Tell me a story before I go to bed

Neo Conned

“Sensationalist claptrap!!” I hear the board member say, “Where’s the proof in humans?” Well I would like to enlist your children’s children to disprove the theory. And it is not just triazines. When exposed to a standard field mixture of water-borne agricultural chemicals, embryos lose weight, the longer they are in the womb. That’s right – they don’t gain weight, they are automatically runts at birth.

ATRAZINE is banned in Europe, Cyanazine (“Bladex”) even banned for a long time in the US because it is the most toxic of the triazine pals. US guidelines say 2 parts per billion, Australian guidelines say 40ppb in drinking water is regarded as safe based on its toxicity in killing rats, converted to its toxicity for a 70kg male.

A neo-con would see this as sensible. If the regulations say we can dump in Australia, well so we should. There might even be nearby neighbours without restrictions. Let’s find out a bit more about the wealth that the board members will be passing on to their family “trusts”.

Dr Tyrone Hayes, a Californian bio-chemist, has studied the triazines for many years, collecting data from both lab and the real world He has been making predictions and verifying these predictions “out there in the fields” – a bit like the coppers from CSI New York. He also checks his results against other scientists’ work. As he did at a presentation in Launceston, he will tell you that the triazines do not break readily unless exposed to light. As they are attracted to water, there is a tendency for them to be found in the groundwater aquifers. They have been shown to reappear in streams 20 years later. Certainly Atrazine was found in Lorrina streams after 10 years.

So what? What has this to do with the legacy that board members leave their children?

Cut to the chase … first to the forensics lab. When you poke the triazines into the CSI computer and spin them around you get the following results: Endocrine disruptor – frogs with eggs in their testes, multiple sets of ovaries and testes (frogs are not hermaphrodites), that sort of action, at .01 part per billion. Similar results are reproducible in reptiles, fish, birds and, yes, mammals. Their endocrine systems and ours are the same. Triazines activate an enzyme that converts testosterone to estrogen (A link as yet not fully understood exists to breast and prostate cancer, therefore.) This screws with embryos – especially those that thought they were male.

This throws the CSIs into a spin – how could it be that someone is trying to turn males into females It couldn’t be a woman who did it, that just wouldn’t make sense to have only girls. It must be a man – but that doesn’t make sense either…must be someone driven purely by profit and therefore non-sensical. A board member!

The triazines are fat soluble and pass through the placenta – mutating the foetus who will likely also give birth to a chemically re-engineered child. Now the kicker… the chemicals that some large forestry company might ask its operator to spray can come back in 20 years when the third generation has been born, and do the same job again! So Mr Board Member the trust to your children – what you order sprayed tomorrow could last for 6 generations.

“Sensationalist claptrap!!” I hear the board member say, “Where’s the proof in humans?” Well I would like to enlist your children’s children to disprove the theory. And it is not just triazines. When exposed to a standard field mixture of water-borne agricultural chemicals, embryos lose weight, the longer they are in the womb. That’s right – they don’t gain weight, they are automatically runts at birth.

There is something wrong with our protection of agricultural land if we poison it like this! We need a policy that encourages more people to go rural and put in the labour needed to replace the use of herbicides.

But our PAL is aimed at encouraging corporate agribusiness methods – even when the company that produces the triazines – the enzyme activator that generates Estrogen, also produces a drug for breast cancer treatment which inhibits the very same enzyme! We lay our trust in the hands of the board members.