Bug Spray Linked to Behavior Problems - Try These Organic Solutions

Organophosphate pesticides are known for their hazards to human health. Prenatal exposure, for example, has been linked to delayed brain development, reduced IQ, and attention deficits¹.

As a result, pyrethroids²—synthetic chemicals derived from natural chemicals found in chrysanthemums—have risen in popularity over the past decade.  There are currently more than 3,500 commercial products containing this insecticide. This includes items like roach sprays, flea bombs, and dog flea or tick collars and medicated shampoos.

Pyrethroids are well-known to be highly toxic to cats, and the most frequent reason for pyrethroid poisoning in cats is the incorrect and unadvised application of dog flea or tick medication.

You can identify pyrethroids in any given product by reading the label. Compounds that end in “thrin,” such as bifenthrin, permethrin and cypermethrin, are all pyrethroids. Alas, switching to pyrethroids may not have been the wisest move. Animal studies suggest it causes neurological-, immune-, and reproductive damage. And, as usual, the human health effects are still largely unknown, despite its widespread use.

Now, Canadian research suggests pyrethroids may be associated with behavior problems in children.  As reported by Scientific American³:

“The findings raise some questions about the safety of the compounds, which have replaced other insecticides with known risks to children’s brain development.

Exposure to pyrethroids, which kill insects by interfering with their nervous systems, is widespread because they are used inside homes and schools, in municipal mosquito control and on farms.”

Common Insecticide May have Adverse Effects on Your Child’s Development

The study⁴ in question tested urine samples from 779 Canadian children, aged 6-11, and the parents answered questions relating to their child’s behavior. Shockingly, even at that tender young age, 97 percent of the children had pyrethroid breakdown products in their urine. Ninety-one percent also had traces of organophosphate pesticides.

“A 10-fold increase in urinary levels of one pyrethroid breakdown product, cis-DCCA, was associated with a doubling in the odds of a child scoring high for parent-reported behavioral problems, such as inattention and hyperactivity,” the featured article reports.

A previous study found that toddlers who had been exposed to pyrethroids while in utero had lower development scores compared to unexposed children. According to a 2006 EPA review, animal research has also shown that even low levels of some of these compounds have an adverse effect on⁵:

 Some pyrethroids act as endocrine disruptors by mimicking estrogen. Such hormone-disrupting chemicals can raise your levels of estrogen, thereby promoting the growth of estrogen-sensitive cancers such as breast cancer.

As stated by Dana Boyd Barr, a research professor of environmental health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta⁶:  “Pyrethroids are obviously a safer alternative to organophosphates, but just because they are safer doesn’t mean they are safe.”

Are You Using this Toxic Bug Spray On or Near Your Kids?

Permethrin—a member of the synthetic pyrethroid family—can also be found in many commercial bug sprays. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), permethrin is carcinogenic⁷, capable of causing lung tumors, liver tumors, immune system problems, and chromosomal abnormalities. Permethrin is also damaging to the environment, and it is particularly toxic to bees and aquatic life.

Despite that, approximately 2 million pounds of permethrin are applied to agricultural, residential and public sites each year. The majority, about 70 percent, is applied in non-agricultural settings; more than 40 percent of it is applied by homeowners in residential areas, so there’s plenty of room for individuals to take personal control over this chemical exposure.

While it may be tempting to douse your kids with bug spray in order to prevent bugs from biting them, there are plenty of other tricks that can keep bugs at bay that don't involve the application of neurotoxic and potentially carcinogenic chemicals.

Simple Preventative Measures to Avoid Mosquito Bites

Mosquito’s are probably the most pervasive when it comes to biting bugs. You can avoid most assaults by staying inside around dawn and dusk, which is when they are most active. If you must be out during those times, wear light-colored, long sleeved shirts and long pants, hats and socks.

Mosquitoes are also thicker in shrubby areas and near standing water. Body temperature and skin chemicals like lactic acid also attract mosquitoes, so trying to stay as cool and dry as possible may also help to some degree.

The American Mosquito Control Association (AMCA) has a helpful factsheet⁸ of things you can do to prevent mosquito breeding on your property. The Three D’s of protection from mosquitoes are:

1.    Drain—Mosquitoes require water in which to breed, so carefully drain any and all sources of standing water around your house and yard, including pet bowls, gutters, garbage- and recycling bins, spare tires, bird baths and so on

2.    Dress—Light colored, loose fitting clothing offer the greatest protection

3.    Defend—Again, I recommend avoiding most chemical repellents, especially those containing DEET or permethrin. (The Environmental Working Group (EWG) recently released an extensive review of bug repellants, and virtually all of them are associated with health hazards⁹.) Instead, try some of the natural alternatives suggested in this article.

Besides draining all sources of standing water and dressing appropriately, the following ideas can help reduce the mosquito population around your yard:

·         Add some bat boxes: Bat houses are becoming increasingly popular since bats are voracious consumers of insects, especially mosquitoes. For more on buying a bat house or constructing one yourself, visit the Organization for Bat Conservation^10.

·         Plant marigolds: Planting marigolds around your yard works as a bug repellent because the flowers give off a fragrance that bugs do not like. This is a great way to ward off mosquitoes without using chemical insecticides.

·         Blow ‘em away... As a last minute fix, a simple house fan can help keep mosquitoes at bay if you’re having a get-together in your backyard.

DIY Bug Repellants

Your diet may have something to do with your popularity with the mosquitoes. To reduce your attractiveness, you may want to forgo bananas during mosquito season. According to alternative health nutritionist Dr. Janet Starr Hull¹¹, “there’s something about how your body processes the banana oil that attracts these female sugar-loving insects.” She also recommends supplementing with one vitamin B-1 tablet a day from April through October, and then adding 100 mg of B-1 to a B-100 Complex daily during the mosquito season to make you less attractive to mosquitoes.

Regularly consuming garlic or garlic capsules may also help protect against both mosquito and tick bites. Bear in mind, the best way to avoid ticks is to make sure you tuck your pants into your socks and wear closed shoes and a hat—especially if venturing out into wooded areas. You can also make your own mosquito repellent using any of the following:

·         Cinnamon leaf oil (one study found it was more effective at killing mosquitoes than DEET)

·         Clear liquid vanilla extract mixed with olive oil

·         Wash with citronella soap, and then put some 100% pure citronella essential oil on your skin. Java Citronella is considered the highest quality citronella on the market

·         Catnip oil (according to one study, this oil is 10 times more effective than DEET¹²)

Another option is to use the safe solution I formulated to repel mosquitoes, fleas, chiggers, ticks, and other biting insects. It's anatural insect repellant with a combination of citronella, lemongrass oil, peppermint oil, and vanillin. An independent study showed it was more effective than a product containing 100 percent DEET. And it's safe for you, your children, and your pets.

Safer Alternatives for Ant, Roach, Lice and Flea Control

With mosquito control out of the way, what about other pesky bugs? Not to worry, there are safer alternatives for most infestations. For example:

·         Knock out roaches, ants and termites with boric acid powder. Sprinkle some in the inner corners of your cabinets and in the corners under your cabinets. Pests will carry it back to their nests on their feet and kill the remainder of the infestation. Boric acid is generally non-toxic for animals, but you’d still be well-advised to place it in areas where your pet will not ingest or inhale it, as it kills bugs by causing dehydration.

·         Treat head lice with an old-fashioned nit comb and essential oils of anise and ylang ylang, combined into a spray. This has been found to be highly effective in eliminating over 90 percent of head lice.

·         Control your pet’s fleas and ticks with safe, natural pest repellents, such as:

o    Cedar oil

o    Natural, food-grade diatomaceous earth

o    Fresh garlic -- work with your holistic vet to determine a safe amount for your pet’s body weight

o    Feeding your pet a balanced, species-appropriate diet. The healthier your dog or cat is, the less appealing she’ll be to parasites. A biologically appropriate diet supports a strong immune system.

o    Bathing and brushing your pet regularly and performing frequent full-body inspections to check for parasite activity.

 Source: Dr. Mercola

Scientists discover what’s killing the bees and it’s worse than you thought

As we’ve written before, the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America’s apis melliferapopulation that one bad winter could leave fields fallow. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be much more difficult than previously thought.

Image: kezi.com

Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch’s brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.

When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite calledNosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.

Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees as they’re designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples.

“There’s growing evidence that fungicides may be affecting the bees on their own and I think what it highlights is a need to reassess how we label these agricultural chemicals,” Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the study’s lead author, told Quartz.

Labels on pesticides warn farmers not to spray when pollinating bees are in the vicinity but such precautions have not applied to fungicides.

Bee populations are so low in the US that it now takes 60% of the country’s surviving colonies just to pollinate one California crop, almonds. And that’s not just a west coast problem—California supplies 80% of the world’s almonds, a market worth $4 billion.

In recent years, a class of chemicals called neonicotinoids has been linked to bee deaths and in April regulators banned the use of the pesticide for two years in Europe where bee populations have also plummeted. But vanEngelsdorp, an assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland, says the new study shows that the interaction of multiple pesticides is affecting bee health.

“The pesticide issue in itself is much more complex than we have led to be believe,” he says. “It’s a lot more complicated than just one product, which means of course the solution does not lie in just banning one class of product.”

The study found another complication in efforts to save the bees: US honey bees, which are descendants of European bees, do not bring home pollen from native North American crops but collect bee chow from nearby weeds and wildflowers. That pollen, however, was also contaminated with pesticides even though those plants were not the target of spraying.
“It’s not clear whether the pesticides are drifting over to those plants but we need take a new look at agricultural spraying practices,” says vanEngelsdorp.

Source: QZ.com

Insecticides to blame for massive bee die-off in Minneapolis

(www.cornucopia.org) Last September, thousands of bees were mysteriously found dead in Minneapolis. Considering the continuing decline in bee population that threatens drastic consequences for our environment, the University of Minnesota's Bee Lab and Bee Squad teamed up with the Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA) to investigate the cause of the massive die-off.

Image: www.greenpeace.org

The investigators gathered samples of dead bees and sent them to a lab in North Carolina, where it was confirmed that the bees had been poisoned by fipronil, an insecticide commonly used by commercial companies around the foundations of buildings. According to the MDA, fipronil sprayed on a house's foundation likely got on nearby plants, and from there foraging bees accidently carried the chemical back the hive.

The investigators determined that the insecticide was not applied by state or local government workers. The poison was probably sprayed either commercially or by a resident. Since the incident occurred in a residential area, it would likely be difficult to find out who is responsible for the bee kill. The MDA said that it is not going to investigate the matter further.

This incident serves as a perfect example of the vast unintended consequences that chemicals can have on our environment and shows that, contrary to what is conventionally practiced, the utmost caution should be used when working with pesticides.

Source: buzz.naturalnews.com

5 Million Farmers Sue Monsanto for 7.7 Billion

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Launching a lawsuit against the very company that is responsible for a farmer suicide every 30 minutes, 5 million farmers are now suing Monsanto for as much as 6.2 billion euros (around 7.7 billion US dollars). The reason? As with many other cases, such as the ones that led certain farming regions to be known as the ‘suicide belt’, Monsanto has been reportedly taxing the farmers to financial shambles with ridiculous royalty charges. The farmers state that Monsanto has been unfairly gathering exorbitant profits each year on a global scale from “renewal” seed harvests, which are crops planted using seed from the previous year’s harvest.

The practice of using renewal seeds dates back to ancient times, but Monsanto seeks to collect massive royalties and put an end to the practice. Why? Because Monsanto owns the very patent to the genetically modified seed, and is charging the farmers not only for the original crops, but the later harvests as well. Eventually, the royalties compound and many farmers begin to struggle with even keeping their farm afloat. It is for this reason that India slammed Monsanto with groundbreaking ‘biopiracy’ charges in an effort to stop Monsanto from ‘patenting life’.

Jane Berwanger, a lawyer for the farmers who went on record regarding the case,
told the Associated Press:

“Monsanto gets paid when it sell the seeds. The law gives producers the right to multiply the seeds they buy and nowhere in the world is there a requirement to pay (again). Producers are in effect paying a private tax on production.”

The findings echo what thousands of farmers have experienced in particularly poor nations, where many of the farmers are unable to stand up to Monsanto. Back in 2008, the Daily Mail covered what is known as the ‘GM Genocide’, which is responsible for taking the lives of over 17,683 Indian farmers in 2009 alone. After finding that their harvests were failing and they started to enter economic turmoil, the farmers began ending their own lives — oftentimes drinking the very same insecticide that Monsanto provided them with.
As the information continues to surface on Monsanto’s crimes, further lawsuits will begin to take effect. After it was ousted in January that Monsanto was running illegal 'slave-like' working rings, more individuals became aware of just how seriously Monsanto seems to disregard their workers — so why would they care for the health of their consumers? In April, another group of farmers sued Monsanto for ‘knowingly poisoning’ workers and causing ‘devastating birth defects’.

Will endless lawsuits from millions of seriously affected individuals be the end of Monsanto?

Do your part to end the madness and join a March Against Monsanto near you on 10/12/13

Source: Raw For Beauty

Natural Society

Monsanto Pays Farmers to Spray GM Crops With RoundUp

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Proving that nothing is out of bounds in the pursuit of food hegemony, Monsanto alters the free market itself by paying customers to use their products. Farmers are paid up to $20 per acre to plant Monsanto’s RoundUp Ready GM corn, as long as they spray it with a blend of RoundUp and herbicides from other companies.

The story behind this bizarre twisting of the free market starts with Monsanto’s genetically-engineered corn that was made to survive Monsanto’s glyphosate herbicide, RoundUp. Actually, the story began billions of years ago with basic evolutionary functions. As a population of life forms is attacked repeatedly, individuals will begin to evolve defense mechanisms against that mode of attack. These individuals survive (the fittest) and pass the defense mechanisms along to their progeny.

In this case the predator was Monsanto’s chemicals and the prey was agricultural weeds. Some of the target weeds, such as pigweed, developed resistance to RoundUp in a matter of years. These “superweeds” are now a major problem for an agricultural system that has become dependent on chemical poisons.

Facing this reality, Monsanto keeps its product in use by actually paying farmers to use other herbicides from other manufacturers in conjunction with its own. While this is going on, it is developing other genetically-engineered crops that can withstand even more toxic herbicides than glyphosate.

Interestingly, when Monsanto was pushing to have its GM corn seed approved for commercial sale in 1993, it stated that RoundUp is “considered to be a herbicide with low risk for weed resistance” and it was “highly unlikely” that resistant weeds would emerge. Apparently this was good enough for the USDA. Besides calling into question the validity of the USDA approval process, this calamity casts a great deal of doubt on Monsanto’s ability or truthfulness of their own research.

However, this likelihood of weed resistance was in fact known among scientists involved in agricultural issues. In 1990 the Union of Concerned Scientists published a report called “Biotechnology’s Bitter Harvest” where they explicitly warned of the development of herbicide-resistance.

This free market manipulation—Monsanto paying farmers to use its product—can only be carried out by a corporation with huge economic might and a near monopoly, in tandem with government protection in the form of patents on life.

by Justin Gardener
Source: RealFarmacy.com