----- Original Message ----- From: "Mitchel Cohen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2002 2:52 AM Subject: NoSpray Coalition Meeting Tuesday, 3/19, 6:20 pm
No Spray Coalition PO Box 334 Peck Slip Station NYC 10272 Hotline: (718) 670-7110 website: www.nospray.org listserve: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Announcing: NoSpray Coalition general meeting Tuesday, March 19th 6:20 pm at the Center for Constitutional Rights 666 Broadway (near Bleecker), 6th floor meeting room Manhattan (F or 6 train to Broadway-Lafayette St.) With the warm winter we've had, spraying season is almost upon us. This meeting of the No Spray Coalition on Tuesday, March 19 will be extremely important. Please don't miss it! Come hear presentations by Robert Lederman, Meg Feeley, Kimberly Flynn, and our lawyers Karl Coplan & Joel Kupferman, who will help orient and update us. We need to strategize: Should we, as part of our ongoing lawsuit against the NY City government, sue to gain access to "The Giuliani Tapes"? (Like Nixon, the former Mayor taped every conversation in City Hall, incluing many concerning the spraying! Hundreds of thousands of pages and tapes are stored in a warehouse in Queens.) Ex-Mayor Giuliani and the EPA's lies concerning the "safety" of the air, when private testing has revealed incredible levels of pollution from the World Trade Center collapse, may impact on our NoSpray lawsuit. In addition, with the exposure of EPA's cover-up of ITS OWN STUDIES indicating high levels of toxicants and recent resignations at that agency, the EPA is suddenly vulnerable to our pressure. Which way to move forward? Joel Kupferman, Kimberly Flynn and I, along with several other NoSprayers, attended an incredible all-day public hearing Monday under the auspices of Rep. Jerrold Nadler, concerning the role of the EPA and other government agencies in failing to warn and protect the people of downtown Manhattan about the extremely high levels of pulverized lead, mercury, asbestos, cadmium, fiberglass and other pollutants in the settled dust as well as in the air. Speaker after speaker -- some from the military, others residents of the area whose children attend schools in the district -- ripped away the government's facade to find AT BEST bureaucratic bungling and complete breakdown of any kind of health and safety protocols over the months following the attacks on the World Trade Center. They relayed personally tragic tales of how the pollution -- and the government agencies' lying about it in order to get the stock exchange opened as quickly as possible -- have made their families ill, and in a number of cases forced a number of hospital emergencies. Pete Dolack has constructed the first of a series of new NoSpray flyers about this, titled: "Is New York Becoming a Toxic Nightmare?" and it is available for mass distribution. (We hope to have it on our website soon.) Also, please check <www.nyenvirolaw.org> -- Joel Kupferman's website -- for more material than you can read in a year on the pollution now contaminating New York, including the EPA's secret documents on all of this. Amidst all of this (and against all odds), NoSpray researcher Jim West has now been able to convince a number of experts about his thesis that emissions from oil refineries played an important role in destroying the immune systems of hundreds of thousands of birds (and people?), in many cases killing them outright and, more generally, (in my words, not Jim's) making them susceptible to West Nile virus. ABC TV's website features Jim's research! (See http://www.geocities.com/noxot.) Jim puts it more strongly: "A detailed study in 2000/2001 found the [so-called WNV] epidemic incidence highest adjacent to and downwind from NJ oil refineries (Staten Island, and nearby NJ counties). All WNV/SLE epidemics that I've studied (15) almost always find extreme air pollution adjacent to petrochemical refinery sources. We can say with certainty that WNV is a bio-marker for toxic stress. A genetic, adaptive reflex to toxic pollution." (**See footnote below) Clearly, we are reaching toxic overload, with new waves of asthma, cancers, respiratory and hormonal illnesses sweeping the City. Additional indiscriminate spraying of toxic pesticides -- which, let me be clear, we hope to STOP -- would likely be the final nail in the coffin. We're working on important press conferences; preparing air pollution booklets for mass distribution; raising funds (oh joy!); setting up meetings with the new Mayor and City Coucil members; posting flyers on the campuses; developing action teams; and lots more. So, please join us at the meeting Tuesday night, March 19, and organize your neighborhood to STOP THE SPRAYING BEFORE IT STARTS. As always, the No Spray Coalition is in need of your continued financial support. Please make out checks to the No Spray Coalition and mail them to: No Spray Coalition PO Box 334 Peck Slip Station NYC 10272 Thank you!!! Mitchel Cohen, for the No Spray Coalition ** From Jim West's website: http://www.geocities.com/noxot Jim has been researching the possibility that the encephalitis said to have been caused by West Nile Virus is actually a result if intense air pollution emanating from MTBE gas additive and petroleum refineries. Jim West has overlaid official EPA pollution and weather maps with the West Nile outbreaks and has found strong correlation. Through the No Spray Coalition he has been pushing for a complete air-toxicological study of the birds (and people) affected. - Mitchel ABCNEWS journalist, Nicholas Regush, has reviewed Jim's study and placed his article in the permanent online archives of his regular column, "Second Opinion". Therein, can be found confirmations, as voiced by leading orthodox West Nile virus scientists: '"Because we don't have the resources, we're missing the opportunity to look at many different factors that may be going on with West Nile," he [Robert Maclean] said. [Maclean is director of the Wisconsin-based National Wildlife Health Center of the U.S. Geological Survey] 'Dr. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University, who has played an important role in identifying the genetics of the West Nile virus... He too believes that an understanding of disease comes from probing the relationship between environmental factors, including viruses and toxic substances, and the genetic endowment of individuals.'To Lipkin, it makes perfect sense to want to know more about how, say, "an unhealthy environment might break down immunity in both birds and humans and make them more susceptible to viral infection. It's worthy to pursue this."' '"We don't order those tests because there are no funds to do that kind of work," he [Ward Stone, NYSDEC Wildlife Pathologist] said. In fact, Stone couldn't recall anyone in his line of work doing air toxicology tests on birds.' '"We don't have a purified form of the virus," said Robert McLean matter-of-factly. "Cellular material could interact with the virus to enhance the replication of viral particles." What McLean left unsaid was the possibility that the cellular material itself could be sufficiently toxic to cause damage to tissue, with or without the virus.' 'Sean Ahearn, director of Hunter College's Center for the Analysis and Research of Spatial Information, offers another perspective. "I think it is extremely important to factor in air pollution and even MTBE because they may harm the immune system and make it easier for an infection to take hold." Ahearn and his colleagues run a computer project for the City of New York that uses a sophisticated formula to chart clusters of dead birds across the city. Still in its testing phase, it is helping the city to link non-random dead bird clusters to pools of mosquitoes that show signs of the West Nile virus and then to possibly predict where human infection has a high probability of occurring. "The next phase of the project will be to factor in the ecological context, things like air quality and weather," Ahearn said. "I think this is the only logical way to go."'
