes to kill weevils in Martinique and Guadeloupe until 2002.

Professor Belpomme said:

“The situation is extremely serious. The tests we carried out on pesticides show there is a health disaster in the Caribbean. The word is not too strong. Martinique and Guadeloupe have literally been poisoned.

“The poisoning affects both land and water. Chlordecone establishes itself in the clay and stays there for up to a century. As a result, the food chain is contaminated, especially water. In Martinique, most water sources are polluted.”

Politicians from the islands, which are overseas departments of France, were torn between accusing the professor of “alarmism” and calling for a full inquiry.

“This must not be covered up by a conspiracy of silence,” said Victorin Lurel, the socialist leader of the Guadeloupe regional council.

Christian Estrosi, the French minister for overseas territories, cast some doubts on the scientific basis of the report but said he was “wholly favourable” to an official commission.

Martinique and Guadeloupe produce more than 260,000 tonnes of bananas a year, worth £150m. The industry, which employs 15,000 people, also receives £90m in EU aid.

The islands, which are relatively poor compared with the French mainland, are already struggling to recover from Hurricane Dean, which devastated every banana plantation in Martinique and half of those in Guadeloupe last month.

Many growers may find their soils and water tables so contaminated they will never be allowed to re-plant their crops, Professor Belpomme said.

Although the banana fruit itself is not affected by chlordecone, the toxin can remain in soil for 100 years and is absorbed by humans through the skin and respiratory tract.

Exposure to the powder can cause tremors, headaches, slurred speech, dizziness, memory loss, weight loss and sterility and raise the risk of developing cancer.

In early August, Guadeloupe’s appeal court accepted a complaint against “persons unknown” for “poisoning” the island with pesticides.

This opens up the possibility of a criminal investigation into the responsibility of successive French governments in failing to ban, or monitor, the illegal use of the chemicals.

According to Professor Belpomme, the impact on health in the islands will be more serious than the “tainted blood” scandal of the 1980s, in which 4,000 French people were infected by blood contaminated with the HIV virus.

“In this case, it is a whole population which has been poisoned,” he told MPs. “Those people who are alive today but also future generations.

“The rate of prostate cancer is major. The French Caribbean is second in the world ranking. The rate of congenital malformation is increasing and women are having fewer children than 15 years ago. The standard theory is that this is because of the Pill, but I think it is linked to pesticides.”

But Christian Choupin, head of the Martinique and Guadeloupe banana growers’ association, insisted chlordecone was no longer used and claimed Professor Belpomme’s report had “no proper scientific basis”. “He is giving the impression that people are dropping like flies, which is not at all the case,” M. Chupin said.

With thanks to the San Francisco Chronicle

At the start of the Academy Award-winning movie “American Beauty,” a character videotapes a plastic grocery bag as it drifts into the air, an event he casts as a symbol of life’s unpredictable currents, and declares the romantic moment as a “most beautiful thing.”

To the eyes of an oceanographer, the image is pure catastrophe.

In reality, the rogue bag would float into a sewer, follow the storm drain to the ocean, then make its way to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that’s twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists.

The enormous stew of trash – which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers – floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

Marcus Eriksen, director of research and education at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, said his group has been monitoring the Garbage Patch for 10 years.

“With the winds blowing in and the currents in the gyre going circular, it’s the perfect environment for trapping,” Eriksen said. “There’s nothing we can do about it now, except do no more harm.”

The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s, said Chris Parry, public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco.

Ocean current patterns may keep the flotsam stashed in a part of the world few will ever see, but the majority of its content is generated onshore, according to a report from Greenpeace last year titled “Plastic Debris in the World’s Oceans.”

The report found that 80 percent of the oceans’ litter originated on land. While ships drop the occasional load of shoes or hockey gloves into the waters (sometimes on purpose and illegally), the vast majority of sea garbage begins its journey as onshore trash.

That’s what makes a potentially toxic swamp like the Garbage Patch entirely preventable, Parry said. “At this point, cleaning it up isn’t an option,” Parry said.

“It’s just going to get bigger as our reliance on plastics continues. … The long-term solution is to stop producing as much plastic products at home and change our consumption habits.”

Parry said using canvas bags to cart groceries instead of using plastic bags is a good first step; buying foods that aren’t wrapped in plastics is another.

After the San Francisco Board of Supervisors banned the use of plastic grocery bags earlier this year with the problem of ocean debris in mind, a slew of state bills were written to limit bag production, said Sarah Christie, a legislative director with the California Coastal Commission.

But many of the bills failed after meeting strong opposition from plastics industry lobbyists, she said.

Meanwhile, the stew in the ocean continues to grow.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is particularly dangerous for birds and marine life, said Warner Chabot, vice president of the Ocean Conservancy, an environmental group.

Sea turtles mistake clear plastic bags for jellyfish.

Birds swoop down and swallow indigestible shards of plastic.

The petroleum-based plastics take decades to break down, and as long as they float on the ocean’s surface, they can appear as feeding grounds.

“These animals die because the plastic eventually fills their stomachs,” Chabot said. “It doesn’t pass, and they literally starve to death.”

The Greenpeace report found that at least 267 marine species had suffered from some kind of ingestion or entanglement with marine debris.

Chabot said if environmentalists wanted to remove the ocean dump site, it would take a massive international effort that would cost billions.

But that is unlikely, he added, because no one country is likely to step forward and claim the issue as its own responsibility.

Instead, cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is left to the landlubbers.

“What we can do is ban plastic fast food packaging,” Chabot said, “or require the substitution of biodegradable materials, increase recycling programs and improve enforcement of litter laws. “Otherwise, this ever-growing floating continent of trash will be with us for the foreseeable future.”

Scientists at the University of Minnesota have been evaluating the impact of antibiotic feeding in livestock production on the environment.

This particular study, funded by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), evaluated whether food crops accumulate antibiotics from soils spread with manure that contains antibiotics.

Results from the study are published in the July-August 2007 issue of the Journal of Environmental Quality. The research was also presented in Indianapolis, IN at the Annual Soil Science Society of America Meeting in November 2006.

Sulfamethazine Uptake by Plants from Manure-Amended Soil Holly Dollivera, Kuldip Kumarb and Satish Guptaa,* a Dep. of Soil, Water, and Climate, Univ. of Minnesota, 1991 Upper Buford Circle, St. Paul, MN 55108 b Res. and Dev., Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, 6001 West Pershing Rd., Cicero, IL 60804-4112 J Environ Qual 36:1224-1230 (2007)

Animal manure is applied to agricultural land as a means to provide crop nutrients. However, animal manure often contains antibiotics as a result of extensive therapeutic and subtherapeutic use in livestock production.

The objective of this study was to evaluate plant uptake of a sulfonamide-class antibiotic, sulfamethazine, in corn (Zea mays L.), lettuce (Lactuca sativa L.), and potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) grown in a manure-amended soil.

The treatments were 0, 50, and 100 µg sulfamethazine mL–1 manure applied at a rate of 56 000 L ha–1.

Results from the 45-d greenhouse experiment showed that sulfamethazine was taken up by all three crops, with concentrations in plant tissue ranging from 0.1 to 1.2 mg kg–1 dry weight.

Sulfamethazine concentrations in plant tissue increased with corresponding increase of sulfamethazine in manure.

Highest plant tissue concentrations were found in corn and lettuce, followed by potato.

Total accumulation of sulfamethazine in plant tissue after 45 d of growth was less than 0.1% of the amount applied to soil in manure.

These results raise potential human health concerns of consuming low levels of antibiotics from produce grown on manure-amended soils.