And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
*System Failure* - The chemical revolution has ushered in a world of
changes. Many of them, it's becoming clear, are in our bodies.
http://www.motherjones.com/mother_jones/JA99/endocrine.html
System Failure
The chemical revolution has ushered in a world of changes. Many of them,
it's becoming clear are in our bodies
by Jon R. Luoma July/August 1999
Elizabeth Guillette, a University of Arizona Medical anthropologist, had
been hearing the stories for years. Midwives and nurses in developing
countries were reporting that children growing up in areas with high levels
of pesticide use were displaying problems in learning and physical skills.
In order to follow up on these reports, Guillette needed to identify two
populations of children that were similar in every way but one--their level
of exposure to pesticides.
In the torrid Yaqui Valley of Sonora, Mexico, she found what she was
looking for. The Yaqui Indians of that area lived in two distinct groups:
one in the valley lowlands, the other in the highland foothills. In the
intensively farmed lowlands, Yaqui mothers had been exposed, over the
course of numerous growing seasons, to high levels of pesticides, including
compounds such as lindane and endrin, long banned for agricultural use in
the United States. By contrast, foothill families lived simple ranching
lives, rejecting pesticide use altogether--to the point of preferring to
swat insects in the home rather than spray a pesticide.
In all other respects--the most relevant being diet--the two groups lived
essentially identical lives; in addition, they shared a common gene pool.
They appeared to Guillette, therefore, to offer a unique chance to measure
the developmental differences between groups of children who seemed to vary
only in their exposure to pesticides.
Her research scheme was straightforward: She adapted a series of motor and
cognitive tests into simple games the children could play, including
hopping, ball catching, and picture drawing. She assumed that any
differences between the two groups would be subtle. Instead, she recalls,
"I was shocked. I couldn't believe what was happening."
The lowland children had much greater difficulty catching a ball or
dropping a raisin into a bottle cap--both tests of hand-eye coordination.
They showed less physical stamina too. But the most striking difference
came when they were asked to draw pictures of a person.
As with any group of kids, there was variation in individual skills. But
most of the pictures from the foothill children looked like recognizable
versions of a person. The pictures from most of the lowland children, on
the other hand, were merely random lines, the kind of unintelligible
scribbles a toddler might compose.
Though it could take years of research to nail down precisely how the
lowland children might have been harmed, it appeared likely they had
suffered some kind of brain damage. Guillette based her working
hypothesis--that pesticide exposure might be the cause--on her familiarity
with an extensive body of animal research that had already proven that some
pesticides and chemically related compounds interfere with test animals'
endocrine (hormonal) systems. In both animals and humans, this system plays
a critical role in nearly every aspect of development of a growing
fetus--including proper formation and function of the brain and
reproductive organs--and is also crucial for normal adult bodily function.
In fact, Guillette's Yaqui Valley findings bolstered not only her own
hypothesis, but the growing notion within the scientific community of the
damage that may be caused by a class of compounds scientists call
"endocrine disruptors," or EDs. These include a much broader range of
chemicals than are found in pesticides, and can not only harm developing
animal embryos and fetuses in dramatic ways, but can have similar impacts
on human fetuses, growing children, and even adults.
In the years since World War II, a veritable chemical revolution has swept
the globe. Scientists in commercial and academic laboratories have
synthesized some 75,000 new compounds--some 15,000 of which are currently
under investigation as potential endocrine disruptors. Relatively few of
these chemicals, suspected EDs or not, have received exhaustive study and
testing, even as a great many have found practical applications in
industrial processes and consumer products--including such presumably
benign items as dental sealants, plastic toys, and plastic intravenous
bags. They have, in short, become ubiquitous throughout the developed and
developing worlds--meaning that it isn't just children in remote Mexican
valleys exposed to pesticides banned in the United States who are at risk
from these chemicals' untested and unintended effects.
Experts estimate that all of us carry in our tissues some 500 compounds
that simply did not exist prior to this century. Virtually all of us harbor
known EDs, including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), chemicals banned in
the 1970s but once widely used and still persistent in the environment; and
dioxins, which are byproducts of industrial processes such as chlorine
bleaching.
The first reports of the effects of endocrine disruptors on animals began
to surface in the news media during the early 1990s. At the time, any
notion that similar effects might be seen in humans (at least at the levels
of contamination to which most of us are exposed) were routinely dismissed
by the chemical industry and its allies as environmental fear mongering.
But more recently, mounting evidence has demonstrated that humans may
indeed be at serious hormonal risk. Scientists have found striking evidence
of problems with male reproductive systems in the developed world,
including soaring rates of testicular cancer and plummeting sperm counts,
and many attribute this to hormonal disruption in the developing fetus. A
scattering of studies, including Guillette's, have shown clear evidence of
neurological problems in children whose pregnant mothers were exposed to
EDs. Recent experiments with mice indicate that, with some compounds,
damage to gonads and abnormal behavior among a mother's offspring can occur
even if she is exposed to amounts so tiny that she shows no effects
whatever. Other recent animal studies have supported the hypothesized link
between neurological problems and contaminants that disrupt the activity of
the thyroid gland, which plays a role in normal brain function.<<<END EXCERPT
Reprinted under the Fair Use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html
doctrine of international copyright law.
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
UPDATES: CAMP
JUSTICE http://shell.webbernet.net/~ishgooda/oglala/
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