Over the years there has been opposition and warnings worldwide about various catastrophic issues associated with SpaceX’s Starlink as well as other companies’ satellites (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.) In fact, insurance companies have become less willing to insure satellites. Additionally, earlier this year, 40 Starlink satellites fell from orbit and burned. More recently a court ruled in favor of environmental groups who opposed the company being approved to launch satellites in France.
Elon Musk’s Starlink Blocked In France Over Legal Battle Against Environmental Groups
Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service has effectively lost its frequencies in France following a legal battle waged by environmental groups. The decision was published by the Conseil d’Etat, France’s Supreme Court for administrative justice, reports Teslarati. According to the court, the recent Starlink ruling negated a decision by Arcep, France’s telecoms regulator, back in February 2021.
Arcep had granted Starlink two bands of frequencies that would link the company’s satellite constellation to France-based customers, the report said. Since the decision to grant licenses to SpaceX‘s Starlink can “impact the market of access to high-bandwidth internet and affect the interests of end-users” as per the Conseil d’Etat, the satellite internet system should have carried out public hearings before its license was granted.
This was something that Arcep did not do. Stephen Kerckhove, who heads Act for the Environment, one of the environmental groups that took legal action against Starlink, stated that the ruling is a way for the State Council to “send a signal to those who confuse speed with haste”.
Kerckhove also noted that he is hoping Arcep would not just go through a public consultation now for sheer compliance but “truly carry out an economic and environmental evaluation” of the satellite internet service.
Airplane leaving jet contrails with COVID-19 word inside. Symbolizing the global spread of the coronavirus through global air traffic.
A few months ago, I wrote an article exploring the connection between the symptoms of disease known as “Covid-19” and air pollution. While air pollution is not the only factor currently causing disease, I laid out why I believe that this is the most likely explanation for any perceived increase in respiratory symptoms of disease. I provided a general overview on the problem of air pollution and how it can impact our health and environment. Within the article, I touched upon the issue of persistent contrails, a.k.a. chemtrails, and provided information directly from Government sources admitting the impact that these trails have on our health and environment. Even though this information is readily available to anyone willing to look, there are many out there who still seem to believe that these trails are harmless. They claim that I am promoting nothing but a baseless conspiracy theory.
The fact of the matter is that these trails are admitted to be harmful to our health and environment by both sides of the “chemtrail” debate. There is no conspiracy theory here. This is a FACT. We can speculate as to who is doing this and why but that is ultimately irrelevant. While pollution from automobiles, factories, power plants, forest fires, etc. all contribute to this air pollution health crisis, the harmful effects from the aviation industry are regularly glossed over and/or omitted when this issue is discussed. However, if you dig deep enough and actually search for the information, what can be found to be admitted by official Government sources regarding the health consequences from these trails is very telling and disturbing.
To start with, I want to provide a quick breakdown of the negative health impact of just one component that is admitted to be found within these persistent trails left in the wake of aircrafts. This is known as particulate matter, the most dangerous of which is PM2.5. From the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), you will see that PM2.5 is a known toxin potentially made up of hundreds of different chemicals that is so small that it can collect deep within the lungs and even enter the bloodstream. It has been associated with cardiovascular and respiratory disease, irritation of the eyes, throat, and lungs, and premature death:
Particulate Matter (PM) Basics
What is PM, and how does it get into the air?
“PM stands for particulate matter (also called particle pollution): the term for a mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets found in the air. Some particles, such as dust, dirt, soot, or smoke, are large or dark enough to be seen with the naked eye. Others are so small they can only be detected using an electron microscope.
Particle pollution includes:
PM10: inhalable particles, with diameters that are generally 10 micrometers and smaller; and
PM2.5: fine inhalable particles, with diameters that are generally 2.5 micrometers and smaller.
How small is 2.5 micrometers? Think about a single hair from your head. The average human hair is about 70 micrometers in diameter – making it 30 times larger than the largest fine particle.
Sources of PM
These particles come in many sizes and shapes and can be made up of hundreds of different chemicals.
Some are emitted directly from a source, such as construction sites, unpaved roads, fields, smokestacks or fires.
Most particles form in the atmosphere as a result of complex reactions of chemicals such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which are pollutants emitted from power plants, industries and automobiles.
What are the Harmful Effects of PM?
Particulate matter contains microscopic solids or liquid droplets that are so small that they can be inhaled and cause serious health problems. Some particles less than 10 micrometers in diameter can get deep into your lungs and some may even get into your bloodstream. Of these, particles less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, also known as fine particles or PM2.5, pose the greatest risk to health.
Fine particles are also the main cause of reduced visibility (haze) in parts of the United States, including many of our treasured national parks and wilderness areas.”
Health and Environmental Effects of Particulate Matter (PM)
Health Effects
The size of particles is directly linked to their potential for causing health problems. Small particles less than 10 micrometers in diameter pose the greatest problems, because they can get deep into your lungs, and some may even get into your bloodstream.
Exposure to such particles can affectboth your lungs and your heart. Numerous scientific studies have linked particle pollution exposure to a variety of problems, including:
premature death in people with heart or lung disease
nonfatal heart attacks
irregular heartbeat
aggravated asthma
decreased lung function
increased respiratory symptoms, such as irritation of the airways, coughing or difficulty breathing.
People with heart or lung diseases,children, and older adults are the most likely to be affected by particle pollution exposure.
PM2.5 and other particulate matter is only part of the dangerous substances found in these persistent contrails. Other admitted substances include carbon dioxide (CO2), volatile organic compounds (VOC), nitrogen oxides (NOX), sulfur oxides (SOX), black carbon soot, and other trace metals. It is simply beyond logic and reasoning to believe that the inhalation of these substances on a daily basis is not harmful to one’s health.
Recently, some members of Congress were interested in addressing the health and environmental problems associated with aviation. On February 8th, 2022, the Congressional Research Service released a report describing the problem and how to address it. A few highlights showcase that aviation pollution is the fastest-growing pollutant over the past decade and that there are numerous toxic substances found within these trails: Aviation, Air Pollution, and Climate Change
Emissions from Aircraft
“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that transportation—including passenger cars and light trucks, heavy-duty trucks, buses, trains, ships, and aircraft—accounted for 35% of carbon dioxide (CO2, the principal GHG) emissions in 2018. While CO2 emissions from passenger cars and light trucks exceed those from aircraft in the United States, CO2 emissions from aviation are currently experiencing a faster rate of growth. All aircraft, including military, commercial, and privately chartered, accounted for 13% of the U.S. transportation sector’s CO2 emissions and 5% of all U.S. CO2 emissions in 2018. Commercial aircraft, including those operated by passenger and all-cargo airlines, accounted for 11% of transportation sector and 4% of all emissions. These estimates include emissions from U.S. domestic flights and emissions from international flights departing the United States, referred to as “international bunkering.”
In the United States, aggregate CO2 emissions from aircraft have fluctuated due to changes in technology, the economy, travel frequency, and military activity, among other reasons. However, since the global financial crisis in 2009,aggregate CO2 emissions from all aircraft types have grown steadily, increasing by almost 22% between 2009 and 2018. This increase makes aircraft one of the faster-growing sources of CO2 emissions in the U.S. transportation sector over the past decade. This trend is likely to be affected, at least temporarily, by reduced air travel in 2020 and 2021 due to Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19).
The effects of aircraft emissions on the atmosphere are complex, reflecting differing altitudes, geography, time horizons, and environmental conditions. Research has shown that in addition to CO2 emissions, other factors increase the climate change impacts of aviation. These factors include the contribution of aircraft emissions to ozone production; the formation of water condensation trails and cirrus clouds; the emission of various gases and particles, including water vapor, nitrous oxides, sulfates, and particulates from jet fuel combustion; and the high altitude location of the bulk of these emissions. In examining the warming and cooling influences of these factors, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated aviation’s total climate change impact could be from two to four times that of its past CO2 emissions alone.
Aside from GHG emissions, aircraft engines emit a number of criteria—or common—pollutants, including nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, oxides of sulfur, unburned or partially combusted hydrocarbons (also known as volatile organic compounds [VOCs]), particulates, and other trace compounds. A subset of the VOCs and particulates are considered hazardous air pollutants.”
In case you wanted a visual representation of how this pollution is said to form and impact our health.
As can be seen, the pollution coming from the aviation industry is a fast-growing problem that is impacting our health and environment in numerous ways. While this has been known for decades and solutions have been presented to try and reverse the impact, nothing is ever implemented to fix the problem. Solutions are only useful if they are enacted upon. While Congress gathers reports, there is little action taken in regards to those reports. It is one thing to acknowledge the negative health and environmental impact yet it is another thing entirely to actually shake up the industry by doing something about it. This seems not to be a major concern as these trails have become worse over time, increasingly contributing to erratic weather, disease, and premature death.
For further evidence of the impact that these trails have on our health and environment, we can turn once again to the EPA to provide more detail. In a document from January 11th, 2021, the EPA enacted standards that are supposed to combat greenhouse gas emissions from the aviation industry. In this document are findings from reports they had compiled in 2016 which call out the dangers these trails have on the public health and welfare:
Control of Air Pollution From Airplanes and Airplane Engines: GHG Emission Standards and Test Procedures
“In August 2016, the EPA issued two findings regarding GHG emissions from aircraft engines (the 2016 Findings).[7]First, the EPA found that elevated concentrations of GHGs in the atmosphere endanger the public health and welfare of current and future generations within the meaning of section 231(a)(2)(A) of the CAA. Second, EPA found that emissions of GHGs from certain classes of engines used in certain aircraft are contributing to the air pollution that endangers public health and welfare under CAA section 231(a)(2)(A). Additional details of the 2016 Findings are described in Section III. As a result of the 2016 Findings, CAA sections 231(a)(2)(A) and (3) obligate the EPA to propose and adopt, respectively, GHG standards for these covered aircraft engines.”
III. Summary of the 2016 Findings
“On August 15, 2016,[46] the EPA issued two findings regarding GHG emissions from aircraft engines. First, the EPA found that elevated concentrations of GHGs in the atmosphere endanger the public health and welfare of current and future generations within the meaning of section 231(a)(2)(A) of the CAA. The EPA made this finding specifically with respect to the same six well-mixed GHGs—CO2, methane, N2 O, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride—that together were defined as the air pollution in the 2009 Endangerment Finding [47] under section 202(a) of the CAA and that together were found to constitute the primary cause of climate change. Second, the EPA found that emissions of those six well-mixed GHGs from certain classes of engines used in certain aircraft [48] cause or contribute to the air pollution—the aggregate group of the same six GHGs—that endangers public health and welfare under CAA section 231(a)(2)(A).”
In February of 2022, the EPA proposed standards that would reflect the importance of the control of PM emissions in aviation. They were looking to secure the highest practicable degree of uniformity in aviation regulations and standards. Within this proposal, the EPA provided plenty of insight into the potential health impacts of PM2.5 on human health such as cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, neurological disorders, asthma, cancer, ferility/reproductive problems, and premature death. They also outlined the impact the chemicals in the trails have on the environment such as affecting the metabolic processes of plant foliage, altering the soil biogeochemistry and microbiology, disrupting plant and animal growth and reproduction, and the corrosion of metals and soil. They even provided more detail on the make-up of the composition of the dangerous toxins inside these trails with the addition of carcinogens such as benzene, 1,3-butadiene, formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, acrolein, polycyclic organic matter (POM), and certain metals such as chromium, manganese, and nickel. Judging by this information alone, it should be rather clear that these trails are negatively impacting our health and environment in numerous ways:
Control of Air Pollution From Aircraft Engines: Emission Standards and Test Procedures
III. Particulate Matter Impacts on Air Quality and Health
A. Background on Particulate Matter
“Particulate matter (PM) is a highly complex mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets distributed among numerous atmospheric gases which interact with solid and liquid phases. Particles range in size from those smaller than 1 nanometer (10−9 meter) to over 100 micrometers (μm, or 10−6 meter) in diameter (for reference, a typical strand of human hair is 70 μm in diameter and a grain of salt is about 100 μm). Atmospheric particles can be grouped into several classes according to their aerodynamic and physical sizes. Generally, the three broad classes of particles include ultrafine particles (UFPs, generally considered as particulates with a diameter less than or equal to 0.1 μm (typically based on physical size, thermal diffusivity or electrical mobility)), “fine” particles (PM2.5; particles with a nominal mean aerodynamic diameter less than or equal to 2.5 μm), and “thoracic” particles (PM10; particles with a nominal mean aerodynamic diameter less than or equal to 10 μm). Particles that fall within the size range between PM2.5 and PM10, are referred to as “thoracic coarse particles” (PM10-2.5, particles with a nominal mean aerodynamic diameter less than or equal to 10 μm and greater than 2.5 μm).
Particles span many sizes and shapes and may consist of hundreds of different chemicals. Particles are emitted directly from sources and are also formed through atmospheric chemical reactions between PM precursors; the former are often referred to as “primary” particles, and the latter as “secondary” particles. Particle concentration and composition varies by time of year and location, and, in addition to differences in source emissions, is affected by several weather-related factors, such as temperature, clouds, humidity, and wind. Ambient levels of PM are also impacted by particles’ ability to shift between solid/liquid and gaseous phases, which is influenced by concentration, meteorology, and especially temperature.
Fine particles are produced primarily by combustion processes and by transformations of gaseous emissions ( e.g., sulfur oxides (SOX), nitrogen oxides (NOX) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs)) in the atmosphere. The chemical and physical properties of PM2.5 may vary greatly with time, region, meteorology, and source category. Thus, PM2.5 may include a complex mixture of different components including sulfates, nitrates, organic compounds, elemental carbon, and metal compounds. These particles can remain in the atmosphere for days to weeks and travel through the atmosphere hundreds to thousands of kilometers.
Particulate matter is comprised of both volatile and non-volatile PM. PM emitted from the engine is known as non-volatile PM (nvPM), and PM formed from transformation of an engine’s gaseous emissions are defined as volatile PM.[35] Because of the difficulty in measuring volatile PM, which is formed in the engine’s exhaust plume and is significantly influenced by ambient conditions, the EPA is proposing standards only for the emission of nvPM.
B. Health Effects of Particulate Matter
Scientific studies show exposure to ambient PM is associated with a broad range of health effects. These health effects are discussed in detail in the Integrated Science Assessment for Particulate Matter (PM ISA), which was finalized in December 2019.[36]The PM ISA concludes that human exposures to ambient PM2.5 are associated with a number of adverse health effects and characterizes the weight of evidence for broad health categories ( e.g., cardiovascular effects, respiratory effects, etc.).[37] The PM ISA additionally notes that stratified analyses ( i.e., analyses that directly compare PM-related health effects across groups) provide strong evidence for racial and ethnic differences in PM2.5 exposures and in PM2.5 -related health risk. As described in Section III.D, concentrations of PM increase with proximity to an airport. Further, studies described in Section III.G report that many communities in close proximity to airports are disproportionately represented by people of color and low-income populations.
EPA has concluded that recent evidence in combination with evidence evaluated in the 2009 p.m. ISA supports a “causal relationship” between both long- and short-term exposures to PM2.5 and mortality and cardiovascular effects and a “likely to be causal relationship” between long- and short-term PM2.5 exposures and respiratory effects.[38]Additionally, recent experimental and epidemiologic studies provide evidence supporting a “likely to be causal relationship” between long-term PM2.5 exposure and nervous system effects, and long-term PM2.5 exposure and cancer. In addition, EPA noted that there was more limited and uncertain evidence for long-term PM2.5 exposure and reproductive and developmental effects ( i.e., male/female reproduction and fertility; pregnancy and birth outcomes), long- and short-term exposures and metabolic effects, and short-term exposure and nervous system effects resulting in the ISA concluding “suggestive of, but not sufficient to infer, a causal relationship.”
More detailed information on the health effects of PM can be found in a memorandum to the docket.[39]
C. Environmental Effects of Particulate Matter
Environmental effects that can result from particulate matter emissions include visibility degradation, plant and ecosystem effects, deposition effects, and materials damage and soiling. These effects are briefly summarized here and discussed in more detail in the memo to the docket cited above.
PM2.5 emissions also adversely impact visibility.[40]In the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977, Congress recognized visibility’s value to society by establishing a national goal to protect national parks and wilderness areas from visibility impairment caused by manmade pollution.[41] In 1999, EPA finalized the regional haze program (64 FR 35714) to protect the visibility in Mandatory Class I Federal areas. There are 156 national parks, forests and wilderness areas categorized as Mandatory Class I Federal areas (62 FR 38680-38681, July 18, 1997). These areas are defined in CAA section 162 as those national parks exceeding 6,000 acres, wilderness areas and memorial parks exceeding 5,000 acres, and all international parks which were in existence on August 7, 1977. EPA has also concluded that PM2.5 causes adverse effects on visibility in other areas that are not targeted by the Regional Haze Rule, such as urban areas, depending on PM2.5 concentrations and other factors such as dry chemical composition and relative humidity ( i.e., an indicator of the water composition of the particles). EPA established the secondary 24-hour PM2.5 NAAQS in 1997 and has retained the standard in subsequent reviews.[42] This standard is expected to provide protection against visibility effects through attainment of the existing secondary standards for PM2.5 . EPA is reconsidering the 2020 decision, as announced on June 10, 2021.[43]
1. Deposition of Metallic and Organic Constituents of PM
Several significant ecological effects are associated with deposition of chemical constituents of ambient PM such as metals and organics.[44]Like all internal combustion engines, turbine engines covered by this rule may emit trace amounts of metals due to fuel contamination or engine wear. Ecological effects of PM include direct effects to metabolic processes of plant foliage; contribution to total metal loading resulting in alteration of soil biogeochemistry and microbiology, plant and animal growth and reproduction; and contribution to total organics loading resulting in bioaccumulation and biomagnification.
2. Materials Damage and Soiling
Deposition of PM is associated with both physical damage (materials damage effects) and impaired aesthetic qualities (soiling effects). Wet and dry deposition of PM can physically affect materials, adding to the effects of natural weathering processes, by potentially promoting or accelerating the corrosion of metals, by degrading paints and by deteriorating building materials such as stone, concrete and marble.[45]
D. Near-Source Impacts on Air Quality and Public Health
Airport activity can adversely impact air quality in the vicinity of airports. Furthermore, these adverse impacts may disproportionately impact sensitive subpopulations. A recent study by Yim et al. (2015) assessed global, regional, and local health impacts of civil aviation emissions, using modeling tools that address environmental impacts at different spatial scales.[46] The study attributed approximately 16,000 premature deaths per year globally to global aviation emissions, with 87 percent attributable to PM2.5 . The study concludes that about a third of these mortalities are attributable to PM2.5 exposures within 20 kilometers of an airport. Another study focused on the continental United States estimated 210 deaths per year attributable to PM2.5 from aircraft.[47] While there are considerable uncertainties associated with such estimates, these results suggest that in addition to the contributions of PM2.5 emissions to regional air quality, impacts on public health of these emissions in the vicinity of airports are an important public health concern.
A significant body of research has addressed pollutant levels and potential health effects in the vicinity of airports. Much of this research was synthesized in a 2015 report published by the Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP), conducted by the Transportation Research Board.[48]The report concluded that PM2.5 concentrations in and around airports vary considerably, ranging from “relatively low levels to those that are close to the NAAQS, and in some cases, exceeding the standards.” [49]
Furthermore, the report states (p. 40) that “existing studies indicate that ultrafine particle concentrations are highly elevated at an airport ( i.e., near a runway) with particle counts that can be orders of magnitude higher than background with some persistence many meters downwind ( e.g., 600 m). Finally, the report concludes that PM2.5 dominates overall health risks posed by airport emissions. Moreover, one recently published study concluded that emissions from aircraft play an etiologic role in pre-term births, independent of noise and traffic-related air pollution exposures.[50]
Since the publication of the 2015 ACRP literature review, a number of studies conducted in the U. S. have been published which concluded that ultrafine particle number concentrations were elevated downwind of commercial airports, and that proximity to an airport also increased particle number concentrations within residences.Hudda et al. investigated ultrafine particle number concentrations (PNC) inside and outside 16 residences in the Boston metropolitan area. They found elevated outdoor PNC within several kilometers of the airport. They also found that aviation-related PNC infiltrated indoors and resulted in significantly higher indoor PNC.[51] In another study in the vicinity of Logan airport, Hudda et al. analyzed PNC impacts of aviation activities.[52] They found that, at sites 4.0 and 7.3 km from the airport, average PNCs were 2 and 1.33-fold higher, respectively, when winds were from the direction of the airport compared to other directions, indicating that aviation impacts on PNC extend many kilometers downwind of Logan airport. Stacey (2019) conducted a literature survey and concluded that the literature consistently reports that particle numbers close to airports are significantly higher than locations distant and upwind of airports, and that the particle size distribution is different from traditional road traffic, with more extremely fine particles.[53] Similar findings have been published from European studies.[54 55 56 57 58 59 ] Results of a monitoring study of communities near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport also found higher levels of ultrafine PM near the airport, and an impacted area larger than at near-roadway sites.[60] The PM associated with aircraft landing activity was also smaller in size, with lower black carbon concentrations than near-roadway samples. As discussed above, PM2.5 exposures are associated with a number of serious, adverse health effects. Further, the PM attributable to aircraft emissions has been associated with potential adverse health impacts.[61 62] For example, He et al. (2018) found that particle composition, size distribution and internalized amount of particles near airports all contributed to promotion of reactive organic species in bronchial epithelial cells.
Because of these potential impacts, a systematic literature review was recently conducted to identify peer-reviewed literature on air quality near commercial airports and assess the quality of the studies.[63] The systematic review identified seventy studies for evaluation. These studies consistently showed that particulate matter, in the form of ultrafine PM (UFP), is elevated in and around airports. Furthermore, many studies showed elevated levels of black carbon, criteria pollutants, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons as well. Finally, the systematic review, while not focused on health effects, identified a limited number of references reporting adverse health effects impacts, including increased rates of premature death, pre-term births, decreased lung function, oxidative DNA damage and childhood leukemia. More research is needed linking particle size distributions to specific airport activities, and proximity to airports, characterizing relationships between different pollutants, evaluating long-term impacts, and improving our understanding of health effects.
A systematic review of health effects associated with exposure to jet engine emissions in the vicinity of airports was also recently published.[64] This study concluded that literature on health effects was sparse, but jet engine emissions have physicochemical properties similar to diesel exhaust particles, and that exposure to jet engine emissions is associated with similar adverse health effects as exposure to diesel exhaust particles and other traffic emissions.A 2010 systematic review by the Health Effects Institute (HEI) concluded that evidence was sufficient to support a causal relationship between exposure to traffic-related air pollution and exacerbation of asthma among children, and suggestive of a causal relationship for childhood asthma, non-asthma respiratory symptoms, impaired lung function and cardiovascular mortality.[65]”
F. Other Pollutants Emitted by Aircraft
“In addition to particulate matter, a number of other criteria pollutants are emitted by the aircraft which are the subject of this proposed rule. These pollutants, which are not covered by the rule, include nitrogen oxides (NOX), including nitrogen dioxide (NO2), volatile organic compounds (VOC), carbon monoxide (CO), and sulfur dioxide (SO2). Aircraft also contribute to ambient levels of hazardous air pollutants (HAP), compounds that are known or suspected human or animal carcinogens, or that have noncancer health effects. These compounds include, but are not limited to, benzene, 1,3-butadiene, formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, acrolein, polycyclic organic matter (POM), and certain metals. Some POM and HAP metals are components of PM2.5 mass measured in turbine engine aircraft emissions.[70]
The term polycyclic organic matter (POM) defines a broad class of compounds that includes the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon compounds (PAHs). POM compounds are formed primarily from combustion and are present in the atmosphere in gas and particulate form. Metal compounds emitted from aircraft turbine engine combustion include chromium, manganese, and nickel. Several POM compounds, as well as hexavalent chromium, manganese compounds and nickel compounds are included in the National Air Toxics Assessment, based on potential carcinogenic risk.[71] In addition, as mentioned previously, deposition of metallic compounds can have ecological effects. Impacts of POM and metals are further discussed in the memorandum to the docket referenced above.”
PM stands for particulate matter – the term for a mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets found in the air
Some particles, such as dust, dirt, soot, or smoke, are large or dark enough to be seen with the naked eye while others are too small to be seen
PM10: inhalable particles, with diameters that are generally 10 micrometers and smaller
PM2.5: fine inhalable particles, with diameters that are generally 2.5 micrometers and smaller
These particles come in many sizes and shapes and can be made up of hundreds of different chemicals
Most particles form in the atmosphere as a result of complex reactions of chemicals such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides
Particulate matter contains microscopic solids or liquid droplets that are so small that they can be inhaled and cause serious health problems
Some particles less than 10 micrometers in diameter can get deep into your lungs and some may even get into your bloodstream
Fine particles are also the main cause of reduced visibility (haze) in parts of the United States
The size of particles is directly linked to their potential for causing health problems
Exposure to such particles can affect both your lungs and your heart
Numerous scientific studies have linked particle pollution exposure to a variety of problems, including:
Premature death in people with heart or lung disease
Nonfatal heart attacks
Irregular heartbeat
Aggravated asthma
Decreased lung function
Increased respiratory symptoms, such as irritation of the airways, coughing or difficulty breathing
People with heart or lung diseases,children, and older adults are the most likely to be affected by particle pollution exposure
According to a Congressional Research Service report from February 8th, 2022, CO2 emissions from aviation are currently experiencing a faster rate of growth than other sources
All aircraft, including military, commercial, and privately chartered, accounted for 13% of the U.S. transportation sector’s CO2 emissions and 5% of all U.S. CO2 emissions in 2018
Commercial aircraft, including those operated by passenger and all-cargo airlines, accounted for 11% of transportation sector and 4% of all emissions
Since the global financial crisis in 2009, aggregate CO2 emissions from all aircraft types have grown steadily, increasing by almost 22% between 2009 and 2018
This increase makes aircraft one of the faster-growing sources of CO2 emissions in the U.S. transportation sector over the past decade
The effects of aircraft emissions on the atmosphere are complex, reflecting differing altitudes, geography, time horizons, and environmental conditions
Research has shown that in addition to CO2 emissions, other factors increase the climate change impacts of aviation which include:
The contribution of aircraft emissions to ozone production
The formation of water condensation trails and cirrus clouds
The emission of various gases and particles, including water vapor, nitrous oxides, sulfates, and particulates from jet fuel combustion
The high altitude location of the bulk of these emissions
In examining the warming and cooling influences of these factors, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated aviation’s total climate change impact could be from two to four times that of its past CO2 emissions alone
Aside from GHG emissions, aircraft engines emit a number of criteria—or common—pollutants, including:
Nitrogen oxides
Carbon monoxide
Oxides of sulfur
Unburned or partially combusted hydrocarbons (also known as volatile organic compounds [VOCs])
Particulates
Other trace compounds
A subset of the VOCs and particulates are considered hazardous air pollutants
According to a 2021 report by the EPA, they found that elevated concentrations of GHGs in the atmosphere endanger the public health and welfare of current and future generations within the meaning of section 231(a)(2)(A) of the CAA
Second, EPA found that emissions of GHGs from certain classes of engines used in certain aircraft are contributing to the air pollution that endangers public health and welfare under CAA section 231(a)(2)(A)
The EPA made this finding specifically with respect to the same six well-mixed GHGs—CO2, methane, N2O, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride—that together were defined as the air pollution in the 2009 Endangerment Finding under section 202(a) of the CAA and that together were found to constitute the primary cause of climate change
The EPA found that emissions of those six well-mixed GHGs from certain classes of engines used in certain aircraft cause or contribute to the air pollution—the aggregate group of the same six GHGs—that endangers public health and welfare under CAA section 231(a)(2)(A)
Another report by the EPA from February 2022 states that particulate matter (PM) is a highly complex mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets distributed among numerous atmospheric gases which interact with solid and liquid phases
Particles span many sizes and shapes and may consist of hundreds of different chemicals
Fine particles are produced primarily by combustion processes and by transformations of gaseous emissions (e.g., sulfur oxides (SOX), nitrogen oxides (NOX) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs)) in the atmosphere
PM2.5 may include a complex mixture of different components including sulfates, nitrates, organic compounds, elemental carbon, and metal compounds
These particles can remain in the atmosphere for days to weeks and travel through the atmosphere hundreds to thousands of kilometers
Particulate matter is comprised of both volatile and non-volatile PM
PM emitted from the engine is known as non-volatile PM (nvPM), and PM formed from transformation of an engine’s gaseous emissions are defined as volatile PM
Because of the difficulty in measuring volatile PM, which is formed in the engine’s exhaust plume and is significantly influenced by ambient conditions, the EPA is proposing standards only for the emission of nvPM
In other words, there are no standards proposed by the EPA for the transformation these chemicals go through after leaving the enginewhen they become lingering trails
Scientific studies show exposure to ambient PM isassociated with a broad range of health effects
The PM ISA concludes that human exposures to ambient PM2.5 are associated with a number of adverse health effects and characterizes the weight of evidence for broad health categories ( e.g., cardiovascular effects, respiratory effects, etc.)
EPA has concluded that recent evidence in combination with evidence evaluated in the 2009 p.m. ISA supports a “causal relationship” between both long- and short-term exposures to PM2.5 and mortality and cardiovascular effects and a “likely to be causal relationship” between long- and short-term PM2.5 exposures and respiratory effects
Additionally, recent experimental and epidemiologic studies provide evidence supporting a “likely to be causal relationship” between long-term PM2.5 exposure and nervous system effects, and long-term PM2.5 exposure and cancer
In addition, EPA noted that there was more limited and uncertain evidence for long-term PM2.5 exposure and reproductive and developmental effects ( i.e., male/female reproduction and fertility; pregnancy and birth outcomes), long- and short-term exposures and metabolic effects, and short-term exposure and nervous system effects resulting in the ISA concluding “suggestive of, but not sufficient to infer, a causal relationship”
Environmental effects that can result from particulate matter emissions include:
Visibility degradation
Plant and ecosystem effects
Deposition effects
Materials damage and soiling
PM2.5 emissions also adversely impact visibility
Like all internal combustion engines, turbine engines covered by this rule may emittrace amounts of metals due to fuel contamination or engine wear
Ecological effects of PM include:
Direct effects to metabolic processes of plant foliage
Contribution to total metal loading resulting in alteration of soil biogeochemistry and microbiology, plant and animal growth and reproduction
Contribution to total organics loading resulting in bioaccumulation and biomagnification
Deposition of PM is associated with both physical damage (materials damage effects) and impaired aesthetic qualities (soiling effects)
Wet and dry deposition of PM can physically affect materials, adding to the effects of natural weathering processes, by potentially promoting or accelerating the corrosion of metals, by degrading paints and by deteriorating building materials such as stone, concrete and marble
A recent study by Yim et al. (2015) assessed global, regional, and local health impacts of civil aviation emissions, using modeling tools that address environmental impacts at different spatial scales
The study attributed approximately 16,000 premature deaths per year globally to global aviation emissions, with 87 percent attributable to PM2.5
The study concluded that about a third of these mortalities are attributable to PM2.5 exposures within 20 kilometers of an airport
Another study focused on the continental United States estimated 210 deaths per year attributable to PM2.5 from aircraft
Impacts on public health of these emissions in the vicinity of airports are an important public health concern
A 2015 report concluded that PM2.5 concentrations in and around airports vary considerably, ranging from “relatively low levels to those that are close to the NAAQS, and in some cases, exceeding the standards.”
Furthermore, the report stated (p. 40) that “existing studies indicate that ultrafine particle concentrations are highly elevated at an airport ( i.e., near a runway) with particle counts that can be orders of magnitude higher than background with some persistence many meters downwind ( e.g., 600 m)
Finally, the report concluded that PM2.5 dominates overall health risks posed by airport emissions
Hudda et al. investigated ultrafine particle number concentrations (PNC) inside and outside 16 residences in the Boston metropolitan area and found that aviation-related PNC infiltrated indoors and resulted in significantly higher indoor PNC
Stacey (2019) conducted a literature survey and concluded that the literature consistently reports that particle numbers close to airports are significantly higher than locations distant and upwind of airports, and that the particle size distribution is different from traditional road traffic, with more extremely fine particles
PM2.5 exposures are associated with a number of serious, adverse health effects and the PM attributable to aircraft emissions has been associated with potential adverse health impacts
He et al. (2018) found that particle composition, size distribution and internalized amount of particles near airports all contributed to promotion of reactive organic species in bronchial epithelial cells
A systematic review of 70 studies consistently showed that particulate matter, in the form of ultrafine PM (UFP), is elevated in and around airports
Furthermore, many studies showed elevated levels of black carbon, criteria pollutants, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons as well
Finally, the systematic review, while not focused on health effects, identified a limited number of references reporting adverse health effects impacts, including increased rates of premature death, pre-term births, decreased lung function, oxidative DNA damage and childhood leukemia
A systematic review of health effects associated with exposure to jet engine emissions in the vicinity of airports found that jet engine emissions have physicochemical properties similar to diesel exhaust particles, and that exposure to jet engine emissions is associated with similar adverse health effects as exposure to diesel exhaust particles and other traffic emissions
A 2010 systematic review by the Health Effects Institute (HEI) concluded that evidence was sufficient to support a causal relationship between exposure to traffic-related air pollution and exacerbation of asthma among children, and suggestive of a causal relationship for childhood asthma, non-asthma respiratory symptoms, impaired lung function and cardiovascular mortality
Besides PM2.5, other harmful pollutants, which are not covered by the rule, include:
Nitrogen oxides (NOX)
Nitrogen dioxide (NO2)
Volatile organic compounds (VOC)
Carbon monoxide (CO)
Sulfur dioxide (SO2)
Aircraft also contribute to ambient levels of hazardous air pollutants (HAP), compounds that are known or suspected human or animal carcinogens, or that have noncancer health effects
These compounds include, but are not limited to:
Benzene,
1,3-butadiene
Formaldehyde
Acetaldehyde
Acrolein
Polycyclic organic matter (POM)
Certain metals
Some POM and HAP metals are components of PM2.5 mass measured in turbine engine aircraft emissions
The term polycyclic organic matter (POM) defines a broad class of compounds that includes the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon compounds (PAHs)
Metal compounds emitted from aircraft turbine engine combustion include:
Chromium
Manganese
Nickel
Several POM compounds, as well as hexavalent chromium, manganese compounds and nickel compounds are included in the National Air Toxics Assessment, based on potential carcinogenic risk
When dealing with a potential health threat, we tend to jump to the conclusion that we are facing a new “virus” as this well-orchestrated lie has been drilled into our collective consciousness since birth. It is second nature to blame the new invisible boogeyman while overlooking the old visible threats that have been plaguing us for years with no end in sight. It seems too easy to admit to ourselves that any perceived increase in respiratory disease could be attributable to the continued increase in air pollution.
Yet from the start, “Covid-19” has been linked to air pollution. The areas hit the hardest were those with the highest levels of these harmful toxins in the air. As travel died down during the lockdowns, cases fell along with subsiding smog. As travel and pollution rose up again, so too did the “Covid” cases. Even small increases in air pollution has been shown to have an impact on “Covid” case numbers and deaths.
We know for a fact that air pollution is harmful to our health and environment. We know that every single symptom of disease associated with “Covid-19” can be linked to the PM2.5 particles which make up the majority of the dirty air we breathe. We know for a fact that automobiles, factories, power plants, forest fires, volcanic eruptions, etc. all contribute to the harmful levels of toxins in the air. However, the one thing we have been told not to question as a contributor to our current problems are the lingering trails in the sky which form artificial clouds blocking out the beneficial rays of the sun. We are told that these are just regular old contrails from commercial airliners made up of ice crystals which eventually dissipate into a completely safe and harmless nothingness. Anyone questioning the trails is immediately labelled a conspiracy theorist.
It should be clear now, whether you call them chemtrails or not, that these persistent streaks in the sky are full of dangerous substances that attack the cardiovascular, respiratory, and neurological systems. Thanks to government sources such as the EPA and the Congressional Research Service, we know that these trails are the fastest growing pollutant in the air and that they are contributing to even greater levels of smog and haze. The trails and the artificial cirrus clouds they form are a near constant sight in the sky these days and the problem is only growing worse with time. The damaging effects that these lines in the sky have on our health and environment is not even debatable. It is agreed upon by both sides of the debate. That these “persistent contrails” are harmful to our health and environment is a FACT. That the chemicals and toxins found within the vapors cause the exact same symptoms of disease as “Covid-19” is not a coincidence.
Thus we are left with two choices. We can either believe the official narrative that a new “virus” of unknown origin magically leapt from animal to man or somehow escaped from a lab and infected millions of people with a disease that causes the exact same symptoms associated with allergies, the common cold, the flu, and pneumonia. And with it’s rise, it has eliminated the majority of the cases of those previous ailments and can also constantly mutate (over 10 million versions now according to GISAID.org) in order to slip by every possible measure to contain it including masks, social distancing, lockdowns, quarantines, vaccines, etc.
Or we can believe that the ever-increasing and constant daily exposure to air pollution has taken a toll on the populace damaging the health and environment of everyone living within these dangerous levels of toxic fumes. While this is not the only explanation for any perceived increase in respiratory and other diseases, it is the most logical one over an invisible “virus.” According to Occam’s Razor, the simplest of competing theories should be preferred over those that are more complex and that explanations of unknown phenomena should be sought first in terms of known quantities. We know air pollution is harmful. We know that these trails are increasing at a faster rate than any other pollutant. We know that the chemicals residing within them are associated with the exact same symptoms of disease that are ascribed to “Covid.” Unlike a “virus,” we can see this boogeyman with our own two eyes.
All we have to do is look up.
From their own sources, the trails are a threat to our health and our environment. Contrary to what they want you to believe about “persistent contrails,” a.k.a. chemtrails, this is NOT a conspiracy.
You can see more of the slides from Government sources that were presented within this article here.
GeoEngineeringWatch.org is the most visited website in the world on the subject of covert climate engineering operations.
Dane Wigington begins this Q&A with his question for the day:
“If the human race remains on the current course of all-out planetary decimation, how much time do we have until the extinction of our species? And will we bring the entire web of life down with us? We’re getting close to that now and few even realize it.”
Dane and his callers cover many topics, including the link between HAARP and other ground-based, radio frequency transmitters, microwave transmission networks and other silent weapons for quiet wars.
A few quotes from Dane:
“So again, they’re using the atmosphere for a physics lab.”
“What’s happening in our skies will very soon determine our collective futures if it’s not stopped. At any point time, if those in power choose to, if they feel they’re losing control, they can put something much more lethal in this mix and put us all on our backs. Overnight. Literally.”
“We have a common thread of the various forms of mental deficiency with those in power — the common thread is this — a near total lack of comprehension as to the consequences of their actions even to themselves. Would they do this to themselves? Yes, they have and they continue to.”
“Those in power don’t care how toxic these elements are. And for those that don’t know what graphene is — look it up… Graphene toxilogical effects — it reads like a horror story. It’s a vascular machete, destroying parts of our bodies’ vascular system and countless other downstream elements. And it can be used for biological carrier, can be used to carry some sort of biological agent from the clouds to the ground.”
Those who follow this site will easily see the link between the toxic ingredients in the so-called covid vaccines and similar toxic nanoparticles that have, for decades, been pumped into our skies, continue to kill off forests and vegetation, and are being breathed in by all humans and all animal life on the planet.
On this Coming Collapse Q and A session, a highly credentialed scientist from a top 10 science testing facility joins us for a shocking front line report.
Recent testing has now confirmed that the highly toxic element graphene is in our precipitation, along with an already long list of toxins including aluminum nanoparticles.
Surfactants have also been confirmed in recent precipitation testing. Climate intervention operations are ubiquitously contaminating the entire planet and every breath we take.
How long do we have if the human race remains on the current course?
Please join us for this front line report on the most dire and immediate threats we collectively face.
[As a service to protect truth from censorship and to share widely, mirrored copies of this video are available at Truth Comes to Light Odysee, BitChute and Brighteon channels. All credit, along with our sincere thanks, goes to the original source of this video. Please follow links provided to support their work.]
Millions of pounds of toxic pesticides sprayed on feed crops for factory farm animals in the U.S. are threatening human health and wildlife and plants by destroying their native habitats, according to a new report by World Animal Protection and the Center for Biological Diversity.
Millions of pounds of toxic pesticides sprayed on feed crops for factory farm animals in the U.S. are threatening human health and wildlife and plants by destroying their native habitats, according to a new report by World Animal Protection and the Center for Biological Diversity.
The report, “Collateral Damage: How Factory Farming Drives Up the Use of Toxic Agricultural Pesticides,” exposes factory farm meat as a “major driver of pesticide use.”
An estimated 99% of animals raised for food in the U.S. come from factory farms, including about 70% of cows, 98% of pigs, 99% of turkeys, 98% of chickens raised for eggs and more than 99.9% of chicken raised for meat.
This expansion of industrial factory farms is not only “perpetuating enormous cruelty and suffering” for the billions of animals confined in them, the report stated, but it’s also pushing key ecosystems to the brink of collapse.
More factory farms mean more land converted to large, industrial corn and soy monocultures, researchers said. The majority of these crops don’t go to feeding humans, but instead are grown to feed animals in confinement, propping up Big Ag’s industrial livestock production model.
Researchers found from 2018 to 2019, an estimated 2.6 million acres of American grasslands were plowed to grow just a handful of crops: corn, soy and wheat.
According to “Collateral Damage”:
“An enormous portion of our agricultural lands, roughly one-third, are used for mass-producing corn and soy, the vast majority of which is not for human consumption. Globally, roughly 67–77% of soy produced is used as feed for livestock, and 36–45% of the corn produced in the U.S. is used as feed.
“Not only are our existing agricultural lands heavily used to produce just these two crops, but worse, wildlands are continuing to be converted to cropland in order to grow more.”
Using data from 2018, the most recent year it was available, researchers found that an “estimated 235,976,274 — ¼ billion — pounds of herbicides and insecticides were applied in the U.S. just to the corn and soybeans grown for farmed animal feed.”
These pesticides include paraquat, glyphosate, atrazine, chlorpyrifos and bifenthrin — all of which are being applied in massive amounts to corn and soy in the U.S., Latin America and Asia.
The result is a “global pesticide market [that] continues to grow in tandem with the industrial factory farming industry,” researchers said.
Dumping massive amounts of toxic pesticides into the environment threatens delicate ecosystems, often killing beneficial insects, aquatic life and other species, many of which are already endangered.
“Foxes and bats, migratory birds, bumblebees, and prairie butterflies, are all imperiled by grassland conversion and industrial agriculture,” the report noted.
No species are spared when toxic pesticides are continually dumped into the environment, researchers said, citing a 2005 study that estimated 72 million birds are killed each year by pesticides.
According to the authors of the new report, agricultural pesticides affect humans, too, as they often pollute surface and groundwater which can lead to contaminated drinking water.
Science shows preserving wildlife and biodiversity is key to the planet’s health, the researchers said, noting that biodiversity promotes clean air, fresh water, healthy soil and crop pollination.
Eating less meat and dairy, and more plants, helps protect biodiversity, the authors said, but it’s also important that when people do eat animal products, they choose products made from animals raised outdoors and on pasture.
In addition to making dietary changes, researchers also called for holding large corporations accountable, particularly those that are perpetuating biodiversity loss by profiting off industrial agricultural systems that harm human health and the planet.
“Protecting biodiversity and wild animal habitats requires reimagining how we are producing and consuming protein, including by ending the factory farming of animals for meat and dairy,” the report concluded.
Since it first went on the market in 1974, glyphosate has been used for weed control, as an exfoliant to eradicate unwanted vegetation and illegal crops, and as a crop desiccant—a chemical applied to crops to dry them out more quickly before harvest.
What is glyphosate?
As a non-selective herbicide, it kills most plants. Scientists now link glyphosate to a number of human health problems, from cancer and neurological diseases to endocrine disruption and birth defects. But the full range of glyphosate’s health effects remains unknown.
What is glyphosate used for?
Various formulations of glyphosate-based herbicides, like Monsanto’s Roundup, are used in agriculture and forestry. Since the mid-1990s, global use has risen dramatically, thanks to the introduction of genetically engineered “Roundup Ready” crops like corn, soybeans, cotton, and alfalfa that resist damage from the herbicide. Today, Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides are also frequently used on lawns, gardens, parks, and school grounds for weed control.
Where is glyphosate?
Glyphosate not only enters our bodies when we come in direct contact with it, but when we breathe, eat, and drink.(Credit: summerbl4ck/flickr)
The widespread use of glyphosate makes it ubiquitous in the environment. Researchers have found it in our food, soil, air, groundwater, surface waters like lakes and rivers, and even in rainwater. That means glyphosate not only enters our bodies when we come in direct contact with it, but when we breathe, eat, and drink.
As worldwide use of glyphosate has increased during the past 25 years or so, human exposures to glyphosate-based herbicides have also risen significantly. A 2017 study found that human glyphosate exposure increased more than 500% in two decades.
Why is glyphosate a health concern?
Emerging research suggest glyphosate could be associated with shorter pregnancies, which can be detrimental to maternal health and increase the risk of infant mortality and learning problems in children. (Credit: Anna Carolina Vieira Santos/flickr)
Recent health studies are prompting calls for more scrutiny of glyphosate toxicity. Research now links glyphosate to health problems including cancer, reproductive problems, neurological diseases like ALS, endocrine disruption, and birth defects. Researchers are also beginning to explore potential impacts of glyphosate on pregnancy. Emerging findings suggest glyphosate could be associated with shorter pregnancies. Shorter pregnancies can be detrimental to maternal health and increase the risk of infant mortality and learning problems as children develop.
In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. However, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has long maintained that glyphosate poses no risk for human health when used according to the manufacturer’s instructions—a finding criticized by many scientists.
While most health research on glyphosate to date focuses on cancer, there is much that science doesn’t yet know about its other potential impacts on human health. Much more research is needed to understand the full range of effects, how they may differ in children and adults, and the extent of glyphosate’s environmental impacts. Leading environmental health researchers, including EHN’s chief scientist Pete Myers, have called for more investigation and better monitoring of glyphosate in water, food, and human bodies.
In addition, scientists have raised concerns about the other ingredients in glyphosate-based herbicides. While glyphosate is the active ingredient, companies don’t have to publicly disclose other proprietary chemicals in these herbicide formulations. Consequently, regulators and researchers can’t fully study these “inert” chemicals to determine their health effects—alone and in combination with each other. Some scientists and activists want to reform the regulatory system so that companies can’t keep these chemicals secret.
Why are there so many glyphosate lawsuits right now?
Tens of thousands of lawsuits have been filed by people claiming that Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides caused their cancer. (Credit: Mike Mozart/flickr)
The World Health Organization’s 2015 declaration that glyphosate probably causes cancer opened the floodgates to litigation. The German company Bayer A.G. bought Monsanto in 2018, and tens of thousands of lawsuits have been filed against the company by people claiming that Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides caused their cancer, especially non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Most claimants in these lawsuits worked in jobs like agriculture, maintenance, landscaping, and other professions with significant exposure risk, or used the products long-term on their lawns and gardens. They say the companies failed to adequately warn the public about health risks.
In 2021, Bayer announced it would replace glyphosate in all lawn and garden products sold in the United States by 2023. The company said the removal of glyphosate from these products is “exclusively to manage litigation risk and not because of any safety concerns,” and indicated it has no plans to remove glyphosate from professional and agricultural market products in the U.S.
One group that’s been largely excluded from glyphosate lawsuits is migrant farmworkers, who are on the front lines when it comes to glyphosate exposure. EHN found that fear of retaliation, and a lack of legal resources and legal immigration status, has diminished migrant farmworkers’ ability to seek justice and compensation.
Where is glyphosate used most?
Glyphosate is the most used pesticide on agricultural crops in the U.S., according to a 2019 analysis by the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. The Midwest, California, and Texas represent about three-quarters of agricultural glyphosate use in the U.S., with the Midwest alone comprising a full two-thirds of total use.
Glyphosate’s popularity comes in part from the fact that it is effective and relatively cheap. Low-cost versions from China and other countries with relatively lax environmental and health regulations flooded the market as glyphosate patents expired in the 1990s, making it even cheaper. This helps explain why its use has increased so dramatically in the past two decades. But some local, state, and national governments are bucking that trend.
Where is glyphosate banned?
Glyphosate has been or will soon be banned in at least 10 countries, including Mexico, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam, and at least 15 others have restricted its use, according to Human Rights Watch. Individual cities and counties, including Los Angeles, Seattle, Miami, Baltimore, Austin, and Portland, have taken action to restrict or ban glyphosate, as have some states.
Unfortunately, glyphosate is hard to avoid. We can’t stop breathing, eating, or drinking water.
However, avoiding GMO foods and eating more organic foods when possible can help. Choosing non-toxic methods of weed control for your lawn and garden also limits exposure. Joining with others to ban glyphosate-based products (and other pesticides) in schools, parks, and your community at large are other effective ways to reduce local exposures.
Ways to take action on glyphosate
Farmers from the Ecuador-Colombia border region voice concerns about economic and health impacts of aerial glyphosate spraying. (Credit: Cancillería del Ecuador)
EHN has been reporting on glyphosate since we started 20 years ago. Monitoring our coverage of glyphosate legislation, litigation, and health research is a great way to stay informed on the latest developments. Check out our extensive story archive: You’ll find dozens of glyphosate stories by EHN as well as other leading news organizations. All of EHN’s stories are free to read, share, and republish with attribution.
Link up with other concerned residents in your community to share information and take action.
Here are a few links to organizations keeping track of the latest science on glyphosate and working to hold regulators, politicians, corporations, and employers accountable for protecting human health:
The US Embassy to Tbilisi is involved in the trafficking of frozen human blood and pathogens as diplomatic cargo for a secret military program. Internal documents, leaked to Bulgarian journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva by Georgian insiders, implicate US scientists in the transportation of and experimenting on pathogens under diplomatic cover.
According to these documents, Pentagon scientists have been deployed to the Republic of Georgia and have been given diplomatic immunity to research deadly diseases and biting insects at the Lugar Center – the Pentagon biolaboratory in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi.
The military facility is just one of the many Pentagon biolaboratories in 25 countries across the world.
This investigative documentary was originally broadcast by Al Mayadeen TV.
The so called “fact checkers” are shutting down legitimate science debate regarding climate intervention operations and countless other critically important issues. Our right to free speech is in the balance, it’s time to hold the fact checkers legally accountable for their actions. The 15 minute video report below outlines the context of the legal action being taken against the sole scientist responsible for Facebook’s censorship of GeoengineeringWatch.org and The Dimming documentary.
The two page press release for the legal action filed against Dr. Douglas MacMartin can be viewed in the PDF below.
Lone Scientist Triggers Facebook Censorship of Climate Science Data
Shasta,CA—Should an individual scientist have the right to censor scientific data from the public? What if that data had disastrous implications for both human health and the longevity of Earth’s ecosystems? What if the conclusions don’t conform to official narratives, but are backed up with scientific testing, recorded testimony from former Federal and State scientists, high ranking military members, physicians, pilots, industry insiders and other experts with key insights into the subject matter at hand?
A recent lawsuit filing in the Superior Court of Shasta County, California by Dane Wigington, lead researcher at Geoengineeringwatch.org, may answer these questions with international implications.
Dane Wigington is seeking damages against Dr. Douglas MacMartin (aka Douglas MacMynowski), professor at Cal-Tech and Cornell University, alleging MacMartin’s actions as an “independent fact checker,” triggered Facebook’s censorship of the Geoengineering Watch 2021 documentary film TheDimmingand subsequently all other forms of affiliated data posted on Facebook. (View the full film of The Dimming)
“Dr. MacMartin’s actions have not only done very real and verifiable damage to many years of research and publication efforts,” stated Wigington on his weekly national radio broadcast GlobalAlert News, “but more importantly, his attempt to stifle legitimate scientific discussion, to suppress results from methodically collected data on an issue of such dire importance, has deprived much of the public access to this critical information. They have a right to know about the ongoing global climate intervention operations.”
As chronicled in Wigington’s film The Dimming, Geoengineering Watch conducted high altitude atmospheric particulate testing in a NOAA (NationalOceanicandAtmosphericAdministration)flying laboratory. Air samples were collected from visible trails being emitted by large jet aircraft and thenanalyzed by scientists using electron microscopy at a world-renowned US laboratory. The scientists were able to identify primary climate engineering elements, as named in climate engineering proposals and weather modification patents, including aluminum and barium nanoparticles.
“The title of the documentary is in reference to the climate science community’s stated objective of geoengineering, or solar radiation management operations, to reflect or ‘dim’ a percentage of the sun’s incoming thermal radiation in a desperate, dangerous and unimaginably destructive attempt to slow the advance of global warming,” Wigington reports.
According to the lawsuit, within weeks of being released in early 2021, The Dimming documentary was flagged as “false information” by Facebook because of MacMartin’s sole claims. The suit notes that MacMartin did not present any data corroborating his accusations or refuting the data presented by Wigington, leaving one asking, should any single scientist be able to censor data from the public that they feel is false without providing counter evidence to back their assertion?
What was once a discipline driven by data and discovery, some areas of science are becoming both politicized and personal. Confrontational communications from MacMartin are detailed in the lawsuit, including a 2018 WBAI radio program featuring an on-air debate between MacMartin and Wigington (listen to the full radio broadcast here). “[MacMartin’s] demeanor toward me was very evident during this exchange. Is it even remotely reasonable to consider Dr. Douglas MacMartin as an unbiased fact checker?” asked Wigington.
“It appears that I am the only individual ever targeted by MacMartin on this subject before or since Facebook’s censorship of The Dimming,” Wigington shared with his listeners, “Perhaps it has something to do with the million dollar grant he’s been awarded to study geoengineering?” As part of his work at Cornell and Cal-Tech, MacMartin’s studies include the geoengineering arena and he recently received a one million dollar grant to study sunshine deflection to reduce the impacts of climate change. (See full grantlistinghere)
MacMartin’s grant is one of many projects in the climate science community purporting to research potential options for offsetting the Earth’s warming climate, but Wigington insists they are not just proposals. “Climate engineering projects have been funded, studied and implemented world-wide for decades. We have documented patents, Federal budgets, high ranking military testimony… so to pretend these programs are in the initial phases of study is simply not backed up by the evidence,” reports Wigington.
When differing conclusions are reached regarding scientific data, shouldn’t the scientific method, and not censorship, be utilized to find clarity and separate fact from fiction? Should one person, regardless of their resume, be able to decide what is credible and worthy of concern for the general public?
With trust in scientists and authorities at an all-time low, and the word “science” being used to silence those whose claims run counter to the prevailing narrative, this lawsuit may have implications and impacts well-beyond its initial judicial sphere.
The full legal complaint has been filed in the Superior court of Shasta County, California. MacMartin and his attorneys have since filed to remove the legal action from Shasta County to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California (in Sacramento), Case No 2:21-cv-02355- KJM-DMC.
A full copy of the initial legal warning sent to Dr. Douglas MacMartin is posted below.
The attached PDF below contains the full 29 page legal proceeding filed against Dr. Douglas MacMartin for triggering Facebook’s censoring of “The Dimming” documentary and all Geoengineering Watch research data.
First known cease and desist for cell tower due to injuries in United States of America will be effective in 7 days
if Verizon does not come to the table.
On February 2, 2022, the Pittsfield, MA Board of Health unanimously voted to issue a cease and desist order to Verizon to shut down its tower located at 877 South Street. Families living in the neighborhood near the tower reported wireless radiation-related health issues soon after the tower became operational in 2020 and since then, have been working tirelessly to turn the transmissions off. This action is the first known cease and desist by a Board of Health in the United States.
The cease and desist order to Verizon would become effective in seven calendar days if Verizon fails to notify the Board that they are willing to come to a discussion and demonstrate significant commitment that they will do something “to resolve the issue to the board’s satisfaction.”
iBerkshires quoted Board Member Steve Smith who stated, “As a member of the Board of Health, I’m here to safeguard the health of residents of the city of Pittsfield…”So on some level for me, win or lose this long battle with a company that’s going to look at this on a global scale, at some point, I’m going to have to sit back 20 years later and say, did I do everything I could to safeguard the residents in Pittsfield when I was in that position or did I not? I guess that’s the way I have to think about it.”
This courageous success story would not have been possible without the sustained efforts of Pittsfield residents who worked tirelessly for months to address the issue.
The community was supported with expertise from Dr. David Carpenter, Dr. Kent Chamberlain, Dr. Sharon Goldberg, Dr. Cindy Russell, Dr. Martha Herbert, Dr. Magda Havas, Cecelia Doucette, Sheena Symington, Robert Berg and numerous other medical practitioners, scientists, and electromagnetic radiation experts. EHT was thankful to have played a role in this potentially precedent-setting moment by presenting some of the peer-reviewed, independent science on wireless radiation health risks and policy issues to the Pittsfield City Council. We express our sincere gratitude to the Board of Health and to the City Council for advocating for the health, safety, and welfare of its residents.
Almost immediately thereafter the cell tower became operational in August of 2020, residents in the adjacent neighborhood began experiencing serious medical conditions, including nausea, vomiting, tinnitus (ringing of the ears), dizziness, insomnia, and more. Residents reported the symptoms to the City authorities and to the Board of Health for over two years requesting relief. Residents presented medical experts, scientists, testimonials of their own illnesses to no avail. Several residents sold their homes and left the community because they found the area virtually uninhabitable. Other residents have been living in their cars or are staying with relatives.
Resident Courtney Gilardi testified to New Hampshire lawmakers on a proposed bill to set a 1640 foot setback from cell towers to homes. In her testimony she shared the story of Pittsfield and the 17 neighbors.
Over the past few months, the Board of Health held two meetings with Verizon Wireless to discuss the possibility of having Verizon relocate the tower away from the neighborhood to an alternative, less intrusive site. In the last meeting, Verizon stated that it would not move the tower and it would not power it down. At the Board of Health meeting last night, the Board reviewed the issue and determined that it has the duty to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the residents of the City of Pittsfield. According to the Board, the tower has caused at least one medically-documented case of electromagnetic sensitivity, with two additional likely cases in the same household.
Throughout the year, Verizon has contended that the tower radiation emissions were “compliant with FCC cell tower radiation limits.” However community advocates and experts repeatedly presented evidence that compliance with FCC limits did not mean safety was assured. In August 2020, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in the historic case EHT et al. v. the FCC that the FCC had violated the Administrative Procedures Act when the agency decided not to update its 1996 wireless radiation limits. Specifically the Court found the FCC had ignored submitted evidence of people injured by wireless radiation, health effects from long term exposure and children’s unique vulnerability.
Spectrum News “Family Injured by Cell Tower” May 2021 d residents say Pittsfield cell tower causing health concernsNeighborhood residents say Pittsfield cell tower causing health concernsNeighborhood residents say Pittsfield cell tower causing health concerns
Kent Chamberlin, a retired electrical engineering Chair and professor at University of New Hampshire, presented to the nearby town of Lenox . Watch presentation which can be viewed on demand at CTSB Search “Town of Lenox Board of Health Remote Meeting, August 19, 2021, with presentation by Kent Chamberlin, Ph.D., on Cell Tower Research.”
Pittsfield Massachusetts Cell Tower Community Links
The volume of pesticide use and exposure is occurring on a scale that is without precedent and world-historical in nature. Agrichemicals are now pervasive as they cycle through bodies and environments. The herbicide glyphosate has been a major factor in driving this increase in use.
The authors state that when the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) declared glyphosate to be a “probable carcinogen” in 2015, the fragile consensus about its safety was upended.
They note that in 2020 the US Environmental Protection Agency affirmed that glyphosate-based herbicides (GBHs) pose no risk to human health, apparently disregarding new evidence about the link between glyphosate and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma as well as its non-cancer impacts on the liver, kidney and gastrointestinal system.
The multi-authored paper notes:
In just under 20 years, much of the Earth has been coated with glyphosate, in many places layering on already chemical-laden human bodies, other organisms and environments.”
However, the authors add that glyphosate is not the only pesticide to achieve broad-scale pervasiveness:
The insecticide imidacloprid, for example, coats the majority of US maize seed, making it the most widely used insecticide in US history. Between just 2003 and 2009, sales of imidacloprid products rose 245% (Simon-Delso et al. 2015). The scale of such use, and its overlapping effects on bodies and environments, have yet to be fully reckoned with, especially outside of countries with relatively strong regulatory and monitoring capacities.”
According to Phillips McDougall’s Annual Agriservice Reports, herbicides made up 43% of the global pesticide market in 2019 by value. Much of the increase in glyphosate use is due to the introduction of glyphosate-tolerant soybean, maize, and cotton seeds in the US, Brazil and Argentina.
The global pesticide industry is valued at over $50 billion (Phillips McDougal 2018).
Eating Poison
In December 2021, a piece appeared in the prominent Danish newspaper Weekendavisen. Written by Niels Bjerre, agricultural affairs manager at Bayer CropScience in Copenhagen, ‘Thank goodness for pesticides’ set out to convince readers that sustainable modern agriculture cannot be done without using pesticides.
Mason lists many pertinent studies. For instance, a French team has found heavy metals in chemical formulants of GBHs in people’s diets. As with other pesticides, 10–20% of GBHs consist of chemical formulants. Families of petroleum-based oxidized molecules and other contaminants have been identified as well as the heavy metals arsenic, chromium, cobalt, lead and nickel, which are known to be toxic and endocrine disruptors.
In 1988, Ridley and Mirly (commissioned by Monsanto) found bioaccumulation of glyphosate in rat tissues. Residues were present in bone, marrow, blood and glands including the thyroid, testes and ovaries, as well as major organs, including the heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, spleen and stomach. Glyphosate was also associated with ophthalmic degenerative lens changes.
A Stout and Rueker (1990) study (also commissioned by Monsanto) provided concerning evidence with regard to cataracts following glyphosate exposure in rats. It is interesting to note that the rate of cataract surgery in England “increased very substantially” between 1989 and 2004: from 173 (1989) to 637 (2004) episodes per 100,000 population.
A 2016 study by the WHO also confirmed that the incidence of cataracts had greatly increased: ‘A global assessment of the burden of disease from environmental risks’ says that cataracts are the leading cause of blindness worldwide. Globally, cataracts are responsible for 51% of blindness. In the US, between 2000 and 2010 the number of cases of cataract rose by 20% from 20.5 million to 24.4 million. It is projected that by 2050, the number of people with cataracts will have doubled to 50 million.
The authors of ‘Assessment of Glyphosate Induced Epigenetic Transgenerational Inheritance of Pathologies and Sperm Epimutations: Generational Toxicology’ (Scientific Reports, 2019) noted that ancestral environmental exposures to a variety of factors and toxicants promoted the epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of adult-onset disease.
They proposed that glyphosate can induce the transgenerational inheritance of disease and germline (for example, sperm) epimutations. Observations suggest the generational toxicology of glyphosate needs to be considered in the disease etiology of future generations.
In a 2017 study, Carlos Javier Baier and colleagues documented behavioural impairments following repeated intranasal glyphosate-based herbicide administration in mice. Intranasal GBH caused behavioural disorders, decreased locomotor activity, induced an anxiogenic behaviour and produced memory deficit.
The paper contains references to many studies from around the world that confirm GBHs are damaging to the development of the foetal brain and that repeated exposure is toxic to the adult human brain and may result in alterations in locomotor activity, feelings of anxiety and memory impairment.
Highlights of a 2018 study on neurotransmitter changes in rat brain regions following glyphosate exposure include neurotoxicity in rats. And in a 2014 study which examined mechanisms underlying the neurotoxicity induced by glyphosate-based herbicide in the immature rat hippocampus, it was found that Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup induces various neurotoxic processes.
In the paper ‘Glyphosate damages blood-testis barrier via NOX1-triggered oxidative stress in rats: Long-term exposure as a potential risk for male reproductive health’ (Environment International, 2022) it was noted that glyphosate causes blood-testis barrier (BTB) damage and low-quality sperm and that glyphosate-induced BTB injury contributes to sperm quality decrease.
The 2020 paper ‘Glyphosate exposure exacerbates the dopaminergic neurotoxicity in the mouse brain after repeated of MPTP’ suggests that glyphosate may be an environmental risk factor for Parkinson’s.
In the 2019 Ramazzini Institute’s 13-week pilot study that looked into the effects of GBHs on development and the endocrine system, it was demonstrated that GBHs exposure, from prenatal period to adulthood, induced endocrine effects and altered reproductive developmental parameters in male and female rats.
Aside from glyphosate, Mason also notes that in 1991 Bayer CropScience introduced a new type of insecticide into the US: imidacloprid, the first member of a group now known as neonicotinoids.
Imidacloprid was licensed for use in Europe in 1994. In July of that year, beekeepers in France noticed something unexpected. Just after the sunflowers had bloomed, a substantial number of their hives would collapse, as the worker bees flew off and never returned, leaving the queen and immature workers to die. The French beekeepers soon believed they knew the reason: a brand new insecticide called Gaucho with imidacloprid as active ingredient was being applied to sunflowers for the first time.
In the 2022 paper ‘Neonicotinoid insecticides found in children treated for leukaemias and lymphomas’ (Environmental Health), the authors stated that multiple neonicotinoids were found in children’s cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), plasma and urine. As the most widely used class of insecticides worldwide, they are ubiquitously found in the environment, wildlife and foods. The data revealed multiple neonicotinoids and/or their metabolites in children’s CSF, plasma and urine.
Bottom Line
If the ‘Monsanto Papers’ told us anything, it is that a corporation’s top priority is the bottom line (at all costs, by all means necessary) and not public health. A CEO’s obligation is to maximise profit, capture markets and – ideally – regulatory and policy-making bodies as well.
Corporations must also secure viable year-on-year growth which often means expanding into hitherto untapped markets. Indeed, in the previously mentioned paper ‘Growing Agrichemical Ubiquity’, the authors note that while countries like the US are still reporting higher pesticide use, most of this growth is taking place in the Global South:
For example, pesticide use in California grew 10% from 2005 to 2015, while use by Bolivian farmers, though starting from a low base, increased 300% in the same period. Pesticide use is growing steeply in countries as diverse as China, Mali, South Africa, Nepal, Laos, Ghana, Argentina, Brazil and Bangladesh. Most countries with high levels of growth have weak regulatory enforcement, environmental monitoring and health surveillance infrastructure.”
And much of this growth is driven by increased demand for herbicides:
India saw a 250% increase since 2005 (Das Gupta et al. 2017) while herbicide use jumped by 2500% in China (Huang, Wang, and Xiao 2017) and 2000% in Ethiopia (Tamru et al. 2017). The introduction of glyphosate-tolerant soybean, maize, and cotton seeds in the US, Brazil, and Argentina is clearly driving much of the demand, but herbicide use is also expanding dramatically in countries that have not approved nor adopted such crops and where smallholder farming is still dominant.”
In response to the increasing use of GBHs in India, the influential Swadeshi Jagaran Manch recently demanded a complete ban on the use of glyphosate in the country. A petition with more than 201,000 signatories favouring a complete ban on glyphosate was submitted to the minister for agriculture.
The minister was also informed that the herbicide is blatantly being used for illegally grown genetically engineered herbicide tolerant (HT) cotton. He was told that “miscreant seed companies” are trying to illegally spread HT Bt cotton on hundreds of thousands of acres of land to promote the use of glyphosate.
In a 2017 paper, academics Glenn Stone and Andrew Flachs describe how cotton farmers in India have been encouraged to change their ploughing practices, leading to more weeds. The outcome in terms of yields (or farmer profit) is arguably no better but the change (conveniently) coincided with the appearance of an increasing supply of these illegal HT cotton seeds. Farmers are being pushed onto herbicide-intensive treadmills.
Industry figures like Niels Bjerre claim pesticide use is necessary in ‘modern agriculture’. But this is not the case: there is now sufficient evidence to suggest otherwise. It is simply not necessary to have our bodies contaminated with toxic agrochemicals, regardless of how much the industry tries to reassure us that they are present in ‘safe’ levels.
There is also the industry-promoted narrative that if you question the need for synthetic pesticides in ‘modern agriculture’, you are somehow ignorant or even ‘anti-science’. This is simply not true. What does ‘modern agriculture’ even mean? It means a system adapted to meet the demands of global agrocapital and its international markets and supply chains.
“Meeting the needs of modern agriculture – growing produce that can be shipped long distances and hold up in the store and at home for more than a few days – can result in tomatoes that taste like cardboard or strawberries that aren’t as sweet as they used to be. Those are not the needs of modern agriculture. They are the needs of global markets.”
What is really being questioned is a policy paradigm that privileges a certain model of social and economic development and a certain type of agriculture: urbanisation, giant supermarkets, global markets, long supply chains, external proprietary inputs (seeds, synthetic pesticides and fertilisers, machinery, etc), chemical-dependent monocropping, highly processed food and market (corporate) dependency at the expense of rural communities, small independent enterprises and smallholder farms, local markets, short supply chains, on-farm resources, diverse agroecological cropping, nutrient dense diets and food sovereignty.
The effects of this paradigm has had devastating ecological, environmental, social, economic and agronomic consequences on highly productive traditional agrarian systems (see Bhaskar Save’s 2006 open letter to Indian officials).
Furthermore, despite claims to the contrary, it is not as though the chemical-intensive Green Revolution actually led to increased food production per capita in the first place (see Glenn Stone’s paper ‘New Histories of the Green Revolution’).
Nevertheless, predatory agri-food conglomerates have been driving this policy paradigm. In doing so, they have actively consolidated their position throughout the entire global food system while promoting the false narrative that they and their inputs are necessary for feeding the world.
In their petition, advocates argued that it is “deeply inappropriate” for the UN agency to partner with CropLife, whose member companies (Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva Agriscience, FMC and Sumitomo) make around one-third of their sales from Highly Hazardous Pesticides (HHPs), or pesticides that pose the highest levels of risk to health and the environment.
Recent estimates show that there are 385 million cases of acute unintentional pesticide poisonings each year, up from an estimated 25 million cases in 1990. “This means that about 44% of farmers and agricultural workers around the world are poisoned each year by an industry dominated by CropLife members,” the petition said.
PAN Europe, along with other organizations, held a mobilization in front of the FAO headquarters in Rome to accompany the petition delivery and to mark the anniversary of the Bhopal tragedy, also commemorated as World No Pesticide Use Day. Advocates from around the world also participated in a Global Day of Action, including placard protests and a social media rally urging the FAO to stop the #ToxicAlliance.
“Pesticides have disastrous consequences on people’s health and biodiversity, while science shows agroecology can feed the world in a pesticide-free manner. There is no way FAO can justify its collaboration with CropLife. We will make sure the European Union reacts to this intolerable situation,” stated Martin Dermine, Policy officer at PAN Europe, who were among those gathered in Rome to urge the FAO leadership to abandon its controversial pesticide industry partnership.
“More than 187,000 people think that getting into bed with the pesticides industry is a bad move for the FAO. This partnership would turn the FAO into a marketing arm for these toxic companies whose products poison millions of farmers every year,” added Keith Tyrell, Director of PAN United Kingdom.
“The partnership between the FAO and CropLife will undermine all efforts made in Africa to ban dangerous pesticides, and will leave the door open to the export of pesticides banned in Europe such as atrazine, paraquat etc. We denounce and strongly reject this ‘Toxic Alliance’ as it is beset with conflict of interests not known to the public, to the detriment of health protection and environmental preservation,” said Maimouna Diene, coordinator of PAN Africa.
“The alliance between FAO and CropLife implies a greater influence on public policies by the companies that manufacture and sell pesticides, especially in the most vulnerable countries where the expansion of monocultures and the use of Highly Hazardous Pesticides is favored, which impacts socio-environmental health. On the contrary, FAO and governments should favor agroecological production as the basis of a comprehensive link with the environment to achieve food sovereignty,” commented Javier Souza, Regional Coordinator of PAN Latin America (RAPAL).
“FAO should not jeopardise its integrity and its achievements in agroecology by cooperating with the very industry that is responsible for the production of HHPs that are known to cause severe or irreversible harm to peoples’ health or the environment worldwide. We need a strong FAO, independent from the market interests of global corporations, and which supports the establishment of safe, healthy and sustainable food and farming systems,” said Susan Haffmans, Pesticides Officer at PAN Germany.
“We cannot expect that partnering with an association of hundreds of subsidiaries to multinational giants like Bayer and Syngenta –who have vested interests in increasing the sales of their products– will support FAO’s own goals of reducing reliance on pesticides. It is incompatible with FAO’s mandate as a UN institution to protect human rights, including the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, which the UN Human Rights Council just recently recognized,” stated Simone Adler, Organizing Co-Director of PAN North America.
The global petition delivery follows letters of appeal submitted by over 350 international civil society and Indigenous peoples’ organizations and 250 scientists and academics last year, after the signing of the partnership agreement between FAO and CropLife in October 2020. A coalition of 11 global organizations, including PAN, followed up with a formal request to meet with Director-General Qu to discuss their concerns, but has not received a response to date.
“It is alarming how big business dominates in setting the direction of policymaking, as we have seen with the corporate capture of the UN Food Systems Summit. We expect that CropLife will take full advantage of this partnership with FAO to expand and consolidate corporate control over food and agriculture. We cannot just take it sitting down,” concluded Sarojeni Rengam, Executive Director of PAN Asia Pacific.
On Friday, civil society and indigenous peoples organizations delivered more than 187,300 petition signatures from over 107 countries to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Director-General Qu Dongyu, demanding that the FAO end its partnership with CropLife International, an association representing the world’s largest agrochemical companies. The global petition was facilitated by Pesticide Action Network (PAN), Friends of the Earth, SumOfUs, and the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL).
The grounds of a hospital in Spain resembled something out of a horror film when hundreds of dead birds mysteriously rained down from the sky. The bizarre incident reportedly occurred at the Juan Cardona Hospital in the city of Ferrol last Friday. For reasons yet to be determined, approximately 200 starlings suddenly perished in mid-air and plummeted onto the pavement, parked cars, and stunned onlookers. A mystified witness to the nightmarish scene, some of which can be seen below, indicated that the birds “came out of the trees in the emergency area of the hospital,” briefly took to the sky, and then just as quickly fell to the ground.
An official with the city told a local media outlet that “The birds have been collected and we are now waiting to find out what happened,” but cautioned that “we are told it won’t be easy.” The mass death follows a similar case that took place in Spain back in February as well as a headline-making incident in Wales from 2019 wherein hundreds of starlings also died under the same mysterious circumstances. In that instance, it was ultimately determined that the creatures perished while attempting a tricky mid-air evasive maneuver, which may wind up being the explanation for the incident outside the hospital in Ferrol.
🔵SECCIÓN SALUD: Le preguntamos a Carlos Piñeiro, nuestro colaborador médico, que pudo haber provocado la muerte de estorninos esta mañana en Caranza ESCÚCHALO AQUÍ🔴https://t.co/4EX2LkEHyVpic.twitter.com/bPBUCPIYCQ
Organizations From 34 States and 29 Countries Join Amicus Brief Asking U.S. Supreme Court to Strike Down a Clause in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 That Prohibits Local Governments From Regulating Cell Towers
On November 23, 2021, 289 organizations and 34 individuals filed an amicus (friend of the court) brief in support of our petition to the United States Supreme Court.
Our petition asks the Court to strike down, as unconstitutional, a clause in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that prohibits local governments from regulating cell towers on the basis of health and the environment.
The organizations that signed the amicus brief are from:
ALASKA
ARIZONA
CALIFORNIA
COLORADO
CONNECTICUT
FLORIDA
GEORGIA
HAWAII
IDAHO
IOWA
KENTUCKY
MAINE
MASSACHUSETTS
MICHIGAN
MINNESOTA
MISSOURI
NEVADA
NEW HAMPSHIRE
NEW JERSEY
NEW MEXICO
NEW YORK
NORTH CAROLINA
OHIO
OREGON
PENNSYLVANIA
RHODE ISLAND
SOUTH CAROLINA
TEXAS
UTAH
VERMONT
VIRGINIA
WASHINGTON
WEST VIRGINIA
WISCONSIN
and from:
ARGENTINA
AUSTRALIA
AUSTRIA
BELGIUM
CANADA
CHILE
DENMARK
FRANCE
GERMANY
IRELAND
ISRAEL
JAPAN
MEXICO
MONACO
NETHERLANDS
NEW ZEALAND
NORWAY
PANAMA
PERU
PHILIPPINES
PORTUGAL
ROMANIA
SLOVAKIA
SOUTH AFRICA
SPAIN
SWEDEN
SWITZERLAND
UNITED KINGDOM
In addition, the following national organizations signed the amicus brief:
AMERICANS FOR RESPONSIBLE TECHNOLOGY
BUILDING BIOLOGY INSTITUTE
MOMS ACROSS AMERICA
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR CHILDREN AND SAFE TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR ENVIRONMENTAL MEDICINE
NATIONAL SOCIETY OF LEADERSHIP AND SUCCESS
ORGANIC CONSUMERS ASSOCIATION
And the following international organizations signed:
FAI FEDERACIÓN AMBIENTALISTA INTERNACIONAL
(International Environmental Federation)
INTERNATIONAL EMF ALLIANCE
INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR HUMAN ACCOUNTABILITY
INTERNATIONAL NETWORK FOR SAFE TECHNOLOGY, ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY & PROTECTION (INSTEPP)
STOP 5G INTERNATIONAL
TAKE BACK YOUR HEALTH INTERNATIONAL
And the following organization representing Latin America signed:
LATINOAMÉRICA POR TECNOLOGÍA SEGURA (LATAMxTS)
(Latin America for Safe Technology)
The amici are not just EMF and Stop 5G organizations. They are also doctors, therapists, performing artists, and environmental organizations of all kinds:
1-800-EARTH
Rights of Nature
Health & Habitat
Community Planet Foundation
Malibu Agricultural Society
Santa Barbara Green Sisters
Willits Environmental Center
Once A Forest
NY4Whales
Ocean Mammal Institute
Help Our Planet Earth
Vermonters for a Clean Environment
Be The Change Earth Alliance
Entre Terre et Ciel
Natur-Akademie
Freundliche Erde e.v.
Terra SOS-tenible
Urobia, Parque Ecológico
Sortir du Nucléaire
The Conscious Farmer
Artemis Bees
Cornwall Lovers Environmental Activists Network
Mind Your Wildlife Manors
and others.
You can read all of the filed documents on the Supreme Court’s website: the petition we filed on October 25, 2021; the amicus brief that was filed on November 23, 2021 in support of our petition; and the list of all the amici.
We have about one and a half months to circulate these three documents far and wide, in order to get publicity and widespread support from around the world, before our petition goes before the Supreme Court for consideration. We want the general public to start talking about our petition, so that the Supreme Court hears about it from many sources, and knows that it is important.
The Petitioners are Santa Fe Alliance for Public Health and Safety, Arthur Firstenberg, and Monika Steinhoff. The Respondents are the City of Santa Fe, the Attorney General of New Mexico, and the United States of America. The Respondents have until December 29, 2021 to answer our petition. We then have until January 12, 2022 to reply to them. The petition then goes to the Court for its consideration, to decide whether or not to hear our case.
Please forward the three documents – the petition, the amicus brief, and the list of amici — to everyone you know. Send them to newspapers and radio and TV stations where you live. Send them to environmental organizations that you are members of, and to environmental organizations that you are not members of.
Give them to your elected representatives. Distribute them in the street. Call radio talk shows. Tell everyone this petition is for the future of life on Earth. And it is. Not just because it is about cell towers. But because it represents the restoration to us all of the right to health, a clean environment, and a future. We must stop fighting one another, take back responsibility for how we live in the world, and unite in common cause.
Democrats and Republicans, Liberals and Conservatives, blacks and whites, Christians and Muslims, rich and poor, advocates for insects, birds, whales and forests, and against plastics, pesticides, global warming, and both nuclear and wireless radiation.
There are practically no insects or birds left, and the oceans are dying. This is an opportunity — an opportunity to generate widespread awareness of this health and environmental problem and to build bridges and make connections that have not been possible until now.
Petition Filed Asking U.S. Supreme Court to Restore the Right of Americans to Protect Their Health, Their Lives and Their Property From Microwave Radiation
The Santa Fe Alliance for Public Health and Safety filed a petition yesterday afternoon asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on a threat to the very existence of this country, and this world.
Twenty-five years ago, Congress passed a law that permitted the unlimited pollution of every square inch of this country with microwave radiation. The polluters — telecommunications companies — were exempted from all liability for injury, death and property damage. Cities and states were forbidden to protect their citizens. State courts were prohibited from hearing lawsuits. The millions of people who have been injured, killed, and deprived of their income and property by cell towers and antennas have had no remedy for their injuries, deaths and losses.
The law that accomplished this assault on our country is the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Section 704 of that law states:
“No State or local government or instrumentality thereof may regulate the placement, construction, and modification of personal wireless service facilities on the basis of the environmental effects of radio frequency emissions to the extent that such facilities comply with the Commission’s regulations concerning such emissions.”
The “Commission” is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which has no authority over health or environment, and does not even have the power to enforce its own regulations concerning microwave (also called radio frequency) radiation.
The result of Section 704 is that no one has been protecting our country, our citizens, and our environment from this radiation for the past 25 years — not the FCC, not the states, not the cities, and not the courts.
The advent of 5G technology has brought this situation to a crisis point. Like many other cities, Santa Fe, New Mexico passed an ordinance exempting antennas in the public rights-of-way from all land use requirements, and in 2018, franchises were awarded to five telecommunications companies to place cell towers and antennas anywhere they please in the streets and on the sidewalks of Santa Fe. The Santa Fe Alliance for Public Health and Safety immediately filed a lawsuit in federal district court. That lawsuit is now before the highest court in the land.
We are asking the Supreme Court to rule on two related questions:
Does Section 704 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 violate the right of access to courts guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution?
Does “environmental effects” mean “health effects” in Section 704?
Either an affirmative answer to the first question, or a negative answer to the second, would immediately restore to all Americans the right to protect their health, their lives and their property from microwave radiation, and would subject telecommunications companies to liability for the injuries, deaths and property damage they are causing.
We need as many organizations as possible to support this petition by joining the amicus (friend of the court) brief that is now being prepared, and which must be filed in the Supreme Court by November 24, 2021. The Supreme Court picks and chooses the cases it will decide, and the more support we have from organizations throughout the world, the more likely the Court will grant our petition and hear our case. The granting of our petition, by itself, will get publicity, and will advance public awareness of this invisible threat to our nation.
Simply talking to one another, putting on conferences, organizing protests, and filing lawsuits against the FCC, which has no authority over health, has not and cannot advance our cause to any significant degree. The proper target for attack is not the FCC, but the unconstitutional law that Congress passed 25 years ago. If your organization would like to join the amicus brief and has not already done so, please send the following information to me at <info@cellphonetaskforce.org> as soon as possible:
Organization’s name, email address, mailing address, and phone number
Your name and your role in the organization
Organization’s website and social media URLs (if any)
Roughly, how many members?
Mission statement
Is your organization for profit?
Any other information you would like to share Thank you.
Donations in any amount are always appreciated. This litigation has been costly. The Cellular Phone Task Force is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, and donations from U.S. residents are tax-deductible.
The last 29 newsletters, including this one, are available for downloading and sharing on the Newsletters page of the Cellular Phone Task Force. Some of the newsletters are also available there in German, Spanish, Italian, French, and Norwegian.
Known as the thinnest and the strongest material found on earth, graphene oxide (GO) has now become more popular not because of its benefits but because of its dangers to the human body. graphene oxide is a nanoparticle discovered by Andrew Geim and Konstantin Novoselov in 2004. As written in www.graphene.manchester.ac.uk:
“Fascination with this material stems from its remarkable physical properties and the potential applications these properties offer for the future. Although scientists knew one atom thick, two-dimensional crystal graphene existed, no-one had worked out how to extract it from graphite. That was until it was isolated in 2004 by two researchers at The University of Manchester, Professor Andre Geim and Professor Kostya Novoselov.
One Friday, the two scientists removed some flakes from a lump of bulk graphite with sticky tape. They noticed some flakes were thinner than others. By separating the graphite fragments repeatedly, they managed to create flakes that were just one atom thick. Their experiment had led to graphene being isolated for the very first time.”
Another interesting characteristic of graphene oxide is that it could change shape and also interact with light, magnetism, and electrons. It’s also a semiconductor and like metals, it can transmit electricity. It’s like a transparent material but way stronger than steel that’s why it is being used in car coating products and as explained in https://radiopatriot.net:
“Graphene oxide is also extremely lightweight and conductive, with its temperature thresholds ranging anywhere from 2200-3300°F, which hypothetically speaking, means that it outperforms all other known materials. As an electrical conductor, graphene performs as well as copper, and despite being almost completely transparent, remains so dense that not even helium, the smallest gas atom, can pass through it.”
In late June, the founder and director of Quinta Columna, Ricardo Delgado Martin, published a study conducted by the Spanish research team at the University of Almeria claiming that Pfizer’s COVID vaccines contain graphene oxide. Martin is “specialized in biostatistics, clinical microbiology, clinical genetics, and immunology”. Using electron microscopy and spectroscopy, he and his team have confirmed that graphene oxide is present in Pfizer’s COVID vaccines and that it’s likely that it has something to do with the reported adverse effects and deaths.
Meanwhile, another expert named Dr. Robert Young, a biochemist, microbiologist, and clinical nutritionist, along with his team, also conducted research to classify the specific ingredients in vaccines created by Moderna, J&J, AstraZeneca, and Pfizer and they’ve discovered that high levels of graphene oxide are present in all of these four vaccines. Their findings were published on the 20th of August, showing that “toxic nanometallic content which are magneticotoxic, cytotoxic and genotoxic to plants, insects, birds, animals and humans” are present on these jabs. One of these injections even contained life-threatening parasites called Trypanosoma cruzi.
Graphene oxide can impact the immune system and when accumulated in the lungs, it can be very deadly. It is “a toxin which triggers thrombi and blood coagulation”. It has never been used on humans before but “it’s been extensively researched for intended use on humans”. According to Dr. Ariyana Love, ND:
“There are over 2000 studies on Graphene Oxide Toxicity and 500 of them were published in 2017.”
Registered as big pharma’s intellectual property, graphene oxide was secretly approved therefore it was never disclosed as an ingredient for COVID vaccines. As acknowledged by national health authorities, graphene oxide is also contained in the face mask. Meanwhile, Dr. Ariyana Love also reported:
“Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech, etc, were in a race to research and development Graphene Oxide Nanoparticles as a cancer cure. So, Graphene oxide was injected into animals and used as the vector to deliver a novel mRNA drug technology directly into cells. At first, the animals seemed fine and the cancer cells were successfully destroyed. But two months after inoculation all the animals got sick and DIED from Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE)! Healthy cells were destroyed by the Graphene Oxide Nanoparticles.
Safety and toxicity were the pharma cartel’s main challenges in using this novel technology for biomedical applications such as gene therapy. After two animal trials that resulted in the death of all the animals, graphene oxide could not be approved for use in humans due to its toxicity to healthy cells and due to ADE, which is where the immune system destroys itself. Front line doctors are already seeing ADE in these unapproved Covid-19 human trials. Experts such as Europe’s leading virologist Professor Dolores Cahill, world-renown scientist Mike Adams of Natural News, world’s leading virologist Geert Vanden Bossche and Pfizer whistleblower, Dr. Michael Yeadon warned us that ADE would come!”
On “The Defender Show,” Dr. Zach Bush, triple-board-certified physician, and host Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., discussed immunity, herbicides, gut health and the need to end chemical food systems “extremely quickly.”
To explain why the shikimate pathway is so vital to our microbiome, Bush described the process of a ripple effect. By adding glyphosate, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and other environmental toxins to soils, air and water, the shikimate pathway, which contains the 22 amino acids that exist for all proteins, can no longer utilize most of those amino acids.
“The way glyphosate injures people is really by the microbiome,” Kennedy clarified. “And by rewarding the bacteria that caused inflammation and making a much more hostile environment in your gut and in your body.”
You are “removing the police force for the invaders,” Kennedy said, allowing inflammation to take over the body.
Bush likened the 22 amino acids in the body to the alphabet. “You’ve only got these few letters that produce hundreds of thousands of words.”
In the same way vowels are critical to the English language, the 22 essential amino acids are critical for the shikimate pathway. Without vowels most words will be misspelled. By eliminating four or more of the critical amino acids, the body is “misspelled” at the protein level.
“And when we miss the proteins, we lose detoxification capacity,” Bush said. He described the ripple effect, adding that without repair capacity, people age at an accelerated rate, which leads to the emergence of diseases such as sarcomas.
“And so in just a single generation, by deleting the alphabet of human biology, we ended up with a chronic disease epidemic on a grand scale,” he said.
Glyphosate “breaks the tight junctions of the Velcro between our body and the outside world,” Bush said. “And, when you lose the tight junctions, you turn into a leaky sieve. And what you’ve just destroyed is the very front line of a whole category of human immunity that we call the innate immune system.”
Bush shared an uplifting story about working with pre-diabetic children in a classroom in Hawaii, and how eating food grown from a regenerative school garden rebalanced their bodies so they no longer were predisposed for diabetes. His nonprofit focuses on planting regenerative gardens in food desert environments.
Kennedy told Bush he’s glad his work addresses both policy and practical solutions. “I wish you were secretary of HHS [Health and Human Services] and you were redirecting this thing to actually saving humanity,” Kennedy said.
“We can do it faster than HHS can,” said Bush. We need to end chemical food systems and we have to do it “extremely quickly,” he added.
“Now it’s time for mobilization and a coherent plan for the public,” said Bush, who has great faith in the power of our innate immune system. “It’s so easy to get stressed out over the powers that be when you hear things about the ‘deep state’ or a ‘cabal,’ but we’re in the driver’s seat — literally, we can go into their fear and guilt paradigm and play into the whole thing, or we can just create an alternative pathway.”
Watch the interview here:
“The Defender Show” is hosted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., founder, chairman and chief legal counsel of Children’s Health Defense, and author of multiple books, including the New York Times bestseller, “Crimes Against Nature.” Kennedy was named one of Time magazine’s “Heroes for the Planet” for his success helping Riverkeeper lead the fight to restore the Hudson River. He is founder of Waterkeeper Alliance, and of counsel to Morgan and Morgan, a nationwide law firm.
On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security and the Metro Transit Authority began a drill in which government agents will release a gas at over 100 locations to simulate a biological attack on the city. Authorities say the gas is “non-toxic” but will be released in closed spaces underground in the city’s subways system as well as outdoors.
The event, which is being referred to as an “airflow and dispersion study,” runs from October 18 through the 29th. It will simulate the aerosol release of a biological agent in a densely populated urban environment.
The project includes the release of “low concentrations of safe particle and gas tracer materials” as part of two programs, the Urban Threat Dispersion (UTD) program and the Chemical and Bio-defense Testbed (CBT) program, according to the DHS.
“The study will track movement of non-toxic material and the results from these tests will be used to learn more about the relationship between airflow in street level and underground environments,” the MTA said.
While a full list of locations was not made available to residents, a DHS document lists Times Square, Grand Central, Penn Station, Union Square, and the World Trade Center transit hub as sites for tests, with testing both indoors and outdoors.
The DHS claims the particle gas tracers are non-toxic and pose no health risks. The non-toxic substances include salt, glycerol, maltodextrin (sweetener), a fluorescent brightener, non-coding DNA oligos, amorphous silica among others. Sounds real healthy.
Naturally, the idea of government agents spraying the public with “safe gas” has many folks worried. Since these plans have been available for over a week, many folks are worried that they may be used as cover for an actual biological weapons attack. After all, many of the world’s recent attacks have taken place simultaneously with drills or exercises of a similar nature.
Many New Yorkers have taken to social media to voice their concerns with such an ill planned move during the middle of a pandemic.
“If you want to test Non-Toxic gas then you can do it in WASHINGTON DC not in NYC during a PANDEMIC in a subway that has 6 million commuters per day,” tweeted one New York resident.
Feds to Deploy Non-Toxic Gas in NYC Subways in Test of Biological Attack Readiness https://t.co/YM0sY1neuo
“One day this won’t be a drill… Homeland security releasing “non-toxic gas” in the subway systems for what reason? This doesn’t sit right with me, It’s time to really move out of NYC. We are basically lab rats and homeland security is running tests on us. Move out of NYC asap!” tweeted another.
This is not the first time the federal government has conducted such experiments and while it is a good idea to be prepared for possible future attacks, the United States has a less than stellar past when it comes to these types of tests.
In fact, as TFTP has reported, some of them have turned deadly.
In 1950, the U.S. government carried out this attack by spraying the city of San Francisco with the microbe Serratia marcescens in an attack that targeted thousands of innocent civilians. Discover Magazine reported that the experiment was conducted as a “vulnerability test to identify susceptible regions in the event of a biological terrorist attack.”
The attack was called “Operation Sea-Spray” and San Francisco was chosen as the target because it is close to the ocean and because it has a unique geography, tall buildings, and dense population.
For six days in September 1950, the United States Navy used giant hoses to spray clouds of Serratia along the San Francisco coastline, which resulted in the city’s 800,000 residents receiving heavy doses of the chemical. It is also estimated that residents in the neighboring communities of Albany, Berkeley, Daly City, Colma, Oakland, San Leandro, and Sausalito, were exposed to it.
While the military insisted that Serratia marcescens is “rarely a cause of illness,” Discover noted that there were a number of serious illnesses and even one tragic death reported as a result of the government’s chemical attack:
“A week after the spraying, 11 patients were admitted to the now defunct Stanford University Hospital in San Francisco with severe urinary tract infections, resistant to the limited antibiotics available in that era. One gentleman, recovering from prostate surgery, developed complications of heart infection as Serratia colonized his heart valves. His would be the only death during the aftermath of the experiment … Stanford published a report on the outbreak, noting that ‘the isolation of a red pigment-producing [bacterium] from the urine of human beings was of interest, at first, as a curious clinical observation. Later, the repeated occurrence of urinary-tract infection by this organism, with bacteremia in two patients and death in one, indicated the potential clinical importance of this group of bacteria.’”
While this experiment was one of the largest, it was not the only time the U.S. government intentionally poisoned its own citizens. Three congressmen began speaking out in October 2017 and calling for the government to be held accountable for conducting secret experiments across the country that involved testing radioactive material on vulnerable and poor populations in the 1950s.
The revelations were recently brought to light by author and professor Lisa Martino-Taylor in her book, “Behind the Fog: How the US Cold War Radiological Weapons Program Exposed Innocent Americans.”
She said she discovered that a small group of researchers “worked to develop radiological weapons and later ‘combination weapons’ using radioactive materials along with chemical or biological weapons.”
“They targeted the most vulnerable in society in most cases,” Martino-Taylor said. “They targeted children. They targeted pregnant women in Nashville. People who were ill in hospitals. They targeted wards of the state. And they targeted minority populations.”
A number of victims were poor, pregnant women in Nashville, Chicago, and San Francisco, who were unknowingly given a mixture that included radioactive iron on their first prenatal visit, to thousands of students who were subjected to “radiation fields” that were created at various high schools and universities in California.
When fields in St. Louis were sprayed with chemicals that included radioactive materials in the 1950s, Mary Helen Brindell, who is now 73, told the AP that she was aware of a squadron of green planes flying low overhead while she was playing a baseball game with friends, and covering them all in “a fine powdery substance that stuck to skin.”
Since then, Brindell said she has suffered from “breast, thyroid, skin and uterine cancers,” and her sister died of a rare form of esophageal cancer. “I just want an explanation from the government. Why would you do that to people?” she said.
The fact is that while some will call it just another “crazy conspiracy theory,” there is legitimate evidence to show that the federal government has been caught intentionally poisoning its citizens on numerous occasions, and the officials who are responsible have never been held accountable for the attacks that caused a lifetime of health problems for thousands of Americans.
On September 29, 2021, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published a notice in theFederal Register saying that it is proposing to list the American bumble bee as a threatened or endangered species, and that it is requesting comments and information about threats to the existence of this species. The agency is taking this action in response to a petition submitted by the Center for Biological Diversity.
Until 2002, the American bumble bee was the most common species of bumble bee in the United States, occurring in every state except Alaska, Hawaii and Washington. But in the past 20 years its numbers have plummeted nationwide by almost 90%. It has disappeared entirely from Connecticut, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming, and has almost vanished from New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
The Fish and Wildlife Service lists four threats to the existence of the American bumble bee: habitat destruction, loss of genetic diversity, climate change, and competition from nonnative honey bees. But the agency has failed to explain why any of these threats should have caused a once-abundant species to suddenly begin to vanish, throughout the United States, in the year 2002. Radiation from cell towers can explain this. 2002 is the year that what we now call 3G technology was introduced in the United States, which turned every cell phone into a computer and connected every cell tower to the Internet. The number of cell towers and cell phone users began to increase tremendously.
Yesterday I submitted my comments to the Fish and Wildlife Service [see Arthur’s letter below] summarizing the threat to bees posed by radio frequency (RF) radiation from wireless technology. This is an opportunity for us to take collective action to bring this threat to bees, and to all life, out into the open. I have received hundreds of emails from people all over the world in recent years about bees suddenly vanishing from their yard and their neighborhood as soon as a cell tower was built nearby. I encourage everyone who has observed this happening to send comments to the Fish and Wildlife Service telling exactly what you saw happen to the bees after a cell tower was erected — the honey bees, the wild bees, and the bumble bees. Whatever you observed.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
MS: PRB/3W
5275 Leesburg Pike
Falls Church, VA 22041-3803
Attention: Louise Clemency, Chicago Ecological Services Field Office
Re: American Bumble Bee Docket No. FWS–R3–ES–2021–0063
THREAT TO THE AMERICAN BUMBLE BEE FROM RF RADIATION
In response to a petition from the Center for Biological Diversity, the Fish and Wildlife Service published a Notification of Status Review on September 29, 2021 in the Federal Register. The Service proposes to list the American bumble bee as a threatened or endangered species and requests comments and new information concerning threats to the existence of that species. In its Notification, FWS lists four threats that to the American bumble bee that it has identified: habitat destruction, loss of genetic diversity, climate change, and competition from nonnative honeybees.
I submit the following information regarding a fifth threat to this species: radio frequency (RF) radiation. RF radiation is a threat to both honeybees and bumble bees and is a greater and more urgent threat to the American bumble bee than any of four threats the Service has listed. This pollutant has been responsible for reducing both domestic and wild bee populations for more than a century. This threat to bees has intensified since the beginning of the wireless revolution in 1996, with the construction of hundreds of thousands of cell towers and antennas in all areas of the United States including farmland, forest land, parkland, and nature preserves. It has become an emergency in the past two years with the national rollout of 5G technology, which is multiplying the density of antennas tenfold and more, as well as increasing the frequency, bandwidth, and effective radiated power from each antenna. Cell towers are already exposing the entire world to levels of RF radiation that are up to ten million times stronger than the natural radiation that comes from the sun and stars.
Mechanisms of Action
RF radiation is a form of electromagnetic energy that is used for communication. It is emitted by radio and TV towers, radar stations, cell towers, cell phones, and all of the other wireless devices that are proliferating in today’s world. It interferes with navigation, communication and metabolism in bees. It is the effect on metabolism that is killing bees the quickest and driving them to extinction.
Metabolism
Electronic devices and systems manufactured today must be hardened against electromagnetic interference (EMI) from RF radiation coming from so many sources today. A living organism is also electronic in nature and is also subject to EMI. However, life evolved in the virtual absence of RF radiation and is not hardened against it. This radiation affects biology in many ways, but most critical for bees is the interference with electron transport in the mitochondria of cells. The electron transport chain is which is where the last, energy-producing step in metabolism takes place. It is where electrons generated by the metabolism of the sugars, fats and proteins we eat are transferred to the oxygen we breathe, resulting in the generation of ATP. Interference with metabolism affects bees more than other creatures because bees have such a high metabolic rate. It deprives them of energy by starving them of oxygen.
That this actually happens was proved in 2011. N. Kumar, S. Sangwan and P. Badotra, “Exposure to Cell Phone Radiations Produces Biochemical Changes in Worker Honey Bees.” ToxicologyInternational 181(a):70-72 (2011). These researchers exposed bees to an ordinary cell phone and sampled their hemolymph. After 10 minutes of exposure to a cell phone, the concentration of total carbohydrates in their hemolymph increased from 1.29 to 1.5 mg/ml. After 20 minutes it increased to 1.73 mg/ml. The glucose content rose from 0.218 to 0.231 to 0.277 mg/ml. Total lipids rose from 2.06 to 3.03 to 4.50 mg/ml. Cholesterol rose from 0.230 to 1.381 to 2.565 mg/ml. Total protein rose from 0.475 to 0.525 to 0.825 mg/ml. In other words, after just ten minutes of exposure to a cell phone, metabolism of sugars, fats and proteins was severely inhibited.
If bees cannot metabolize their food they cannot fly and they will crawl on the ground and die.
Science
The quickest way to destroy a bee hive, scientists have found, is to place a wireless telephone inside it.
In 2009, VP Sharma and N Kumar placed two cell phones each—one in talk mode and one in listening mode in order to maintain the connection—in two of four hives. They turned them on at 11:00 in the morning for 15 minutes, and again at 3:00 in the afternoon for 15 minutes. They did this twice a week between February and April. As soon as the phones were turned on the bees would become quiet and still. During the course of three months fewer and fewer bees flew in and out of those two hives. The number of eggs laid by the queen declined from 546 to 145 per day. The area under brood declined from 2,866 to 760 square centimeters. Honey stores declined from 3,200 to 400 square centimeters. “At the end of the experiment there was neither honey, nor pollen nor brood nor bees in the colony resulting in complete loss of the colony,” wrote the authors.
The following year Kumar performed the experiment described above in which she demonstrated that electromagnetic fields from a cell phone interfere with cellular metabolism in bees and cause them to become oxygen starved.
Daniel Favre, at the Apiary School of the City of Lausanne, Switzerland, observed that bees exposed to a cell phone would become quiet and still at first, but within 30 minutes they would starts to produce loud, high frequency sounds like worker piping, which is usually produced by bees when they are preparing to swarm.
Sainudeen Pattazhy, a professor at Sree Narayana College, placed one cell phone inside each of six bee hives and turned the phone on for just ten minutes, once a day for ten days. While the phone was on, the bees became still. The egg-laying rate of the queen declined from 355 to 100 per day. After ten days no bees were left in any of the hives.
German biologist Ulrich Warnke has published a booklet titled Bees, Birds and Mankind: Destroying Nature by ‘Electrosmog’, in which he reviews the science on the effects of electromagnetic pollution on orientation, navigation and communication in birds and in bees. “Animals that depend on the natural electrical, magnetic and electromagnetic fields for their orientation and navigation through earth’s atmosphere are confused by the much stronger and constantly changing artificial fields created by technology and fail to navigate back to their home environments.”
Russian researchers EK Eskov and AM Sapozhnikov found in 1975 that bees generate electromagnetic signals with a modulation frequency between 180 and 250 Hz as they perform their waggle dance, and that hungry bees react to the frequencies by holding their antennae erect.
History
Bees began disappearing at the dawn of the radio age. On the small island lying off England’s southern coast where Guglielmo Marconi sent the world’s first long-distance radio transmission in 1901, the honey bees began to vanish. By 1906, the island, then host to the greatest density of radio transmissions in the world, was almost empty of bees. Thousands, unable to fly, were found crawling and dying on the ground outside their hives. Healthy bees imported from the mainland began dying within a week of arrival. In the following decades, Isle of Wight disease spread along with radio broadcasting to the rest of Great Britain, and to Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, Brazil, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States. In the 1960s and 1970s its name changed to “disappearing disease.” It became urgent in 1996, when cell towers began to be erected throughout the United States, and became a worldwide emergency by 2006, when it was renamed “colony collapse disorder.” Today not only domestic bees, but also all wild bees are in danger of extinction.
In the winter of 1995-1996, beekeepers lost 45 percent of their hives in Kentucky, 60 percent in Michigan, and 80 percent in Maine. By 1997, 90 percent of all feral honey bee colonies had disappeared nationwide.
Europe’s first UMTS network—what is now known as “3G” technology, which greatly expanded the network of cell towers and connected them all to the Internet, enabling the operation of smartphones—went into service in the fall of 2002, just before the disastrous winter during which so many of Europe’s honey bees vanished.
Ferdinand Ruzicka, a medical physicist and beekeeper in Austria, wrote an article in Bienenwelt (“Bee World”) about this problem in 2003 and published a survey form in Bienenvater (“Beekeeper”) requesting to be contacted by beekeepers with antennas near their hives. Ruzicka’s colonies had collapsed after telecommunications antennas appeared in a field near his hives. The majority of Bienenvater readers who filled out his form similarly observed that their bees had become suddenly aggressive when antennas appeared, had begun to swarm, and that their healthy colonies had vanished for no other reason.
In 2003, Swedish beekeeper Börje Svensson published an article titled “Silent Spring in northern Europe?”
During the winter of 2006-2007, when disappearing disease was renamed “colony collapse disorder,” a team of researchers examined thirteen large apiaries owned by eleven different commercial beekeepers in Florida and California, and could not find any specific nutritional, toxic, or infectious factor that differentiated bees or colonies with and without colony collapse disorder. Tracheal mites were more than three times as prevalent in the healthy colonies as in the decimated colonies. The supposedly devastating Varroa mite was not more prevalent in collapsed or collapsing colonies. The only specific observation they were able to make was that colony collapse disorder was location-specific, and that colonies with this disorder tended to cluster together. The colonies in those locations not only died, but tended to be left alone even by the parasites that normally infest dead honey bee colonies.
Simultaneous to the disappearance of honey bees, bumble bees also disappeared. The Franklin bumble bee, formerly prevalent in southwestern Oregon, has not been seen since about 2005. Until the mid-1990s, the western bumble bee was abundant in forests, fields, and urban backyards throughout western North America, from New Mexico to Saskatchewan to Alaska. It has vanished except for small pockets in the Colorado Rockies. The rusty-patched bumble bee has not been seen in New York State since 2004. Once common in 26 states and two Canadian provinces, this bee has disappeared from the eastern United States and Canada and has drastically declined in the American midwest.
And, the FWS’s 90-day finding reports that the American bumble bee, formerly the most common species of bumble bee in the United States, has disappeared entirely from 12 states and is in severe decline in the 35 states in which it is still found. The petition from the Center for Biological Diversity reports that this species exists at only 11% of its former abundance, and that its rapid decline began only 20 years ago, in 2002.
Conclusion
The Service has failed to provide any reason why any of the four threats to this species that have been identified so far—habitat destruction, loss of genetic diversity, climate change, and competition from nonnative honey bees—should have suddenly cause the American bumble bee’s population to plummet after 2002. RF radiation can provide that reason. 3G cell towers and smartphones were introduced in that year in the United States as well as in Europe. On January 28, 2002, Verizon launched 3G service in Utah; in a corridor from Norfolk, Virginia to Portland, Maine; and in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area. Sprint launched a nationwide 3G network on August 8, 2002.
The American bumble bee should be listed as an endangered species. This listing should occur as quickly as possible. And the FWS should investigate the urgent threat to this species from RF radiation, in addition to the threats that it has listed in its Notification of Status Review.
References
Anderson, John. 1930. “‘Isle of Wight Disease’ in Bees. I.” Bee World 11(4): 37-42.
Dyer, F.C. and J.L. Gould. 1981. “Honeybee orientation: a backup system for cloudy days.” Science 214: 1041-1042.
Eskov, E. K. and A. M. Sapozhnikov. 1976. “Mechanisms of Generation and Perception of Electric Fields by Honeybees. Biophysik 21(6): 1097-1102.
Imms, Augustus D. 1907. “Report on a Disease of Bees in the Isle of Wight.” Journal of the Board of Agriculture 14(3): 129-40.
Kuhn, J. and H. Stever. 2002. “Auswirkungen hochfrequenter elektromagnetischer Felder auf Bienenvölker.” Deutsches Bienen Journal 4: 29-22.
Kumar, Neelima R., Sonika Sangwan, and Pooja Badotra. 2011. “Exposure to Cell Phone Radiations Produces Biochemical Changes in Worker Honey Bees.” Toxicology International 18(1): 70-72.
Lindauer, Martin and Herman Martin. 1972. “Magnetic Effect on Dancing Bees.” In: Sidney R. Galler, Klaus Schmidt-Koenig, G. J. Jacobs, and Richard E. Belleville, eds., Animal Orientation and Navigation (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), NASA SP-262, pp. 559-67.
Pattazhy, Sainudeen. 2011. Impact of Electromagnetic Radiation on the Density of Honeybees: A Case Study. Saarbrücken, Germany: Lambert Academic.
Pattazhy, Sainudeen. 2011. “Impact of Mobile Phones on the Density of Honey Bees.” Munis Entomology and Zoology 6(1): 396-99.
Pattazhy, Sainudeen. 2012. “Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR) Clashes with Honeybees.” Journal of Entomology and Nematology 4(10): 1-3.
Phillips, Ernest F. 1925. “The Status of Isle of Wight Disease in Various Countries.” Journal of Economic Entomology 18: 391-95.
Rennie, John, Philip Bruce White, and Elsie J. Harvey. 1921. “Isle of Wight Disease in Hive Bees: The Etiology of the Disease.” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. 52, part 4, no. 29, pp. 737-79.
Ruzicka, Ferdinand. 2003. “Schäden Durch Elektrosmog.” Bienenwelt 10: 34-35.
Ruzicka, Ferdinand. 2006. “Schäden an Bienenvölkern.” Diagnose: Funk 2006.
Sharma, Ved Parkash and Neelima R. Kumar. 2010. “Changes in Honeybee Behaviour and Biology under the Influence of Cellphone Radiations.” Current Science 98(10): 1376-78.
Svensson, Börje. 2003. “Silent Spring in Northern Europe?” Bees for Development Journal 71: 3-4.
Underwood, Robyn M. and Dennis vanEngelsdorp. 2007. “Colony Collapse Disorder: Have We Seen This Before?” Bee Culture 35(7): 13-18.
vanEngelsdorp, Dennis, Jay D. Evans, Claude Saegerman, Chris Mullin, Eric Haubruge, Bach Kim Nguyen, Maryann Frazier, Jim Frazier, Diana Cox-Foster, Yanping Chen, Robyn Underwood, David R. Tarpy, and Jeffery S. Pettis. 2009. “Colony Collapse Disorder: A Descriptive Study.” PLoS ONE 4(8): e6481.
Warnke, Ulrich. 1973. “Neue Ergebnisse der Elektrophysiologie der Bienen. Apidologie 4(2): 150.
Warnke, Ulrich. 1976. “Effects of Electric Charges on Honeybees.” Bee World 57(2): 50-56.
Warnke, Ulrich. 2009. Bienen, Vögel und Menschen: Die Zerstörung der Natur durch “Elektrosmog.” Published in English as Bees, Birds and Mankind: Destroying Nature by “Electrosmog.” Kempten, Germany: Kompetenzinitiative.
Westerdahl, B. B. and N. E. Gary. 1981. “Flight, Orientation, and Homing Abilities of Honeybees Following Exposure to 2.45-GHz CW Microwaves. Bioelectromagnetics 2: 71-75.
Wilson, William T. and Diana M. Menapace. 1979. “Disappearing Disease of Honey Bees: A Survey of the United States.” American Bee Journal, February, pp. 118-19; March, pp. 184-86, 217.
Respectfully submitted,
Arthur Firstenberg, President
Cellular Phone Task Force
Arthur Firstenberg is a scientist, journalist and author who is at the center of a growing worldwide movement to bring attention to the most ignored threat to life on Earth. His book, The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life is the first book to tell the history of electricity from an environmental point of view.
The Cellular Phone Task Force: https://www.cellphonetaskforce.org/ provides a global clearinghouse for information about wireless technology’s harmful effects, and a support network for the millions of people injured by this technology.
Firstenberg is the Administrator and Co-author of the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space. To date, the Appeal has more than 300,000 signatures from 214 countries and territories.
Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany September 5, 2012 – An American airman takes a sample of wastewater from the wastewater treatment facility. The U.S. Air Force command says the facility removes hazardous chemicals from wastewater before it is released into the environment. Per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are not considered to be hazardous substances by the Americans. [Source: U.S. Air Force]
Günther Schneider, a farmer from Binsfeld, Germany, has photos that show what the stream that flows through the village of Binsfeld looks like when aqueous film-forming foam is released from a fire suppression system in hangars on the Spangdahlem Air Base—like a fluffy white ribbon.
All around the meadows, shreds of foam remained like huge snowballs. The toxic substances used in fire-fighting foams on base have contaminated the sewer water, ground water, surface water, and the air, both on and off the base. The foam contains highly toxic per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, (PFAS).
Throughout the world, the U.S. military has taught soldiers to practice putting out super-hot petroleum-based fires using the deadly foams on military installations.
They dug one-meter-deep craters that were 30 to 60 meters in diameter, and they filled them with jet fuel. They ignited the fuel before extinguishing the flames with the PFAS-laden foams. The toxic “forever chemicals” were allowed to leach into the groundwater and pour into sewer systems, thereby contaminating the environment.
The groundwater monitoring program of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate in the vicinity of the Spangdahlem Air Base found PFAS at concentrations of 1,935 parts per trillion (ppt). The drainage system in Spangdahlem is still spreading the chemicals.
Some U.S. states, like New Jersey, limit two varieties of PFAS found in the poisoned German ground to 14 parts per trillion for Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and 13 parts per trillion for Perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS). There are about 8,000 types of PFAS and they are all believed to be dangerous.
The chemicals—in the tiniest amounts—are known to contribute to testicular, liver, breast and kidney cancers, as well as abnormalities in the developing fetus and a host of childhood diseases, ranging from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder to childhood asthma. Most of the PFAS in our bodies comes from the food we eat, especially fish.
Alexander S. Neu, a member of Die Linke (The Left) in the German Bundestag, along with other Die Linke members of the parliament, have questioned the responsibility for the assumption of environmental damage caused by U.S. troops in Germany.
When the town of Wittlich-Land, close to the sprawling NATO Spangdahlem base, tried to sue the U.S. military for poisoning the town’s sewer system and croplands with PFAS where the contaminated sludge was spread, it discovered it was not allowed to sue the Americans in court.
The poisonous sludge grows poisonous crops. Today, the town incinerates the substances at great environmental and financial cost. The PFAS in the sludge doesn’t burn. Incineration sprinkles tiny toxic particles of PFAS onto homes and fields downwind.
A German brown trout caught in Spanger Bach Creek, near Spangdahlem, was found to contain 82,000 parts per trillion of PFAS. Public health scientists around the world have been warning people not to consume more than 1 ppt of the poisons daily.
Last year, 9,000 kilometers away, a fire suppression system at an aircraft hangar discharged 143,830 liters of the deadly fire-fighting foam from Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Okinawa. Carcinogenic clouds of foam soared 30 meters into the sky settling on children at a nearby playground.
Okinawan children play with giant toxic “snowflakes” near the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, Okinawa. [Photo courtesy of YouTube]
Toshio Takahashia, an Okinawan environmental activist, reported immediately after the incident that frothy foam could be seen pouring from several sewer pipes coming from the Marine Corps base into a a small stream. The deadly bubbles flow to the Hira River through Ginowan City into the East China Sea, poisoning water and fish along the way.
Tomohiro Yara, a representative of the National Diet from Okinawa, reflected the attitude of the Okinawan public when he said, “The U.S. government should take full responsibility for cleaning up soil and water at any military base abroad. We must protect the environment for everyone on the planet.”
Swordtail, pearl danio, guppy, and tilapia caught near the base all contained more than 100,000 ppt of PFAS.
David Steele, Commanding Officer, Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, Okinawa, told the Okinawan people, “When it rains it will subside.” Sadly, these are “forever chemicals” and will poison people and the environment for many generations to come. The Americans accept no responsibility for their criminality because they are not required to do so.
Imperial subjects worldwide need only watch this video of a suppression system at McGhee Tyson Air National Guard Base, in Knoxville, Tennessee, to witness the criminal assault on future generations in that state. One teaspoon of this foam is enough to poison the drinking water reservoir of a large, modern city. See video here.
The U.S. military has known these chemicals are poisonous since the 1970’s. They have contaminated huge swaths of the earth while using them, and they will continue to use them until they are forced to stop. Much of the world has moved beyond the toxic fire-fighting foams and has begun using extraordinarily capable fluorine-free foams while the U.S. military sticks to its killer chemicals.
The American military is not only at war against many of the world’s people, but it is also at war against its own people. It is a war of poisons. Rather than being fought with bombs and bullets it is fought with an arsenal of toxins. The American military is on a mission (we’re still trying to figure out exactly what it is) and everything is subservient to it. Fetal abnormalities, altered DNA, a host of cancers and childhood diseases are no less a threat to humanity than the American missiles hurled from afar to burn human flesh.
Truths conveyed here are largely unmarketable and unpalatable in the United States of America. The American people must learn to seek truth in media that may not include outlets like the New York Times or CNN.
From Germany and Japan to Maryland, 75 Miles South of Washington
PFAS-laden foam travels across St. Inigoes Creek from Webster Field to my beach in Southern Maryland. [Photo by Pat Elder]
Like Günther, Alexander, Toshio, and Tomohiro, I am also a subject of the American empire. I have no rights or protections from the abuses of the American overlords beyond those of my German and Japanese brethren.
The Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland (Pax River) reported lthat groundwater at Pax River’s Webster Outlying Field contains 84,757 ppt of PFOS. The toxins were detected at Building 8076, also known as Fire Station 3. The level of toxicity is 1,200 times the 70 ppt federal non-mandatory advisory. The groundwater and the surface water from the small naval installation drain into St. Inigoes Creek, a short distance to the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay.
I live on the beach 1,800 feet across a deep saltwater creek from the area where PFAS was routinely released into the environment over many years.
Webster Field is located 12 miles southwest of Pax River in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, about 75 miles south of Washington, D.C.
PFAS Contamination at Webster Field
Webster Field occupies the peninsula between St. Inigoes Creek and the St. Mary’s River, a tributary of the Potomac River. The Webster Outlying Field annex is home to the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division, along with Coast Guard Station St. Inigoes, and a component of the Maryland Army National Guard.
Building 8076 is adjacent to the aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF) Crash Truck Maintenance Area where trucks using foams containing PFAS were regularly tested. The site is less than 200 feet from St. Inigoes Creek, directly across from my family. The practice, according to the Navy, was discontinued in the 1990’s, although the damage continues. The high PFAS levels recently reported are a testament to the staying power of the so-called “forever chemicals.”
Firehouse 3 Webster Field
Highest Readings
PFOS 84,756.77
PFOA 2,816.04
PFBS 4,804.83
In February 2020, I tested the water on my beach on St. Inigoes Creek in St. Mary’s City for PFAS. The results I published shocked the community. The water was shown to contain a total of 1,894.3 ppt of PFAS with 1,544.4 ppt of PFOS. In early March 2020, immediately before the pandemic, 275 people packed into the Lexington Park Library to hear U.S. Navy representatives dismiss their concerns and defend its use of PFAS.
Many were more concerned with the quality of the waters in the creeks and the rivers and the Chesapeake Bay than the drinking water. They had many unanswered questions for the Navy. They were worried about contaminated seafood.
The results I received were generated by the University of Michigan’s Biological Laboratory using EPA method 537.1.
The Navy has only addressed PFOS, PFOA, and PFBS. It fails to address the levels of 11 other types of harmful PFAS found in St. Inigoes Creek: PFHxA, PFHpA, PFHxS, PFNA, PFDA, PFUnA, PFDoA, PFTrDA, PFTA, N-MeFOSAA, NEtFOSAA.
Instead, Patrick Gordon, NAS Patuxent River Public Affairs Officer questioned the “veracity and accuracy” of my results.
This is pretty much a full-court press, and I don’t stand much of a chance while trying to warn the public. The Navy wants to be left alone. The Maryland Department of the Environment doesn’t give a damn, and neither do the St. Mary’s County and State of Maryland Health Departments.
The five conservative Republican County Commissioners are not leading a charge. Senators Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD 5th District) have been largely silent.
The watermen see a threat to their livelihood. My neighbors say if it were so bad, the authorities would have taken care of it by now.
It’s a lonely, frightening business telling the truth in the land of the free and the brave.
In response to the findings of high levels of the fire-fighting toxins at my beach last year, Ira May, who oversees federal site cleanups for the Maryland Department of the Environment, told the Bay Journal that contamination in the creek, “if it exists,” could have another source. The chemicals are often found in landfills, he noted, as well as in biosolids and at sites where civilian fire departments sprayed foam. “So, there are multiple potential sources,” May said. “We’re just at the beginning of looking at all of those.”
It appears the state’s top environmental official was covering for the military. The nearest firehouse is five miles away, while the closest landfill is 11 miles away. My beach is 1,800 feet from the deadly foam releases.
Fate and Transport of PFAS
It is important to understand the fate and transport of PFAS. The science is not settled. I found 1,544 ppt of PFOS while the Webster Field groundwater on the facility had 84,000 ppt of PFOS.
Our beach sits on a cove north-northeast of the base while the prevailing winds blow from the south-southwest, that is, from the base to our beach. The foams gather with the tide on many days. Sometimes the foam is a foot high and becomes airborne. If the waves are too high the foam dissipates.
Within about one to two hours of high tide, the foams dissolve into water, like dish detergent bubbles left alone in the sink. Sometimes we can see the line of foam begin to form as it hits the shelf of the creek.
For approximately 125 meters the water in front of our house is about 1-1.5 meters deep at low tide. Then, suddenly, it drops to 6-8 meters. That’s where the foams begin to build and move toward the beach. This is 20-30 years after the Navy says they stopped releasing the materials into the ground.
There are other factors to consider regarding the fate and transport of various PFAS in water. For starters, PFOS is the great PFAS swimmer and can travel for miles in groundwater and in surface water. The Germans and the Japanese know a lot about PFOS levels in their rivers near NATO and U.S. bases. They know how poisoned their fish have become.
PFOA, on the other hand, seems to be more stationary and tends to contaminate the land, agricultural produce, beef, and poultry. PFOS moves in the water, as is evidenced in the University of Michigan results of the water in St. Inigoes Creek.
After my water results were dismissed by the state, I tested the seafood from the creek for PFAS. Oysters were found to have 2,070 ppt; crabs had 6,650 ppt; and a rockfish was contaminated with 23,100 ppt of the substances. There has been no official response and no mea culpa from the military.
This stuff is poison. The Environmental Working Group says we ought to keep the consumption of these chemicals below 1 ppt daily in our drinking water. More importantly, the European Food Safety Authority says 86% of the PFAS in humans is from the food we consume, especially the seafood.
The state of Michigan tested 2,841 fish for various PFAS chemicals and found the average fish contained 93,000 ppt of PFOS alone. Meanwhile, the state limits drinking water to 16 ppt of PFOS –while people are free to consume fish containing thousands of times more of the toxins.
The 23,100 ppt found in our St. Mary’s City, Maryland, rockfish may seem low compared to the Michigan average, but Webster Field is not a major airbase and cannot service the Navy’s large fighters, like the F-35.
Larger installations typically have higher PFAS levels. A single F-35 may cost more than $100 million and the Pentagon wants to make sure they’re not destroyed in a hangar fire or a training exercise, so they make a judgment that the value of the jet fighter is greater than the value of a baby in the womb.
Although the Naval Command at the Pax River NAS says, “There is no current complete exposure pathway to people from releases of PFAS to on or off base receptors,” they are only considering drinking water sources, and even this claim may be challenged.
Many homes in the predominately African-American Hermanville community, which straddles the west and south sides of the base, are served by well water. The Navy has refused to test these wells, claiming that all of the PFAS from the base runs into the Chesapeake Bay.
The St. Mary’s County (MD) Health Department says it will not test the wells because it trusts the Navy’s findings regarding the toxic plumes of contamination.
Last month the Navy invited “Residents and other interested parties in the vicinity of NAS Patuxent River and Webster Outlying Field” to attend a virtual meeting on PFAS to be held on April 28th.
The way I see it, everyone on the planet is in the vicinity of these two naval installations 75 miles south of Washington. It would be good for people to join such meetings and post comments. They are poisoning our rivers and our oceans. We are one world, subjects of the American empire, whether we live in Germany, Japan or Maryland.
Environmentalist and campaigner Dr Rosemary Mason recently wrote an open letter to the head of the Pesticides Unit at the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), Jose Tarazona.
(Since this article was written, Jose Tarazona has stepped down from his position and the letter has been forwarded to his successors, Manuela Tiramani and Benedicte Vagenede.)
Mason wrote to Tarazona because the licence for glyphosate is up for renewal in the EU in 2022 and the Rapporteur Member States (France, Hungary, the Netherlands and Sweden), tasked with risk assessing glyphosate and appointed by the European Commission in 2019, said in June 2021 that there was no problem with glyphosate-based herbicides, the world’s most widely used weedkillers in agriculture.
Mason informs Tarazona that the European Commission has colluded with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to allow Bayer to keep glyphosate on the market. A substance that is toxic to both human health and the environment.
To set out her case, Mason enclosed a 5,900-word report informing Tarazona of the malfeasance and corruption that have resulted in environmental devastation and a severe, ongoing public health crisis. Her report brings together key research and analyses into the toxicity of glyphosate and industry dominance over regulatory processes.
What appears below is the second part of an article based on Mason’s report. Part one can be read here. This second part questions why a proven toxic substance like glyphosate is still sanctioned for use in the EU.
Industry PR and reality
Although the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) Committee for Risk Assessment agreed that glyphosate causes serious eye damage and is toxic to aquatic life with long-lasting effects, in December 2017 the then European Commissioner Jean-Claude Juncker still reauthorised glyphosate use in the EU for five more years.
The European Glyphosate Renewal Group (GRG) has lobbied hard to ensure that the licence for glyphosate will again be renewed in 2022. The GRG is a collection of companies that have prepared a dossier with scientific studies and information on the supposed safety of glyphosate. This dossier was submitted to the evaluating member states and the EFSA as part of the EU regulatory procedure to evaluate whether glyphosate and glyphosate-containing products should be kept on the market in the EU.
Current members of the GRG are Albaugh Europe SARL, Barclay Chemicals Manufacturing Ltd., Bayer Agriculture bvba, Ciech Sarzyna S.A., Industrias Afrasa S.A., Nufarm GMBH & Co.KG, Sinon Corporation and Syngenta Crop Protection AG.
Cristina Alonso is the chair of the GRG and is also the head of Regulatory Affairs Crop Protection at Bayer AG. On the GRG website, Alonso writes:
“As GRG Chairman, I am personally committed to ensuring the decisions made during the regulatory process are based on sound science and supported with transparent, honest and cooperative dialogue among all stakeholders, while also respecting different viewpoints.”
Based on what is set out in this article, it could be concluded that Alonso’s notion of “sound science” has little to do with the regulatory process that she refers to.
Bayer CropScience was also part of the European Glyphosate Task Force (GTF) which lobbied for the reauthorisation of glyphosate in the EU back in 2017. Mason argues that the GTF conveniently overlooked many critical papers from South America in its submission as part of the EU glyphosate reapproval process. She fears that what we are currently seeing is a repeat of the previous process which led to the reauthorisation of glyphosate.
It raises the question, do sound science, honesty and transparency really govern how Bayer et al act in general and, more specifically, where the glyphosate regulatory process is concerned?
“In the last 25 years, the consumption of pesticides increased by 983%, while the cultivated area increased by 50%. A production system based on the systematic application of agricultural poisons means, inevitably, that nature responds by adapting, forcing farmers to apply greater quantities of pesticides in the field to achieve the same objectives. Over the years, a system has been created by and for sellers of pesticides, who every year increase their net sales (in 2015, the increase was 9%) while our patients, too, year after year are being exposed to this pesticide pollution more and more.”
The doctors stated that the massive and growing exposure to pesticides has changed the disease profile of Argentine rural populations and that cancer is now the leading cause of death. They noted that exposure to glyphosate or agricultural poisons in general leads to increases in spontaneous abortions and birth defects as well as increased endocrine disorders such as hypothyroidism, neurological disorders or cognitive development problems and soaring of cancer rates to a tripling of incidence, prevalence and mortality.
The physicians warned about the toxic nature of modern agriculture which results from the immense influence of large multinational pesticide companies.
As explained in part one of this article, this public health crisis is not limited to South America. People elsewhere, not least in the US and UK, are experiencing the devastating health impacts because of the huge increase in glyphosate-based herbicides being sprayed on food crops in recent decades.
The agrochemical conglomerates are more concerned with increasing their sales regardless of the damage to the environment and public health. No number of sound-bites about sound science or transparency can disguise their genuine motives and the impacts of their actions.
Glyphosate is a multi-billion-dollar cash cow for these companies and protecting that revenue stream is their priority. In 2015, for example, Monsanto made nearly $4.76 billion in sales and $1.9 billion in gross profits from herbicide products, mostly Roundup.
Sound science?
A new scientific analysis confirms the dominance of industry in driving policy and its reliance on selective science and dubious studies when lobbying to keep glyphosate on the market.
‘Evaluation of the scientific quality of studies concerning genotoxic properties of glyphosate’, by Armen Nersesyan and Siegfried Knasmueller of the Institute of Cancer Research at the Medical University of Vienna, concludes that the claim of glyphosate not being genotoxic cannot be justified on the basis of manufacturers’ studies. (Genotoxic substances induce damage to the genetic material in cells through interactions with the DNA sequence and structure.)
Of the 53 industry-funded studies used for the EU’s current authorisation of glyphosate in 2017, the evaluation concluded that some 34 were identified as “not reliable”, with another 17 as “partly reliable” and only two studies as “reliable” from a methodological point of view.
In response to this new research, Angeliki Lyssimachou, environmental scientist at the Health and Environment Alliance, says:
“This new scientific analysis shows yet again that the European Union’s claim to having the most rigorous pesticide authorisation procedure in the world has to be taken with a heavy grain of salt. The authorisation procedure in place is evidently not rigorous enough to detect errors in the execution of the regulatory studies that are blindly considered the gold standard. Yet these were at the heart of the 2017 EU market approval of glyphosate, and they have now been submitted again in an effort to water down scientific evidence that glyphosate may cause cancer and is a danger to human health.”
Helmut Burtscher, biochemist at GLOBAL 2000, argues that if you subtract from the 53 genotoxicity studies those studies that are not reliable and those studies that are of minor importance for the assessment of genotoxicity in humans, then nothing remains. He asks on what basis are the EU authorities claiming that glyphosate is ‘not genotoxic’?
According to Peter Clausing, toxicologist at Pesticide Action Network Germany, in 2017, EU authorities violated their own rules to ensure an outcome that pleased the chemical industry.
A point reiterated by Nina Holland, researcher at Corporate Europe Observatory, who argues that national regulators and EU authorities alike do not seem to pay close scrutiny when looking at the quality of industry’s own studies.
Holland states that regulators exist to protect people’s health and the environment, not serve the interests of the pesticide industry.
Eoin Dubsky, Campaigner at SumOfUs, goes a step further by saying that people are sick of glyphosate and of being lied to.
Dubsky asks:
“How could EFSA give glyphosate a thumbs-up based on such shoddy scientific studies when IARC warned that it is genotoxic and probably cancer-causing too?”
The IARC is the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer.
Unsound studies aside, there is sound scientific research that should be driving the risk assessment but which seems to have been overlooked. A point not lost on Dr Mason.
She asks why key scientific studies have been side-lined, especially those from Latin America where Monsanto has grown GMO Roundup Ready crops since 1996 (glyphosate is the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weedicide).
She also asks why was a 2010 groundbreaking study showing that Roundup causes adverse impacts on embryonic development and produces birth defects side-lined? Why have scientific studies that show that glyphosate is an endocrine-disrupting chemical that causes infertility been overlooked? Why have papers that show that glyphosate causes cancer been missed? And why have the effects of exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides on the brain not been properly considered?
Some key studies documenting the adverse effects of glyphosate are listed at the end of this article.
Ban Glyphosate Now!
In April 2017 (before Bayer purchased Monsanto), Bart Elmore, assistant professor of environmental history at Ohio State University, wrote a telling piece for Dissent Magazine that pointed out some of the real costs of producing glyphosate. These included radioactive waste piles, groundwater pollution, mercury emissions and poisoned livestock.
Glyphosate is derived from elemental phosphorous extracted from phosphate rock buried below ground. Monsanto got its phosphate from mines in Southeast Idaho near Soda Springs, a small town. The company has been operating there since the 1950s.
Elmore visited the site and watched as trucks dumped molten red heaps of radioactive refuse over the edge of a mountain of waste. The dumping happened about every 15 minutes. Horses grazed in a field just a few dozen yards away and rows of barley waved in the distance.
When phosphate ore is refined into elemental phosphorous, Elmore explains, it leaves a radioactive by-product known as slag. Monsanto’s elemental phosphorous facility, situated just a few miles from its phosphate mines, produces prodigious quantities of slag that contains elevated concentrations of radioactive material.
In the 1980s, the EPA conducted a radiological survey of the community and warned that citizens might be at risk from elevated gamma ray exposure and thus cancer.
Of course, the cancerous effects of glyphosate are not restricted to the community of Soda Springs. Due to its prevalence in agriculture and its use by municipal authorities, glyphosate is in our food and in our bodies. Marius Stelzmann of the Coordination gegen BAYER-Gefahren (CBG), refers to the ongoing court cases in the US regarding glyphosate use and cancer.
Marius says:
“… despite more than a year and a half of negotiations for a settlement in the glyphosate affair, the global player (Bayer) still cannot present a solution. It still has not reached agreements for compensation with all of the 125,000 US plaintiffs who accuse the herbicide of being responsible for their cancers. As a response to these actions, the CBG has launched the campaign ‘Carcinogen. Climate killer. Environmental toxin. Ban glyphosate now!’”
In a recent press release, the European Federation of Food, Agriculture and Tourism Trade Unions (EFFAT) demanded an immediate ban on glyphosate. It also called for more investments in the promotion of alternatives to the use of glyphosate and other harmful pesticides and urges a clear governance in charge of a smooth transition with the involvement of trade unions.
The EFSA, ECHA and the European Commission should carry out their current assessment of glyphosate in a transparent and reliable way. Instead, it seems that, as in 2017, the agrochemical industry is still manipulating and driving the process.
The EFFAT says that alternatives to the use of glyphosate and other harmful chemicals already exist and must be further promoted, not least appropriate agronomic practices, mechanical and biological weed control, animal grazing and natural herbicides.
Selected key studies documenting serious adverse health impacts of glyphosate
How the widespread use of weedkillers and an over-reliance on antibiotics compromise our ability to stay healthy, naturally.
A new generation of superweeds have been identified that are resistant to pesticides to which they have never been exposed; antibiotic resistant bacteria and fungi threaten to kill millions of people worldwide in a few years’ time. Established authorities are responding to these threats with more of the same: new weedkillers! New drugs! New Antifungals! We must pivot to sustainable approaches grounded in regenerative health and regenerative agriculture; that is, rather than treating sickness and destroying weeds with chemicals, we create healthy, resilient environments in the soil and the human body.
Weeds are evolving faster than the biotech industry can come up with new products, and in just ten years’ time we may be at a point when weed killers cease to be effective. A New York Times Magazine article provides stunning details of the explosive growth of Palmer amaranth, some populations of which are resistant to at least six different herbicides. Scientists think this is a new type of resistance. These weeds have developed enzymes that are able to break down weed killers immediately, a process called metabolic resistance. This enables the weeds to resist weedkillers they have never been exposed to.
The writing is on the wall that we’re nearing the end of the “pesticide treadmill,” a term coined decades ago referring to the slow escalation in the strength and quantity of the chemicals needed to control pests. A new chemical is developed to kill weeds, weeds become resistant to that chemical, so a new, more potent chemical is developed, and so on and so on.
The consequences of industrial agriculture and the “pesticide treadmill” are enormous. Resistant weeds have been estimated to cost $43 billion in crop losses each year for corn and soybeans alone. This has a cascading effect that drives up food prices: more expensive corn means more expensive feed which means more expensive meat, and on and on.
There is a striking similarity between the “pesticide treadmill” and the crisis of antibiotic resistance—when bacteria and fungi develop the ability to defeat the drugs designed to kill them. Antibiotic-resistant illnesses currently kill an estimated 700,000 people a year globally. By 2050, these illnesses are expected to kill 10 million people.
Both pesticides and antibiotics kill the microorganisms that are critical to human health and soil health. Antibiotics profoundly impact the gut microbiome, which is implicated in many health processes including aging. Antibiotic use in infancy, for example, can alter the gut and negatively impact immunity for years. Similarly, pesticides are harmful to the organisms that are critical to maintaining healthy soils, like ground beetles, ground-nesting bees, and worms. Antibiotics and weedkillers drive us away from the healthy balance that brings resilience.
Many current practices make antibiotic resistance much worse. Microplastics, which are ubiquitous in our waterways, are hubs for bacteria and antibiotic waste to attach and comingle; certain strains of bacteria elevated antibiotic resistance by up to 30 times while living on microplastic biofilms. Antibiotics are overused in many settings. The CDC has said that about a third of antibiotic prescriptions are unnecessary. They are misused and overused on factory farms to speed the growth of animals and protect them from the unsanitary conditions in the feeding lots. The use of weedkillers also increases the prevalence of antibiotic resistant bacteria in the soil relative to other soil bacteria.
Antifungal medications are becoming less effective for many of the same reasons—except that there are only three types of antifungal medicines, so options are much more limited. We reported previously on the use of triazoles to protect plants from fungal diseases, noting that these are the same medicines humans use. Fungi in the soil are exposed to triazoles through the agricultural use of the compounds in this fungicide, making the spores resistant. Then when triazoles are used in patients with a fungal infection, the drugs don’t work.
So, what’s the answer? To control weeds, scientists have been urging farmers to engage in practices that are commonplace in regenerative agriculture: rotating crops, hand-pulling weeds, composting, avoiding artificial and synthetic fertilizers, and shifting from feeding lots to well-managed grazing practices. These practices rebuild soil health, restore plant nutrient density, and sequester carbon in the soil. Such a transition obviously requires major changes in how large-scale farming operations are conducted. These practices are labor intensive and account for much of the premium we pay for organic produce. But farmers, in the end, may be forced to “return to their roots,” so to speak, to continue farming as chemical weedkillers become obsolete.
We’ve covered the alternatives to antibiotics for many years (see here and here). There are many natural medicines that have shown their ability to fight off these infections, from essential oils, vitamin D, ozone therapy, and nanosilver. It is maddening to see conventional medicine continue to rely on drugs when there are potent natural options available to fight these deadly illnesses. We’ve also reviewed how to use natural medicines to shore up immunity to resist infections.
All of this supports a view of regenerative agriculture and regenerative health. There are similarities between the overuse of pesticides driving resistant weeds and the overuse of antibiotics driving “superbugs,” or the idea that we can vaccinate our way to health during COVID, staying ahead of the mutating virus with ever more booster shots rather than creating health by building immune resilience. Natural, regenerative health is about creating a healthy environment in the body through proper nutrition, lifestyle, and supplementation, just as regenerative agriculture is about creating a healthy environment for plants to grow and thrive. We abandon these principles at our own peril.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — 124 consumer, health and environmental groups sent letters today calling on Lowe’s(NYSE: LOW) and Home Depot(NASDQ: HD) to immediately end the sale of Roundup following Bayer’s recent decision to remove cancer-causing glyphosate from weedkiller Roundup by 2023 for the U.S. consumer market. Urging that the health of people and pollinators can’t wait, the groups contend that unless major home and garden retailers act now, consumers will continue to use and be exposed to glyphosate via Roundup for the next two years.
Friends of the Earth and allies have been campaigning for Home Depot and Lowe’s to end sales of Roundup and other glyphosate-based weedkillers based on science linking the chemical to cancer and other serious health concerns, as well as threats to pollinators and endangered species.
The groups are also pushing Lowe’s and Home Depot to not supply Bayer’s reformulated Roundup products once they are available in 2023 unless they are truly safe for people and pollinators. A recent analysis showed that half of all herbicides offered by these retail giants contain highly hazardous ingredients, highlighting the need for truly safe alternatives. In a process known as “regrettable substitution,” the replacements for high-profile chemicals of concern like glyphosate are often as toxic as the original chemicals.
Bayer’s decision is a response to years-long court battles the company inherited after acquiring Roundup manufacturer Monsanto in 2018. In a series of high-profile court cases, glyphosate exposure has been linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in farmers, groundskeepers, and homeowners using the herbicide for lawn care.
However, Bayer’s decision only applies to consumer markets – the company will continue selling glyphosate-based formulas for agricultural and professional use.
“Despite Bayer’s decision, the battle against glyphosate is far from over — massive amounts of this toxic chemical will continue to be bought and sprayed in our yards, communities and farms. Retailers and regulators must act now to protect people and the planet from this cancer-linked weedkiller,” said Paolo Mutia, food and agriculture campaigner for Friends of the Earth.
“It is great news that after years of public outcry, Bayer is finally going to stop selling cancer-linked glyphosate products in U.S. home and garden stores. But we need to get these dangerous products off of shelves now, not in two years,” said Lacey Kohlmoos, U.S. campaign manager for SumOfUs. “Lowe’s and Home Depot need to show that they care about their customers’ health by ending all sales of Roundup and other glyphosate products immediately.”
According to Akayla Bracey, science and regulatory manager for Beyond Pesticides, “People generally aren’t aware that the pesticides widely available in garden retailers like Home Depot and Lowe’s are a threat to health and the environment, and that there are safer products that are available and used in organic land management.”
“Home Depot and Lowe’s need to take action for human and environmental health and immediately end the sale of Roundup and all other pesticides and herbicides with toxic chemicals,” said Todd Larsen, executive co-director for Green America. “When people go to big box stores looking for weedkiller, they don’t realize the chemicals they are purchasing are harming them and pollinators. It’s up to retailers to sell only products that are safe to use, and as the largest Do It Yourself stores in the U.S., Home Depot and Lowe’s need to be leaders in selling only the safest products.”
“In light of Bayer’s announcement, Home Depot and Lowe’s have no reason to wait until 2023 to end the sales of Roundup and other toxic glyphosate-based herbicides,” said Rebecca Spector, west coast director for the Center for Food Safety. “It’s time for these major retailers to demonstrate bold leadership that prioritizes environmental stewardship and human health over short-term profits resulting from continued sales of these harmful products. Our pollinators cannot wait two more years, and as consumers, we deserve better, now.”
“We will not accept the continued sale of glyphosate; it wreaks havoc on both environmental and human health,” said Rose Williamson president for Herbicide Free Campus Loyola Marymount University. “It should no longer be sold on Lowe’s and Home Depot shelves starting today, rather than waiting until 2023.”
“This is a win against the toxic chemical market; we the people hold the power and, with this news, we are more motivated than ever to continue working with our campuses to eliminate synthetic herbicide use,” said Christie Jones, a student activist with Herbicide-Free Campus at Emory University.
John Czuba of Legal Talk network interviews Michael Watza, attorney from Kitch Drutchas Wagner Valitutti & Sherbrook on 5G and insurance claims. Mike Watza serves as general counsel to PROTEC, a governmental consortium of over 100 cities across Michigan focusing on municipal rights of way concerns.
Mike Watza: “The new technology to try and densify the bandwidth and get up to speeds that 5G is advertising, requires that these small cell towers be put very close to the consumer. The user of the bandwidth. The intent is to get these right down at street level including in front of our houses, or behind our houses, or on a utility pole, perhaps sitting at a point in the street where the kids are waiting for the school bus. That is the concern. Because now, these transmitters that used to be several 100 feet in the air and maybe a mile away or more are right over our heads.”
“There are a couple studies that have been done recently, one report in 2018 by the US government. NTP, National Toxicology Program, issued a study that found exposure to these bandwidths could cause…The study found that these bandwidths and frequencies, referred to as radio frequency radiation, could cause and did cause in rats over a two year study cardiomyopathy, malignant schwannoma in the heart, malignant glioma in the brain, adenomas in the pituitary gland, adrenal cytomas in the liver, malignant glioma in the prostate, and a significant increase in DNA damage in the hippocampus cells of male rats.”
“So the medical experts out there who conducted or peer reviewed this study, the conclusion is that there appears to be some possible connection between these cell related frequencies and at least pre- cancerous developments. I won’t say that it’s been confirmed, but it raises concerns. Most recently, July of this year, the environmental groups, one of them in particular, The Environmental Working Group or EWG, issued a study result that confirmed or tracked some of these same results.”
“Anybody who’s been in the insurance industry for any length of time and who like me… practiced in the area of mass torts, which I and my firm still have a hand in, knows what happened with products like asbestos and tobacco.
“If you’re familiar with asbestos or tobacco in particular and you saw how that developed back in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s I wasn’t a lawyer back then, but I certainly read a lot of the material that was out there– there were these same kinds of growing numbers of studies and warnings that developed into more specific concerns over the course of decades. All that of course then led to massive amounts of litigation.”
“To my mind, we have the risk, not only of the substantive result in a litigated matter where somebody can prove an injury related to these transmissions, but the other key concern and cost, is the cost of defense because, essentially, everyone across the country could be a plaintiff even if they aren’t specifically named in multiple class actions.”
“That means, if you’re familiar with class action litigation, that you get one person to step up as a representative of the class and you arguably have 320 million Americans included in that class. The cost of defending that can be overwhelming, and in many cases, certainly in the asbestos arena, led to the bankruptcy of not only many of the producers, but in some cases their insurers and many others in the chain of distributors and users of such products.”
“That’s bad enough for the providers and their carriers, but for the potential municipal defendants who are at the end of the approval and installation process, it potentially leaves them holding the bag, so to speak, because notwithstanding indemnity language and notwithstanding insurers standing behind the providers and the installers, when those folks go to bankruptcy court, that’s going to potentially leave local government holding the bag at the end of the line.”
“Of course, the local governments have various immunity defenses as well as the argument that under current federal and state law, they had no choice but too quickly and with minimal review, approve these facilities. And they are backed by the full faith and credit of the taxpayer; which is ironic, since the taxpayer, of course, is also the customers and users of these wireless service providers and facilities. It’s an insidious circle. Those are some of the risks in my mind, and that’s why we’re talking.”
“I think the insurance industry’s got to be very careful about where it provides coverage.”
“In conclusion, the environmentalists who have these concerns and who are pressing them, don’t have to necessarily prove all this in stone. They just have to present enough to create interest in it, and to get a jury or just one a court thinking and opining, ‘Hey, this RFR might be a problem,’ and the next thing you know, you’ve got tens of thousands, even millions of claims filed. Then you get into that ultimate problem of how in the world do we finance the defense of this?”
Parasites, like any life form, have a purpose. They are there to clean up the mess, the toxins that accumulate over time. Chemicals and metals in food, air, and water are chief among the garbage heap that draw parasites. However, there is also the 4G and 5G frequency exposures which intensify our parasites, yeast, and our smallest inhabitants.
Like all life, parasites appear when the environment favors their presence.
In the body, parasites favor an acidic pH tissue state of < 6.4 pH. By their activity of living, multiplying, and dying off, your body’s cells and tissues can drop as low as 3-4 pH, and you can lose your ability to exchange oxygen efficiently. The body becomes an open door to more pathogenic microbes, yeast, mold, and fungus. Cancer cells thrive. Cancer is simply a word for cells that grow out of control; growth for the sake of growth is similar to sprawl. When it comes to pathogens, people can have parasites without cancer but cannot have cancer without parasites. Cancer reflects parasites.
There are many reasons for the continued uptick in humans of parasites, yeast, fungus, mycoplasma, Lyme disease, and its multiple co-infections. Physical parasites reflect emotional or energetic parasites. Do people alway ask you for things? Do they unload their problems on you and leave? Are people around you agitated, irritated, detached? Do you feel bothered?
Do you make it a habit to drink alcohol or spirits, or abuse drugs? Alcohol and drugs create holes in the aura of the energy body. These holes act like portals, or open doors, to attract parasitic relationships. Auric attachments impede the body’s energy flow and ability to clear itself physically.
In the physical body, Lyme is a parasitic disease affecting over 400,000 people each year, twelve times more than the 35,000 annual cases that the CDC reports. Because Lyme is “The Great Imitator,” and shares symptoms with other disease labels, it is often misdiagnosed.
sweet cravings, constantly hungry, increase or loss of appetite
Energy, Wellbeing
tired, fatigue, exhaustion, mood swings, depression, muscle/join pain, body aches
Skin
skin rashes, eczema, hives, rosacea
Sleep
poor sleep, insomnia, nightmares, night sweats, teeth grinding in sleep, anus itching at night
Genitals
itching around genitals, infections
Overall health
unexplained weight loss or gain, nutritional deficiencies, dehydration, fever
Misdiagnosed
In 2006, a group of Spanish scientists in Salamanca, Spain, conducted a study that followed the lifecycle of the Wolbachia bacteria that lives inside the Dirofilaria immitis worm and they obtained 80 blood serum samples of human patients who were diagnosed with pulmonary dirofilariosis. Dirofilaria immitis is the scientific name for a heart worm that infects the heart and lungs of its hosts, transmitted by a mosquito bite. Type “Dirofilaria” into YouTube and you will see videos of people who have worms inside their eyes. A search of the Pubmed database turns up 36 papers describing Dirofilaria in humans. Six of the studies are canine-human studies and thirty relate to humans. Ascaris Lumbrico is another parasitic species.
There are hundreds of large parasites that can easily enter the human body, take up residence and cause a variety of life-threatening diseases. Dirofilaria is a roundworm, otherwise known as a nematode, and there are millions of species. Adult worms can lay eggs every three and a half days and the eggs are microscopic. Eggs that hatch inside the human body become larvae that are also microscopic. Either of these forms can move through bloodstream and become embedded anywhere.
Medical doctors misdiagnose fatty tumors in the lung and other areas of the body as cancer. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), if genetic testing were done, doctors would find worms.
Removing fatty tumors will not prevent these tumors from returning, unless you address the underlying cause. Cancer is not a big question mark without a solution. If investigated properly, a systemic infection of parasites and worms may be found. If you are concerned about a recent insect bite or a developing rash, you can request an analysis for Lyme from Ticlab.org.
Mycoplasma is a genus of parasitic bacteria that lacks a cell wall around its cell membranes. This characteristic makes them naturally resistant to antibiotics that target cell wall synthesis. Though rarely investigated by doctors, Mycoplasma pneumonia is most often seen in children and youth under age 40. It lives in the mucous membranes of the respiratory tract and air sacs around the heart.
The growing number of people living with parasites is not only a consequence of misdiagnosis, but also reflects the myriad ways humans modify their environment, including the addition of new frequencies. There is also evidence that some of these resistant bugs are created in labs where scientists conduct secret bioweapon experiments. But they wouldn’t do that, would they?
With recombinant DNA insertion experiments now widely reported, it is not hard to find the trail that leads to a manufactured flu-like pandemic. In 2017, when the Federal government lifted a ban on making pathogens more deadly, Frankenstein’s door swung wide open to unleash man-made parasites on a large scale. The release of this information was not in the form of a public warning. Such a disclosure is meant to be a form of ‘informed consent,’ even if no one sees it. We have informed you. Do you consent?
I personally suspect that the exposure to electromagnetic fields in the home and the microwaves from cell phone radiation are driving the virulence of many of the microbes that are naturally in us, and makes them aggressive and illness producing. Shielding patients from EMFs has been a more successful strategy to treating Lyme disease and to get people neurologically well than any of the antibiotics or any of the antimicrobial compounds. ~Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, MD, PhD
By connecting these dots for yourself, you can begin to see the full picture of how biowarfare includes multiple avenues; both in the manipulation of patented microbial genomes, and in the use of electromagnetic frequency technology. The layering of 4G and 5G microwaves is a human experiment since 60 GHz frequencies interferes with both water and oxygen molecules to create a hypoxic state in living organisms. Equally egregious are the Biotech companies given large grants from governments, authorized to develop the vaccines against the patented viruses, without any accountability or liability for their products.
How we interact with our surroundings determines whether we adapt and survive or not. Outer terrain reflects inner terrain.
Terrain Theory
As part of nature, our disease state reflects a relationship with our microbes and our tissue states. Claude Bernard, a rival of Louis Pasteur and his Germ Theory, understood that germs do not invade to cause disease, but rather the germ is a product of the condition of the terrain or tissue state, created within a cell. A virus is not an organism because it requires the components of a cell to survive. Once it leaves the cell it does.
In 1870, Bernards’s colleague, Antoine Bechamp, observed that when conditions of pH, nutritional status, and toxicity shifted, so did the microbes. Bacteria shape-shifted to diverse stages of itself without losing its essence as it worked to adapt with its surroundings. The scene playing out was not one of divide and conquer but rather of one for all and all for one.
Dr. Enderlein later described this shape-shifter as the “endobiont,” as the basis of all life, working in tandem with the body’s terrain in peaceful coexistence.
As the endobiont evolves to a higher valence state, from bacterial to fungal and parasitic, its waste products poison body fluids and produce a new stage of disease. Parasites go unnoticed until they begin to cause digestive distress, fatigue, chronic diarrhea or constipation, blood pressure issues, and many other common symptoms, including but not limited to tumors. Unfortunately, these symptoms are usually attributed to other causes.
The disease process is not linear but multidimensional and electrodynamic with the whole system moving in harmonic resonance based on the unique patterns of each individual, always in an effort to achieve homeostasis, as reflected in Nature. In his book Holographic Blood, Harvey Bigelsen MD, writes, “Disease is a living process.”
CANcer Is Also CANdida
As a continuum of symptoms, acute disease is expressed as bacterial or viral, whereas chronic disease is fungal. Ultimately, cancer is a fungal adaptation. CANcer equals CANdida, both yeast and fungus. Once the body has exhausted all internal resources and begins to lose ground, the endobiont, as a fungus, begins the recycling process to gradually consume the organism.
Recently, many people have turned to the anti-parasitic drug Ivermectin with good results. Now scientists are saying Ivermectin can work on the symptoms of COVID for less than $1 a day. Does that mean that people with COVID have parasites? Is all that is needed a return to a healthy balance of our microbes? A stronger immune system?
This is the universal story of life, adaptation, death and rebirth. If healing is to occur, intervention on all levels, is necessary. When balance returns to the terrain, the endobiont reverts back to its natural state. Bechamp called this process pleiomorphism, an understanding of how the one aspect, or one microbe, reflects The Whole.
Our microbes are in flux based on conditions of dysbiosis that we create through our emotional health. We invited them to live with us through our own ignorance. Parasites R Us. All disease begins when physical and emotional landscapes clash with our ability to balance terrain. So we should ask what makes each of us susceptible to parasites at this time, more so than any other time?
Harmony in Nature
Why is all of this information hidden from the public? Modern medicine is mostly an allopathic for-profit system. Allopathic physicians use drugs and surgery to combat disease using codes billed by insurance companies. If there is a worm causing a blockage in a blood vessel, would a doctor want to prescribe an antiparasitic drug, or perform a profitable surgery?”
Meanwhile, Nature advertises two strong herbs that kill nematodes. The most famous one is Thyme, a culinary herb. Thyme also kills hook-worms, roundworms, threadworms, skin parasites. and several types of harmful bacteria. Another herb is Neem, derived from the leaves of Neem trees that are native to India and Pakistan. When the worm population in the human body overwhelms the immune system, it is known as a hyperinfection. At this stage, it is difficult to kill the worms with herbs. Frequency machines, used by natural health practitioners, can neutralize specific pathogens by their frequencies.
Friendly technology exists. We only have to look to Nature for the answers. What happens on the outside reflects what happens on the inside. Our relationships, whether harmonious or chaotic, all mirror the relationship we cultivate within ourselves. Our interactions create rhythmic waves of emotions that ripple out. The individual reflects the whole, as illustrated in Nature.
A parasitic relationship is a snapshot of emotional health. Parasites show up in life when we choose to give up our power to narcissists. When we allow others, including government officials, to tell us who we are, and what we need, we are challenged to either reclaim our bodies, or adapt and conform to the suckers that will feed off of us at our expense. Do we choose to play victim or do we choose harmony?
The Germ Theory that underlies conventional medicine describes the body as victim to an invisible germ. Yet, rarely are medical tests done to identify which germs are the cause of symptoms. Is it because, when it comes to viruses, we each create them within our own cells?
We have allowed only those qualified by a medical license to identify the “germ” and to ‘call the shots’ as the solution. This ideology loses credibility under the weight of false information. For instance, in 2014, the Council on Foreign Relations released a report finding that the highest vaccinated populations are also those with the greatest number of outbreaks for the same infectious diseases. The US, Canada, the European Union, Australia and New Zealand, and Japan—each with the highest number of mandated vaccines—led the list of nations.
The Office of Medical and Scientific Justice, in Sweden, analyzed the report, and suggested the theory of herd immunity is flawed and offered several possibilities to explain the report: 1) vaccines are increasingly becoming ineffective and causing “immune dysfunction,” and 2) “vaccine antigen responses” may be reprogramming viruses while weakening the immune systems of the most vaccinated individuals.
Humans are 10:1 microbial cells to human cells. Just as humans perceive an attack on their biology, so too, do our microbes. As a defense mechanism against frequencies and drugs, they release biotoxins, which ultimately drives inflammation in the human body and worsens chronic infections of bacteria, fungus, yeast, and parasites.
When we choose to kill off our microbes with long-term antibiotics, we kill our smallest inhabitants, our endobionts. We kill off ourselves. Antibiotic = antilife. Our choices cause our endobionts to shift into more pathogenic forms – into Superbugs not recognized by antibiotics. The endobiont doesn’t die. It adapts to its changing environment. In the same manner, humans do the same.
In this world, nothing dies without being reborn. Everything adapts.
No-Fear Approach To Thwart Parasites
There is no need to fear parasites, germs, or death. We only need to realize our true Nature, which is always changing in relation to our surroundings. In order to bring balance back to the body, individual countries, and the collective Whole of Humanity, we only need to see ourselves as part of a symbiotic Whole.
There is no single remedy and no single method to healing. The Lyme spirochete is able to survive a 28-day course of antibiotics when treatment is begun four months after infection. So, the best approach is a multi-faceted approach: 1) support the immune system, 2) reduce inflammation, 3) detoxify, 4) prevent co-infections, 5) use adaptogenic herbs, and 6) rest and nourish the body.
By seeking natural herbs such as Japanese knotweed, medicinal mushrooms, homeopathic remedies, sometimes in combination with conventional drugs used at the outset of infection, you can stop the progression of Lyme and reset the body’s self-healing system to reverse the conditions in which parasites thrive. You simply have to understand the parasite’s needs and wants as you would your own.
We create our terrain from the inside-out. Healing is an inside-out job. Most medical treatments are outside-in procedures. Parasites show us what is happening within our bodies and our minds. They teach us to identify and work with underlying emotions. They show us what we have allowed to invade our thoughts and feed off our bodies. Our choices, each moment, determine health or disease, as shown by the endobiont, which adapts with us.
We heal all relationships when we heal ourselves first. When we exchange emotions of fear and emptiness with those of love and wholeness, we achieve harmony. When we let go of people and things that no longer serve us, in favor of those that do, we are complete and whole. Only then do we reclaim our power and come into a state of harmony and balance with our bugs.
Rob Herring, producer of the film, “The Need to Grow,” told RFK, Jr. on the “RFK Jr. The Defender Podcast,” healthy soil has a “cosmic galactic level of microbial activity happening right under our noses.”
Award-winning filmmaker Rob Herring told Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the “RFK Jr. The Defender Podcast” that industrial agriculture is killing life in the soil, depleting crops of key nutrients and poisoning our waterways.
Herring, a certified holistic health coach and co-founder of Integrative Pediatrics, produced “The Need to Grow,” a film that highlights the importance of healthy soil, as well as the challenges and opportunities of transitioning to an agriculture system that’s good for people, animals and the planet.
Herring discussed the difference between farmable topsoil and dirt.
“Dirt is void of life,” said Herring. “Soil is really complex” and has a “cosmic galactic level of microbial activity happening right under our noses.”
Herring said one tablespoon of healthy soil may contain up to 10 billion microorganisms — an intricate web of biodiversity and life that’s key to producing healthy food, healthy humans and ultimately, a healthy planet.
But when you ignore soil health and mistreat it with toxic agrichemicals and overtilling, said Herring, we lose the ability to grow nutritious food.
Herring said the overuse of pesticides and artificial fertilizers has significantly depleted the nutritional value of plants.
“We’re growing something that looks like a broccoli,” said Herring, “but it doesn’t have the minerals and the nutrient density that, even just a few generations ago, the broccoli would have.”
Agrichemicals also make soil less resilient when it comes to weeds, pests and even drought, said Herring. The good news, he said, is that solutions already exist.
By ditching toxic agrichemicals and using a variety of organic and regenerative farming practices such as composting and purposeful livestock grazing, Herring said we can rebuild soil health, grow nutritious food, protect farmers and promote clean waterways.
“This is why we geek out about soil,” Herring said. “This is why it’s so exciting, it’s really a forefront of how we’re going to possibly regenerate human and environmental health.”
Herring said:
“There’s an illusion right now that we think organic is more expensive, when in reality, that system is much, much cheaper in the long term, not only from the human health [aspect], not having to pay your doctor later for the medical bills, but also just the environment of cleanup that is outsourced.”
When airplanes routinely dump megatons of toxic garbage into our atmosphere as they have been doing for twenty years plus now, the most obvious question is: What are the biological impacts? What are the environmental implications of very small coal fly ash particles entering our bodies and fouling our biosphere? As one might guess, the implications are grave. Although the geoengineers will undoubtedly tell us that everything is fine, the best available evidence shows that the general population’s health is being negatively impacted, at least hundreds of thousands of people are dying, and our environment is being summarily wrecked as well. These are the biological impacts of the New Manhattan Project.
Particulate matter
The inhalation of aerosolized particulate matter has generally harmful human health impacts. This is not a matter of debate. Common sense and many studies show this. A slew of studies referenced at the end of this chapter shows that inhalation of fine particulate matter is associated with: Alzheimer’s disease, risk for stroke, risk for cardiovascular disease, lung inflammation and diabetes, reduced renal (kidney) function in older males, morbidity and premature mortality, decreased male fertility, low birth weight, onset of asthma, and increased hospital admissions.
Coal fly ash
As far back as October of 1979, a study was performed about the health effects of aerosolized coal fly ash. Unsurprisingly, the authors of the study found that exposure to aerosolized coal fly ash through the lungs causes harm. In other news, the geniuses at the World Health Organization found that bullets fired from guns can kill people.
We should be thankful that the good Dr. Marvin Herndon has recently produced a series of peer-reviewed, published journal articles detailing the health effects of exposure to that specific material being routinely pumped out of jet aircraft. His first paper in this area titled “Coal Fly Ash Aerosol: Risk Factor for Lung Cancer,” published in February of 2018, was co-authored by Dr. Mark Whiteside, MD, MPH, the Medical Director of the Monroe County, Florida Department of Health. Herndon and Whiteside found that coal fly ash has lots of nasty, cancer-causing stuff in it. The authors write:
“CFA [coal fly ash] contains a variety of potentially carcinogenic substances including aluminosilicates, an iron oxide-containing magnetic fraction, several toxic trace elements, nanoparticles, and alpha-particle-emitting radionuclides. Silica, arsenic, cadmium, and hexavalent chromium are found in CFA and all have been associated with increased lung cancer risk.”
Further, the authors write, “Chronic exposure to aerosolized CFA, emplaced in the atmosphere for climate intervention, may be an important, yet unrecognized, environmental risk factor for development of lung cancer.”
Doctors Herndon and Whiteside
As we can see from the passage above and as many have feared, Dr.s Herndon and Whiteside have found that at least some of these atmospheric coal fly ash particles are nano-sized. This is a concern because when nano-sized particles are inhaled, they are so small that they go directly into the blood stream and right into the brain, often causing a host of neurological disorders. Nano-sized particles are so small that one ingests them through one’s skin.
Herndon and Whiteside teamed up again for the March 2018 publication of their paper “Aerosolized Coal Fly Ash: Risk Factor for Neurodegenerative Disease.” The authors write:
“The recent finding of spherical exogenous magnetite (Fe3O4) nanoparticles in the brain tissue of persons with dementia suggests an origin in air pollution produced by coal fly ash. The primary components of coal fly ash, iron oxides and aluminosilicates, are all found in the abnormal proteins that characterize Alzheimer’s dementia. The presence of these substances in brain tissue leads to oxidative stress and chronic inflammation. Energy absorbed by magnetite from external electromagnetic fields may contribute to this neuropathology.”
Later, in May of 2018, Herndon and Whiteside were published once again. This time, their paper titled “Aerosolized Coal Fly Ash: Risk Factor for COPD and Respiratory Disease” found that:
“Aerosolized CFA [coal fly ash] is a particularly hazardous form of deliberate air pollution. Ultrafine particles and nanoparticles found in coal fly ash can be inhaled into the lungs and produce many toxic effects including decreased host defenses, tissue inflammation, altered cellular redox balance toward oxidation, and genotoxicity. Oxidative stress and chronic inflammation can predispose to chronic lung disease. Recognition and public disclosure of the adverse health effects of geoengineering projects taking place in our skies, and their concomitant cessation will be necessary to prevent an ever-widening epidemic of COPD and other respiratory illnesses.”
Rounding out this duo’s series of papers on the Human health impacts of chemtrails, Herndon and Whiteside wrote a November 2019 paper titled “Geoengineering, Coal Fly Ash and the New Heart-Iron Connection: Universal Exposure to Iron Oxide Nanoparticulates.” The authors write:
“Coal fly ash is a rich source of nano-sized metal, iron oxide, and carbonaceous particles. Previous findings revealed that coal fly ash is widely utilized in undisclosed tropospheric aerosol geoengineering. Proper iron balance is central to human health and disease, and the harmful effects of iron are normally prevented by tightly controlled processes of systemic and cellular iron homeostasis. Altered iron balance is linked to the traditional risk factors for cardiovascular disease. The iron-heart hypothesis is supported by epidemiological, clinical, and experimental studies. Biogenic magnetite (Fe3O4) serves essential life functions, but iron oxide nanoparticles from anthropogenic sources cause disease. The recent finding of countless combustion-type magnetic nanoparticles in damaged hearts of persons from highly polluted areas is definitive evidence of the connection between the iron oxide fraction of air pollution and cardiovascular disease. Spherical magnetic iron oxide particles found in coal fly ash and certain vehicle emissions match the exogenous iron pollution particles found in the human heart. Iron oxide nanoparticles cross the placenta and may act as seed material for future cardiovascular disease. The pandemic of non-communicable diseases like cardiovascular disease and also rapid global warming can be alleviated by drastically reducing nanoparticulate air pollution. It is crucial to halt tropospheric aerosol geoengineering, and to curb fine particulate emissions from industrial and traffic sources to avoid further gross contamination of the human race by iron oxide-type nanoparticles.”
Now that we have seen the Human health impacts of aerosolized coal fly ash, we will now take a look at the Human health impacts of some known constituents of coal fly ash.
Aluminum
As evidenced by voluminous rainwater sample lab reports (ch 1), chemtrails have been shown to consist significantly of aluminum oxide. Aluminum is a common component of coal fly ash. As we have learned from Dr.s Herndon and Whiteside, these particles can be nano-sized.
Aluminum nanoparticles are nasty stuff. A material safety data sheet (MSDS) produced by US Research Nanomaterials, Inc. says that they can cause: respiratory problems, skin irritation, eye irritation, tumors, Alzheimer’s, pulmonary disease, neoplasms, and gastric or intestinal disorders. This MSDS also states that people coming in contact with aluminum nanoparticles should wear a respirator and a fully protective, impervious suit.
A 2016 paper titled “Assessing the Direct Occupational and Public Health Impacts of Solar Radiation Management with Stratospheric Aerosols” says that Aluminum aerosols will target these bodily systems: respiratory, cardiovascular, hematologic (blood), musculoskeletal (muscles & bones), endocrine (glands), immunologic, and neurologic (brain). They also say exposure to small atmospheric aluminum particles can cause cancer and death.
It appears coincidental that Wright-Patterson Air Force Base has studied the biological impacts of aerosolized aluminum. In March 2001, the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson published a study titled “In Vitro Toxicity of Aluminum Nanoparticles in Rat Alveolar Macrophages.” Scientists exposed rats to airborne, nano-sized aluminum oxide particles. The authors concluded:
“Aluminum oxide nanoparticles displayed significant toxicity after 96 and 144 hours post exposure at high doses (100 and 250 µg/ml). Aluminum nanoparticles also showed slight toxicity after 24 hours at high doses (100 and 250 μg/ml). When these cells were dosed at lower non toxic levels (25 μg/ml) Al 50, 80, 120 nm caused a significant reduction in phagocytosis. Even at a dose as low as 5 μg/ml Al 50 nm still caused a significant reduction. None of these nanoparticles caused the induction of nitric oxide, TNF-alpha, or MIP-2, important components in inflammatory responses. In summary, based on viability aluminum nanoparticles appear to be slightly toxic to rat alveolar macrophages. However, there was a significant reduction in phagocytic function of macrophages.”
In other words, they found that even at low doses, forcing rats to breathe in tiny aluminum particles screwed up their lungs. The induced lack of phagocytes means that the rats’ immune systems (especially in the lungs) became unable to fight off invading harmful organisms.
“In Vitro Toxicity of Aluminum Nanoparticles in Rat Alveolar Macrophages” was but one of a series of studies produced by Wright-Patterson pertaining to aluminum nanoparticle exposure. Wright-Patterson also produced a 2010 study titled “Nanosized Aluminum Altered Immune Function” in which they found that inhaled aluminum nanoparticles impair human immune systems. The authors again noted that nanoparticles have more deleterious health effects than do larger sized particles. Curiously, “Nanosized Aluminum Altered Immune Function” also states that we are prone to inhale aluminum nanoparticles because they are used in jet fuels. This information, makes yet another case for aluminum-spiked jet fuels. All this is extremely interesting when one considers Wright-Patterson’s involvement in the New Manhattan Project such as that which was documented in chapter 5.
A 2009 paper titled “Manufactured Aluminum Oxide Nanoparticles Decrease Expression of Tight Junction Proteins in Brain Vasculature” found that, due to brain cell death, aluminum exposure can cause: Alzheimer’s, stroke, reperfusion, hypoxia, mitochondrial disease, and general vascular dysfunction.
In a 2012 paper written by one of the world’s top neurosurgeons (now retired), many neurological diseases are linked to aluminum exposure. Russell Blaylock’s “Aluminum Induced Immunoexcitotoxicity in Neurodevelopmental and Neurodegenerative Disorders” found a link between aluminum exposure and: Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Pick’s, HIV dementia, multiple sclerosis, viral encephalopathies, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS / Lou Gehrig’s disease). In this paper, Dr. Blaylock also found that aluminum exposure is linked to: impaired cognition, poor memory, impaired learning, poor attention, social withdrawal, irritability, reduced food and water intake and depression. Not only that, but Dr. Blaylock cites another paper here showing how extremely small aluminum particles like the ones used in today’s New Manhattan Project can intensify adverse health reactions.
Dr. Blaylock has provided us with some impressive evidence for a causal relationship between chemtrails and Alzheimer’s here. He tells us that the aluminum nanoparticles we constantly inhale are carried directly to the part of the brain that is first affected by Alzheimer’s disease AND most severely affected by Alzheimer’s disease. On March 28, 2013 Dr. Blaylock went on the Linderman Unleashed radio program. The host asked him how he became chemtrail aware and Dr. Blaylock said this:
Dr. Russell Blaylock, MD
“Well, you know, the connection has been the aluminum in the vaccines. I wrote several articles about the effects of the adjuvants in vaccines including the mercury and the aluminum effect.
“Then I found some articles about the chemtrails and there was a lot being said about it and I wasn’t too sure whether it was true or not because in my state we rarely saw them. But as I started looking on the Internet and I would see these states in which there were these criss-cross patterns and they were very tight patterns and geometrical shapes where it was obvious that it was a purposeful covering of the atmosphere with these patterns and the trails were so long. Well now, you know, we’re starting to see them in my state and as I look at them, they go from to horizon to horizon. Well, you know, I’ve been alive long enough to know that jets never did that in the past and I see the same patterning effect now where they’re criss-crossing; it’s an obvious pattern.
“And so I look into the literature and some of the reports and YouTube videos and they were saying that they were dropping as one of the ingredients, aluminum. Well, I had done a fair amount of writing and research on the effect of aerosolized chemicals in the nose when you breathe them. And what we knew was that these particles tend to travel along the olfactory nerves which are the smell nerves in the nose. And it travels directly to the part of the brain that has to do with memory and emotions; the hippocampus, the interlinal area, and the prefrontal cortex. And that you can trace these chemicals traveling along that nerve and depositing in this area of the brain.
“The other thing that was known is that if you aerosolize aluminum, it’s one of the metals that passes very easily along this track and directly into the brain. So it bypasses the blood-brain barrier and goes directly into the brain and accumulates. Well, if you do it in animals, it produces lesions, or damage in that area of the brain and the animal will begin to show changes of memory and learning and emotional changes.
“When we look at people who have Alzheimer’s disease, ironically, the highest concentration of aluminum in the brain is that same entry point; what’s called the interlinal cortex. And the levels continue to accumulate. So we have compelling evidence that aerosolized aluminum alone will enter the brain and produce damage to that critical area of the brain.
“The worst of all is the nano-sized. Nano-size means you make it such a small particle that it easily penetrates skin. It penetrates barriers in the body that normally metals cannot pass through. When you nano-size and produce these incredibly small particulate matter, it passes very easily. So when you nano-size aluminum and you use it in these aerosols through the nasal passages, it enters the brain in very high concentration and they find that the nano-sized aluminum in the brain is infinitely more toxic.
“Now one of the toxic reactions to aluminum is intense inflammation and activation of cells in the brain that are the immune cells called microglia. Aluminum is a very potent activator of these immune cells and that triggers the release of a powerful substance called glutamate which is an excitotoxin that causes cells to die from an excitatory mechanism. Kinda complex mechanism, but it is a combination of inflammation and excitotoxicity. And I coined the term in the medical literature called immunoexcitotoxicity to describe that process. So, we know that occurs. We know it occurs very easily.
“Now, the reports are coming out now that what they’re spraying is nano-sized aluminum and the idea is the old concept of preventing global warming. And they nano-size the aluminum so it will stay in the upper atmosphere longer; supposedly as a reflective compound metal. The problem with that, even from a climatological description is that if you make it into cirrus-like clouds rather than reflecting it upward and out of the atmosphere, it reflects the heat downward and actually causes global warming. So, you know, you could envision that they’re doing this on purpose to make the atmosphere heat up so they can say, ‘See, the atmosphere is warming up.’
“But what I’m concerned about mainly is the medical effect and that’s because of these very strong connections between aluminum passing through this pathway into the brain [which] is so strongly connected with Alzheimer’s disease and other diseases of memory.
“If you’re aerosolizing this and spraying literally tons of it over the world, people are constantly breathing that aerosolized, nano-sized aluminum which will easily penetrate filters in your air-conditioning system [and] enter your home. So you’re breathing it 24 hours a day; producing high levels of aluminum in this part of the brain. And the consequences could be absolutely devastating. It could cause a huge increase in Alzheimer’s disease and inflammatory neurological disorders.
“I watched a YouTube which was a geoengineering conference that the government had put on. And in the conference, one of the questions somebody in the audience asked was: What is the medical effect of spraying aluminum in the atmosphere? And the speaker said, ‘Well, uh, we don’t really know. But we’re in the process of researching that.’ Well, of course that was an absolute lie. We do know what it does. But the fact that they were admitting that in fact they were going to spray, they gave it in the future tense that they were going to spray aluminum, the evidence now from the examination by biologists and scientists around the world is that the aluminum level in the lakes and streams and trees is increasing enormously. Some areas have incredible elevations of aluminum in the groundwater and in the vegetation. So if this indeed is happening, we’re looking at a medical catastrophe that’s worldwide.”
There is lots of other highly credible evidence available linking aluminum exposure to the diseases mentioned here. If you want more information, please search the term ‘aluminum toxicity.’ Expediency demands that we move on.
Barium
Rainwater sample test results from around the world consistently show barium as well, and barium can also be a component of coal fly ash. Barium is highly toxic. Barium material safety data sheets (MSDS) readily available online will inform you that barium is extremely hazardous in case of inhalation. Severe exposure to barium can cause lung damage, choking, unconsciousness and death. Many other barium oxide MSDSs go on and on in a similar fashion. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that barium oxide reacts violently with water while the atmosphere has lots of water in it and our bodies consist mostly of water. My science advisor says that barium titanate and barium sulfate have been used in atmospheric dispersions as well.
The aforementioned paper “Assessing the Direct Occupational and Public Health Impacts of Solar Radiation Management with Stratospheric Aerosols” says that barium compounds used as atmospheric sprays target these Human bodily systems: respiratory, gastrointestinal, musculoskeletal, renal, metabolic, and neurologic. They also say barium compounds dispersed by aircraft as part of geoengineering programs can cause death.
Strontium
Rainwater sample test results as well as others such as ambient air sample test results collected by Dr. Herndon have also been showing a presence of strontium. Strontium can be a component of coal fly ash. It is not surprising, but, like aluminum and barium, strontium is highly toxic as well.
A strontium MSDS from Sigma-Aldrich states that it is corrosive. It causes burns when it comes in contact with the skin and can be absorbed through the skin. If one inhales it, the MSDS states that it is, “…extremely destructive to the tissue of the mucous membranes and upper respiratory tract.” The MSDS continues:
“Inhalation may result in spasm, inflammation and edema of the larynx and bronchi, chemical pneumonitis, and pulmonary edema. Material is extremely destructive to tissue of the mucous membranes and upper respiratory tract, eyes, and skin.”
The Sigma-Aldrich MSDS finishes up by noting that the chemical, physical, and toxicological properties of strontium have not been thoroughly investigated.
Strontium hydroxide is even worse. Being that there is lots of water in the atmosphere, the atmospheric strontium produced as part of the New Manhattan Project may react with it and form the extremely caustic strontium hydroxide. Not only that, but don’t forget that our bodies are comprised of mostly H2O. Strontium in the atmosphere and inside of us has lots of opportunities to become strontium hydroxide. The Sigma-Aldrich MSDS cautions potential users to never expose strontium oxide to water because it reacts violently.
Because strontium can be a component of coal fly ash, it is interesting to note that studies have been done concerning exposure to the strontium found in ‘fly ash.’ The CDC writes:
“Rats were exposed to aerosols of 85Sr [strontium] carbonate, phosphate, fluoride, oxide, or titanate (particle sizes and doses not specified) (Willard and Snyder 1966). Greater than 99% of the initial lung burden of 85Sr was cleared from the lung 5 days after inhalation of the carbonate, phosphate, fluoride, or oxide, whereas 60% of the 85Sr remained in the lung after inhalation of the more insoluble strontium titanate.
“In rats exposed to airborne fly ash (sieved to have a particle diameter of distribution of 90% less than 20 μm) for 6 hours, strontium was eliminated from the lung with a half-time of 23 days (observations were made for 30 days) (Srivastava et al. 1984b). One day after the exposure, the tissue: plasma strontium concentration ratios were 0.3–0.5 in the liver, kidney, small intestine, and heart. The report of this study does not indicate whether whole-body or nose-only exposures were utilized in the study; therefore, it is not possible to know for certain how much of the absorption may have resulted from ingestion of fly ash deposited on the animals. Furthermore, given the relatively large particle size of the fly ash, it is likely that deposition in the respiratory tract was largely in the tracheobronchial and nasopharyngeal region, from which the strontium may have been cleared mechanically to the esophagus and swallowed. Nevertheless, studies in which 89Sr-enriched fly ash was instilled into the trachea of rats indicate that strontium in this form was partly absorbed and appeared in plasma and other tissues within days of the exposure (Srivastava et al. 1984a).”
The CDC goes on to note that the fly ash strontium administered to the lab rats ended up mostly in the bones. After that, it appeared in (in order of prevalence): muscle, skin, liver, and kidneys. Those heady days of just dumping dry ice into clouds are long gone.
Mercury
Dr. J. Marvin Herndon produced a December 2017 paper co-authored by Mark Whiteside, MD in which the authors write specifically of the Human health impacts of mercury. It has been well known for a long time now that mercury is one of the most toxic substances on the planet and we now know that mercury is a common constituent of the coal fly ash currently being sprayed by the megaton. The authors write:
“Despite strengthened mercury emission regulations, mercury measured in rainwater is increasing. Since it is known that the upper troposphere contains oxidized, particle-bound mercury, it is likely that covert aerosolized coal fly ash sprayed into this region is a major source of mercury pollution. Mercury affects multiple systems in the body, potentially causing neurological, cardiovascular, genitourinary, reproductive, immunological, and even genetic disease.”
CDC rates of associated diseases
As this chapter has explained, chemtrails are associated with many diseases. As we have been assaulted by this New Manhattan Project for over twenty years now, it is no surprise that the best available data shows rates of the associated diseases going up significantly. Historical rates of every disease associated with chemtrail spray are not presented here due to a lack of CDC data. Every associated disease with available CDC data is presented.
Let’s start with the most strongly correlated disease: Alzheimer’s. According to the latest data from the CDC, from 1999 to 2014, age-adjusted rates of death from Alzheimer’s increased 54.5% with the 2014 number of total deaths at 93,541. That means that in 2014 alone we saw tens of thousands of additional American deaths from Alzheimer’s. If one adds up all the additional deaths from Alzheimer’s between 1999 and 2014, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of additional deaths. Let us recall that large-scale domestic spraying operations began in 1996.
Age adjusted rates of Alzheimer’s disease 1999-2014
In a 2013 report, the CDC found that while deaths from other diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and stroke decreased significantly, Alzheimer’s deaths increased 39%. They write, “Mortality from Alzheimer’s disease has steadily increased during the last 30 years.” Knowing what we now know, it is reasonable to assume that chemtrails have contributed greatly to this.
Not only have the rates of adult Alzheimer’s disease been increasing, but a disease that used to be relegated to the elderly is now showing up in children. Reports have been pouring in from around the world documenting research into Niemann Pick Type C disease, also known as ‘childhood Alzheimer’s.’ As previously mentioned, Dr. Blaylock has seen this phenomenon as well.
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Dr. Blaylock says that there is also a correlation between aluminum exposure and Parkinson’s. The latest data from the CDC shows that between 1999 and 2017, the age-adjusted rate of Parkinson’s disease in people aged 65 or older went from 41.7 per 100,000 to 65.3 per 100,000.
CDC rates of Parkinson’s disease 1999-2017
Despite what the tobacco companies said in the 1950s, routinely breathing in particulate matter is bad for your lungs. It is for this reason that we now take a look at the CDC data pertaining to diseases associated with the routine inhalation of particulate matter such as COPD, asthma, and lung cancer. Although the CDC found that the rate of chronic pulmonary disease (COPD) was stable between 1998 and 2009, they also found that the prevalence of asthma rose during a similar period (between 2001 and 2010). The CDC also reports that between 1995 and 2011, smoking went from 35% among students and 25% among adults to 18% and 19% respectively. Concurrently, the CDC reports significant drops in the rate of lung cancer between 2002 and 2011.
Rate of smoking from 1965-2011
With these big drops in the rate of smoking, one might assume that the rate of COPD and asthma would go down as well, instead of remaining stable. Chemtrails probably kept the rate of COPD stable while contributing to the prevalence of asthma. Lung cancer probably decreased because chemtrail exposure has not been as carcinogenic for your lungs as smoking. It’s good to know that there are more carcinogenic things for your lungs than routine chemtrail exposure. Smoking cigarettes apparently fits that category. Moderate chemtrail exposure is probably better for you than inhaling burning plutonium too, but that doesn’t mean it’s ok.
Overall life expectancy
Very recently, we here in America have seen a slight reduction in our life expectancies. According to CDC data, for the first time in many decades, between 2016 and 2017 overall life expectancy at birth fell by .1 years.
CDC life expectancy 1970-2017
One might think, with all the much-touted breakthroughs in medicine, a growing health care industry, expanded access to better nutrition such as organic foods and supplements, and the like, that we would be experiencing longer average life expectancies, not shorter. Might chemtrails have something to do with it?
Early exposures
Although it appears that our bodies have been finding ways to better cope with this daily onslaught of aerosolized toxic waste, around the times when people were first exposed, emergency rooms filled up. William Thomas’ aforementioned 2004 book Chemtrails Confirmed chronicles many of these examples. Thomas recounts the words of a registered nurse:
“Approximately December 16th or the 17th, while traveling north, I could see ‘stripes’ in the sky. It appeared as if someone took white paint on their fingers and from north to south ran their fingers through the sky. These contrails were evenly spaced and covered the whole sky! They covered it completely! When I was finished with the next visit, approximately 45 minutes, I came out of the house and found the whole sky was white. There was no definition in cloud pattern.
“Within the 24 hours I became very weak, feverish, and my asthma began to act up. I didn’t think too much about it, until my boyfriend told me that many in his family started coming down with the same complaints. I also started noticing a lot of my patients and their family members were coming down with these symptoms at the same time. In our area we have one main hospital which I was the Supervisor of for four years. I worked there a total of six years. I stay in close contact with the nurses and physicians and am planning on investigating into this more. At that time, they complained of being extremely busy with respiratory diagnoses.”
Another passage from Chemtrails Confirmed recounts the experiences of a restaurant owner from Oklahoma. The passage reads:
“On January 24, 1999 [Pat] Edgar reported that on, ‘Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday of last week, we were really hit hard with the contrails. I mean real bad. Everybody in this town is sick right now; sicker than a damn dog. It’s all in their head and their sinuses, and it hangs in the throat, (sore necks), ears ringing.’
“Edgar added: ‘Some customers that frequent our business have stated that they have been to the doctor and the offices have been full of sick people. Same thing at the Indian clinic.’
“‘People have to wait for hours because the waiting room is full. Some people have reported being on their third and fourth round of antibiotics and they are still ill. We noticed excessive contrails Thursday, Feb. 11th.’
“Edgar became ill the following day, and visited a doctor. From a friend he learned that Sparks regional hospital had over 500 people seeking medical attention at the emergency room for flu, or flu-like symptoms.”
Others appearing in Thomas’ book tell similar stories.
Bodily contamination testing
When we ingest aluminum, some of it eventually comes out in our hair and fingernails. There are many reports online of people finding high levels of chemtrail toxins in their hair and fingernails. Certain laboratories can analyze hair and fingernail samples for aluminum and other substances. If you are curious about your bodily contamination, one may get their hair tested by the Great Plains Laboratory or Analytical Research Labs. One can find their websites online.
Biospheric implications
There is evidence that chemtrails are changing soil pH. This could be very bad for our biosphere. As mentioned in the first chapter, anti-geoengineering activist Francis Mangels has a Bachelor of Science in forestry from the International School of Forestry at Missoula, spent 35 years with the U.S. Forest Service as a wildlife biologist and worked several years with the USDA Soil Conservation Service as a soil conservationist. In order to document the effect of chemtrail spray upon soil pH, Mr. Mangels wrote on Oct. 30, 2009:
“The soil scientists from the USDA Soil Conservation Department visited private property east of Shasta Lake, California, on Oct. 27, 2009. Mr. Bailey, Komar, and Owens tested the pH with standard federal meters. All agreed the pH should be 5.5.
“Under Douglas fir, the ph was 7.4, astoundingly basic for that habitat.
“Under Poderosa pine, at the precise soil-needle interface, I would expect a pH of 5. At that point, Bailey’s meter showed 6.5. This is high for a microhabitat that should be very acid. Old soil surveys indicate this soil should be very acid, around pH of 5.5.
“I bought a house in Mt. Shasta old black oak/pine pasture in 2002, tested the pH at below 6, good for vegetable gardening. It was a major reason for purchase, and proceeded with highly acid composting of leaves and grass to drive the pH down or at least keep it low, as every master gardener knows. I added a touch of sulphur and avoided wood ash to insure acidity, and proceeded to teach organic gardening courses out of my yard through COS. The pH tests were an embarrassment because now my garden is pH 7, sometimes higher. This is the opposite of what should happen.
“The pH meter of Jon McClellan proceeded to show pH in McCloud gardens also running close to 7 or 8, which is too high for heavy organic mulch with no ashes. General lawns were also running over pH 7 under oaks and pines and fir trees. This is contrary to everything I learned in college and the Soil Conservation Service for 35 years. The old data sheets say these soils should be running at a pH of 5-6.”
Francis Mangels
In the movie What In the World Are They Spraying?, Mr. Mangels says that when soil pH changes, soil arthropods (a vital link in our ecosystem) start to go away. This type of disruption could have negative effects up and down the food chain.
Reports of massive plant and animal die-offs potentially due to chemtrails are widespread. Spraying vast regions of the Earth with tens of thousands of megatons of toxic waste is probably contributing to the alarming rate of animal species extinction as well. Although many other factors are in play here, the chemtrails surely don’t help. The Center for Biological Diversity reports that:
“Scientists estimate we’re now losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day. It could be a scary future indeed, with as many as 30 to 50 percent of all species possibly heading toward extinction by mid-century.”
Once again, our Spartacus with the dragon energy, Dr. J. Marvin Herndon, PhD has been on the case. Dr. Herndon has again teamed up with the Medical Director of the Monroe County, Florida Department of Health, Dr. Mark Whiteside, MD, MPH to publish a series of peer-reviewed, published journal articles addressing the biospheric implications of the ongoing and uncontrolled geoengineering experimentation and we will go over them here.
Let’s start at the bottom of the food chain. In June of 2019 Herndon and Whiteside published a paper titled “Role of Aerosolized Coal Fly Ash in the Global Plankton Imbalance: Case of Florida’s Toxic Algae Crisis.” In this paper, the authors provide evidence for the assertion that the coal fly ash sprayed by the megaton into our biosphere is causing, among other things, an overabundance of harmful plankton blooms which, in turn, has more harmful effects. The authors write:
“Our objective is to review the effects the multifold components of aerosolized coal fly ash as they relate to the increasing occurrences of HABs [harmful algal blooms]. Aerosolized coal fly ash (CFA) pollutants from non-sequestered coal-fired power plant emissions and from undisclosed, although ‘hidden in plain sight,’ tropospheric particulate geoengineering operations are inflicting irreparable damage to the world’s surface water-bodies and causing great harm to human health (including lung cancer, respiratory and neurodegenerative diseases) and environmental health (including major die-offs of insects, birds and trees). Florida’s ever-growing toxic nightmare of red tides and blue-green algae is a microcosm of similar activity globally. Atmospheric deposition of aerosol particulates, most importantly bioavailable iron, has drastically shifted the global plankton community balance in the direction of harmful algae and cyanobacterial blooms in fresh and salt water.”
A little further up the food chain we find insects. Herndon and Whiteside have been working in this area as well. In August of 2018 their paper titled “Previously Unacknowledged Potential Factors in Catastrophic Bee and Insect Die-off Arising from Coal Fly Ash Geoengineering” was published. In this paper, the authors substantiate a multitude of harmful, observed effects upon insects from chemtrail spray. We can stop wondering why bee populations are being decimated. The authors write:
“The primary components of CFA [coal fly ash], silicon, aluminum, and iron, consisting in part of magnetite (Fe3O4), all have important potential toxicities to insects. Many of the trace elements in CFA are injurious to insects; several of them (e.g., arsenic, mercury, and cadmium) are used as insecticides. Toxic particulates and heavy metals in CFA contaminate air, water, and soil and thus impact the entire biosphere. Components of CFA, including aluminum extractable in a chemically-mobile form, have been shown to adversely affect insects in terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial environments. Both the primary and trace elements in CFA have been found on, in, and around insects and the plants they feed on in polluted regions around the world. Magnetite from CFA may potentially disrupt insect magnetoreception. Chlorine and certain other constituents of aerosolized CFA potentially destroy atmospheric ozone thus exposing insects to elevated mutagenicity and lethality levels of UV-B and UV-C solar radiation.”
This information goes a long way towards explaining the tremendous drops in global insect populations lately. It’s almost too scary to look into, but an Internet search of the term ‘insect populations’ will bring pages and pages of relevant results. Of course, many are blaming it on the dreaded global warming/climate change, but insect populations have done just fine throughout previous fluctuations in Earth’s average temperature. In fact, insect populations have most probably done better in warmer climates, so maybe we should look instead at the gigantic aircraft routinely dumping megatons of toxic waste into our biosphere.
As noted, Francis Mangels has been observing a lack of insects as well. He logically attributes it to geoengineering. On July 19, 2017, Francis emailed to the author the following:
“Several streams were sampled for aquatic insects, and I likewise fished them hard to get stomach samples of trout. Total sample over 1000, lately around 400 stomach samples. Methods used were fairly casual, using typical nets for streams in gravel substrates that appeared similar. Standard data was orders of aquatics per square foot, accuracy about 80% due to equipment. It was very easy to see which streams would have the most trout.
“The bottom fell out of the sampling from 2000 to 2008, and it continues today. All major orders of bugs took severe hits from an unknown source. Then I was contacted by Dane [Wigington], and logic said only sky pollution could hit all the streams at once in the same way.
“Likewise, the trout I caught before then always were loaded with bugs and etc. food both terra and aquatic. Ever since about 2006, the trout stomachs were almost empty, and I quit taking data because there was no data to take, for the most part. A bug here and there, mostly terrestrials, very small amounts and the trout got skinny over the years (except for those freshly planted, that soon lost the fat and got skinny too, as we say, poor condition factors). Very clear streams went almost barren, no bugs or trout either.
“Net sweeps in lots showed plenty of earwigs, pill bugs, ants, aphids, box elder bugs, any SUCKING types. However, the caterpillar types for the most part became very scarce, as did moths and butterflies as you would expect (leaf eaters eat the aluminum). I turned in a huge collection to the American butterfly association of CA, but damned if I could do it now….Lepidoptera are around, but rare now except for the cabbage butterfly and a few swallowtails. Point is, this distribution showed in the trout stomachs, which caused me to do the sweeps.”
Further up the food chain we find birds. Dr.s Herndon and Whiteside published a paper in November of 2018 titled “Aerosolized Coal Fly Ash: A Previously Unrecognized Primary Factor in the Catastrophic Global Demise of Bird Populations and Species.” In this paper, the authors find that coal fly ash is causing unprecedented bird die-offs.
The authors write, “Bird populations and species world-wide are experiencing die-offs on an unprecedented scale.” A little later, the authors continue, “Aerosolized CFA [coal fly ash], a particularly toxic form of air pollution, contains multiple metals and elements well-known to adversely affect all portions of the avian life cycle, in aerial, terrestrial, and marine environments. Studies from around the globe reveal systemic contamination of birds by these elements.” The authors conclude that, “Coal fly ash, including its use in ongoing atmospheric geoengineering operations, is a major factor in global bird die-off. The accelerating decline of birds parallels the catastrophic decline of insects, due in part to the same type of aerial pollution.”
Doctors Herndon and Whiteside have also looked at the biological impacts of chemtrails upon bat populations. In January of this year (2020), they published a paper titled “Unacknowledged Potential Factors in Catastrophic Bat Die-off Arising from Coal Fly Ash Geoengineering.” In this paper, the authors find that bat populations worldwide are suffering a precipitous decline. The authors write:
“Bats are excellent mammalian bioindicators of environmental contaminants and it is known that their tissue contains high levels of metals and persistent organic pollutants. From a review of the literature, we show that the pollutant element ratios in bat tissue and bat guano are consistent with an origin in CFA-type air pollution. These findings suggest that CFA [coal fly ash], including its use in covert climate engineering operations, is an unacknowledged factor in the morbidity and mortality of bats. Bats, therefore, are an important ‘canary in the coal mine’ pointing to the urgency of halting covert climate engineering and greatly reducing ultrafine particulate air pollution.”
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As we saw at the beginning of this section, with all the professionally observed soil pH anomalies, plants are not doing very well under this New Manhattan Project either. Doctors Herndon, Whiteside and other co-authors have been doing work in these areas as well. In a series of published, peer-reviewed journal articles, they have found that a combination of factors, all caused by the spraying of coal fly ash, are causing mass die-offs of global vegetation. They found that trees, in particular, are weakened by increased UV radiation, desiccation, and toxicity – all caused by chemtrails. Once a tree is weakened by this trifecta, it becomes susceptible to insect infestations, fungal infections, and other biotic factors such as bacteria and viruses.
The result of all this is dry, dead and dying vegetation. An abundance of dry, dead and dying vegetation makes forest fires occur more often and burn more furiously. Herndon et al. find that this is most probably why we have seen such tremendously large forest fires lately. The increased levels of UV radiation noted by Herndon et al. as being harmful to vegetation, are also harmful to Humans as well as phytoplankton, coral, and insects.
Silver iodide
The conventional weather modification industry has been openly spraying vast areas of the United States with silver iodide since 1947. The super-secret New Manhattan Project only started spraying us with coal fly ash in 1996. Hence, the vast majority of the weather modification and atmospheric sciences literature is geared towards the dispersion of silver iodide. Although silver iodide is not what is used in today’s New Manhattan Project, as a side issue, let’s take a look at the scientific evidence (or lack thereof) concerning the biological impacts of silver iodide. Past is prelude.
Considering that this issue is the most obvious question and of grave importance, the lack of publicly available research pertaining to the biological impacts of silver iodide dispersion is quite shocking. You may read the 746 page, 1978 Congressional Research Service report on weather modification. You may read all 21 of the Interdepartmental Committee for Atmospheric Sciences reports or all of the National Science Foundation annual weather modification reports. You may read scores of weather modification reports, book after book, and myriad reports and papers about weather modification and the atmospheric sciences. But nowhere in any of these documents may you find an adequate examination of biological impacts and specifically human health impacts caused by exposure to atmospheric silver iodide. Only after reading a stack of documents about a yard high, did your author finally find a report containing an adequate discussion of this topic.
A popular silver iodide material safety data sheet describes silver iodide as, “Hazardous in case of skin contact (irritant), of eye contact (irritant), of ingestion, [and] of inhalation.” Unbelievably, the authors of this data sheet write that much of the toxicology information is NOT AVAILABLE. They’ve been spraying us with this stuff since 1947 and the toxicology information is not available?! Equally as unbelievable, to date, no publicly available, long-term studies have been done.
It is widely suggested that exposure to silver iodide causes argyria – characterized by a blue-grey discoloration of the eyes, skin, mucous membranes, and internal organs. Does that sound healthy? Another MSDS produced by Fisher Scientific reads:
“Chronic ingestion of iodides during pregnancy has resulted in fetal death, severe goiter, and cretinoid appearance of the newborn. Prolonged exposure to iodides may produce iodism in sensitive individuals. Symptoms could include skin rash, running nose and headache.”
In spite of this information, the historical weather modification literature notes a lack of data. A 1966 National Science Foundation report stated, “The present state of knowledge places uncomfortable limits on the prediction of the biological consequences of modifying the weather.” A 1969 Bureau of Reclamation report noted, “There has so far not been a single biological field study completed and reported in the literature specifically designed to identify any aspect of the ecological effects of weather modification.” A 1972 study conducted by the Council on Environmental Quality stated, “Projects may have significant adverse environmental effects, ranging from immediate hazards to life and property to long-term alterations in land use patterns and threats to ecological systems.”
Weather modifiers have exhibited a pattern of dismissing the potentially harmful effects of substances used in weather modification activities. In 1967 weather modifier Archie Kahan, writing for the Bureau of Reclamation, dismissed concerns about the use of silver iodide as he conflated the biological impacts of silver iodide with its efficacy as a nucleant and any possible hazardous weather that might arise from its use.
In 1972, decades after silver iodide was first used as a nucleant, Bernard Vonnegut and another atmospheric scientist by the name of Ronald Standler wrote a biology paper published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology that mollified concerns about their activities. Although the biological impacts of prolonged silver iodide dispersion has implications not only for Human health, but also for the health of the entire biosphere, the paper concerns itself almost exclusively with impacts upon Human health. The questionable biological impacts of their activities pertaining to plant and animal life is glossed over only briefly. They note that prolonged exposure to silver iodide has been known to cause Humans to exhibit an ashen appearance, but they claim that this is not of particular concern. They also dismiss concerns about silver iodide’s ability to cause a yellowing of the skin when exposure is topical. They even dismiss two examples of individuals having been significantly harmed by exposure to silver iodide. Their paper is full of phrases like ’seem to be’ and ‘we do not expect’ because much of what is presented in the paper is assumptions and extrapolations based on other people’s work rather than any scientific findings of their own.
The vast majority of research done in this area does not even concern itself with Human health impacts or biospheric contamination. Rather, it focuses on the ancillary issue of how plants and animals may be affected by either more or less rainfall. The work that is publicly available is mostly cursory. In the vast majority of cases where the subject is even so much as broached, the literature quickly follows with assurances that there are probably no adverse effects and that further study is not necessary.
Thankfully, some research indicating silver iodide’s negative biological impacts has surfaced. It is not good news, but we need to hear it. Evidence suggests that it is exceptionally bad for organisms further down the food chain. The aforementioned 1969 Bureau of Reclamation report also noted:
“Silver compounds are much more toxic to fish than to terrestrial vertebrates. Some of the higher concentrations of Ag recorded in precipitation from seeded storms are comparable to the lowest concentrations lethal to fish in the short run. In one set of experiments, sticklebacks were able to withstand no more than 0.003 ppm Ag in water at 15-18° C. The fish survived one week at 0.004 ppm, four days at 0.01 ppm, and but one day at 0.1 ppm.”
This 1969 report also found silver to be, “…highly toxic to microorganisms….” The report continues:
“Many investigators have placed Ag at or near the top of the list among heavy metals in toxicity to fungi, slime molds, and bacteria. Water containing 0.015 ppm Ag from contact with specially prepared metal has exhibited bacteriocidal activity. 0.006 ppm Ag has killed E. coli in 2 to 24 hours, depending on numbers of bacteria. Bacteriocidal activity in this context usually implies death of 9.99% or so of the cells present.”
Killing fungi, E. coli, and slime molds may sound like a good thing. But in the context of our complex and interdependent biosphere, it is not. Our overall ecosystem needs slime molds and the like. These things are vital links in the food chain.
Why does the conventional weather modification and atmospheric sciences literature not sufficiently address the issue of silver iodide’s biological impacts? They wouldn’t have anything to hide, would they? That which is not disclosed is often more incriminating than that which is. Although today’s Weather Modification Association claims it is completely safe, they have a conflict of interest and they do not have enough data to sufficiently back up their claims.
The bottom line is that there is evidence showing that silver iodide has negative biological impacts. We cannot know for sure that spraying this stuff is safe if no public long term studies have been done. But they have been going ahead and doing it anyway – just like today’s geoengineers.
Conclusions
Although it is currently not feasible to completely assess the damage to Earth’s biosphere caused by this New Manhattan Project, the available evidence does not paint a pretty picture. This is an area of study and body of work which should be vastly expanded and updated in the coming years and decades. We already know that massive quantities of atmospheric coal fly ash are bad for Humans, animals, insects, plants, and the overall environment. In Humans, the rates of diseases linked to exposure are on the rise. Many people became very sick when first exposed. The historical precedent set by the conventional weather modification industry mandates irresponsibility. When geoengineers say that their activities are harmless, we have plenty of good reasons to not believe them.
References
“An Open Letter to Members of AGU, EGU, and IPCC Alleging Promotion of Fake Science at the Expense of Human and Environmental Health and Comments on AGU Draft Geoengineering Position Statement” a paper by J. Marvin Herndon, published by New Concepts in Global Tectonics Journal, September 2017
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“The Effect of Reaerosolized Fly Ash from an Atmospheric Fluidized Bed Combustor on Murine Alveolar Macrophages” a paper by Patricia C. Brennan, Frederick R. Kirchner, and William P. Norris, published by Argonne National Laboratory, 1979
“Coal Fly Ash Aerosol: Risk Factor for Lung Cancer” a paper by Dr. Mark Whiteside and J. Marvin Herndon, PhD, published by the Journal of Advances in Medicine and Medical Research, February 2018
“Aerosolized Coal Fly Ash: Risk Factor for Neurodegenerative Disease” a paper by Dr. Mark Whiteside and J. Marvin Herndon, PhD, published by the Journal of Advances in Medicine and Medical Research, March 2018
“Aerosolized Coal Fly Ash: Risk Factor for COPD and Respiratory Disease” a paper by Dr. Mark Whiteside and J. Marvin Herndon, PhD, published by the Journal of Advances in Medicine and Medical Research, May 2018
“Geoengineering, Coal Fly Ash and the New Heart-Iron Connection: Universal Exposure to Iron Oxide Nanoparticulates” a paper by Dr. Mark Whiteside and J. Marvin Herndon, PhD, published by the Journal of Advances in Medicine and Medical Research, November 2019
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Aluminum oxide material safety data sheet by US Research Nanomaterials, Inc., 2013
“Assessing the Direct Occupational and Public Health Impacts of Solar Radiation Management with Stratospheric Aerosols” a paper by Utibe Effiong and Richard L. Neitzel, published in Environmental Health, 2016
“In Vitro Toxicity of Aluminum Nanoparticles in Rat Alveolar Macrophages” a report by Andrew Wagner, Charles Bleckmann, and E. England of the Air Force Institute of Technology, Krista Hess of Geo-Centers, Inc., Dayton, Ohio, and Saber Hussain and John J. Schlager of the Air Force Research Laboratory, Human Effectiveness Directorate, Applied Biotechnology Branch, Wright-Patterson AFB, published by the Air Force Research Laboratory, Human Effectiveness Directorate, Applied Biotechnology Branch, Wright-Patterson AFB, 2001
“Nanosized Aluminum Altered Immune Function” a paper by Laura K. Braydich-Stolle, Janice L. Speshock, Alicia Castle, Marcus Smith, Richard C. Murdock, and Saber M. Hussain, published by the American Chemical Society, 2010
“Manufactured Aluminum Oxide Nanoparticles Decrease Expression of Tight Junction Proteins in Brain Vasculature” a paper by Lei Chen, Robert A. Yokel, Bernhard Henning, and Michal Toborek, published by the Journal of Neuroimmune Pharmacology, December, 2008
“Aluminum Induced Immunoexcitotoxicity in Neurodevelopmental and Neurodegenerative Disorders” a paper by Dr. Russell L. Blaylock, as published in Current Inorganic Chemistry, 2012
“Gila Activation Induced by Peripheral Administration of Aluminum Oxide Nanoparticles in Rat Brains” a paper by X. Li, H. Zheng, Z. Zhang, M. Li, Z. Huang, H.J. Schluesener, Y. Li, and S. Xu, published in Nanomed, 2009, 5, (4), 473-479
Strontium oxide material safety data sheet by Sigma- Aldrich, 2007
“Aluminum Poisoning of Humanity and Earth’s Biota by Clandestine Geoengineering Activity: Implications for India” a paper by J. Marvin Herndon, PhD, published by Current Science, 2015
“Strontium” a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
“Contamination of the Biosphere with Mercury: Another Potential Consequence of On-going Climate Manipulation Using Aerosolized Coal Fly Ash” a paper by Dr. Mark Whiteside and J. Marvin Herndon, PhD, published by the Journal of Geography, Environment and Earth Science International, December 2017
Inhaled Particles and Vapours a book edited by C.N. Davies, published by Pergamon Press, 1961
“Fine Particulate Air Pollution and Mortality in 20 U.S. Cities, 1987-1994” a report by Jonathan M. Samet, MD, Francesca Dominici, PhD, Frank C. Curriero, PhD, Ivan Coursac, MS, and Scott L. Zeger, PhD, published by the New England Journal of Medicine, volume 343, number 24, 2000
Pulmonary Deposition and Retention of Inhaled Aerosols a book by Theodore F. Hatch, Paul Gross, the American Industrial Hygiene Association, and the United States Atomic Energy Commission, published by Academic Press, 1964
“Mortality from Alzheimer’s Disease in the United States: Data for 2000 and 2010” a report by Betzaida Tejada-Vera, M.S., published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2013
“Deaths from Alzheimer’s Disease – United States, 1999-2014” an article by Christopher A. Taylor, PhD, Sujay F. Greenlund, Lisa C. McGuire, PhD, Hua Lu, MS, and Janet B. Croft, PhD, published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, May 26, 2017
“Age-Adjusted Death Rates for Parkinson’s Disease Among Adults Aged ≥65 Years – National Vital Statistics System, United States, 1999-2017” an article by Nancy Han, MS and Barnali Das, PhD, published by the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Sept. 6, 2019
“Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Among Adults Aged 18 and Over in the United States, 1998–2009” a report by Lara J. Akinbami, MD; and Xiang Liu, MSc, published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2011
“United States Life Tables, 2017” an article by Elizabeth Arias, PhD and Jiaquan Xu, MD, published by National Vital Statistics Reports, June 24, 2019
“National Surveillance of Asthma: United States, 2001-2010” a report by the Centers for Disease Control, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, November, 2012
Chemtrails Confirmed a book by William Thomas, published by Bridger House Publishers, 2004
What In the World Are They Spraying? a documentary film by Michael Murphy, Paul Wittenberger, and Edward G. Griffin, produced by Truth Media Productions, 2010
“Role of Aerosolized Coal Fly Ash in the Global Plankton Imbalance: Case of Florida’s Toxic Algae Crisis” a paper by Dr. J. Marvin Herndon, PhD and Dr. Mark Whiteside, MD, published by the Asian Journal of Biology, June 2019
“Previously Unacknowledged Potential Factors in Catastrophic Bee and Insect Die-off Arising from Coal Fly Ash Geoengineering” a paper by Dr. J. Marvin Herndon, PhD and Dr. Mark Whiteside, MD, published by the Asian Journal of Biology, August 2018
“Aerosolized Coal Fly Ash: A Previously Unrecognized Primary Factor in the Catastrophic Global Demise of Bird Populations and Species” a paper by Dr. J. Marvin Herndon, PhD and Dr. Mark Whiteside, MD, published by the Asian Journal of Biology, November 2018
“Unacknowledged Potential Factors in Catastrophic Bat Die-off Arising from Coal Fly Ash Geoengineering” a paper by Dr. J. Marvin Herndon, PhD and Dr. Mark Whiteside, MD, published by the Asian Journal of Biology, January 2020
“Previously Unrecognized Primary Factors in the Demise of Endangered Torrey Pines: A Microcosm of Global Forest Die-offs” a paper by J. Marvin Herndon, PhD, Dale D. Williams, and Dr. Mark Whiteside, MD, published by the Journal of Geography, Environment and Earth Science International, August 2018
“California Wildfires: Role of Undisclosed Atmospheric Manipulation and Geoengineering” a paper by J. Marvin Herndon and Dr. Mark Whiteside, MD, published by the Journal of Geography, Environment and Earth Science International, October 2018
“Deadly Ultraviolet UV-C and UV-B Penetration to Earth’s Surface: Human and Environmental Health Implications” a paper by J. Marvin Herndon, PhD, Raymond D. Hoisington and Dr. Mark Whiteside, MD, published by the Journal of Geography, Environment and Earth Science International, March 2018
Silver iodide material safety data sheet produced by ScienceLab.com, 2010
Silver iodide material safety data sheet produced by Fisher Scientific, 2009
National Science Foundation Report No. 66-3 as it appeared in a hearing before the Subcommittee on Oceans and Atmosphere of the Committee on Commerce, United States Senate, Ninety-fourth Congress, second session, Feb. 17, 1976
“Ecological Effects of Weather Modification: A Problem Analysis” a report by Charles F. Cooper and William C. Jolly, produced by the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation, Office of Atmospheric Water Resources, published by the University of Michigan, 1969
“Some Comments About Weather Modification Affects on Man’s Environment” by Archie M. Kahan, Office of Atmospheric Water Resources, Office of Chief Engineer, Bureau of Reclamation, Department of the Interior, published by the Department of the Interior, 1967
“Federal Regulation of Weather Modification” a report by the Council on Environmental Quality, Washington, D.C., 1972 as it appeared in a hearing before the Subcommittee on Oceans and Atmosphere of the Committee on Commerce, United States Senate, Ninety-fourth Congress, second session, Feb. 17, 1976
Environmental Impacts of Artificial Ice Nucleating Agents a book edited and co-written by Donald A. Klein, published by Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, 1978
“Weather Modification Association Position Statement on the Environmental Impact of Using Silver Iodide as a Cloud Seeding Agent” a paper by the Weather Modification Association, published by the Weather Modification Association, 2009
“Estimated Possible Effects of AgI Cloud Seeding on Human Health” a paper by Ronald B. Standler and Bernard Vonnegut, published by the Journal of Applied Meteorology, Volume 11, August 11, 1972
Peter A. Kirby is a San Rafael, CA researcher, author, and activist. The greatly revised and expanded second edition of his book Chemtrails Exposed: A New Manhattan Project is now available. Join his email list at his website PeterAKirby.com.
(Beyond Pesticides, July 14, 2021) Corteva (formerly DowDupont) is facing a potential class-action lawsuit after several California families filed suit claiming that the use of the insecticide chlorpyrifos around their homes resulted in birth defects, brain damage, and developmental problems in their children. Chlorpyrifos is an organophosphate insecticide that has been linked to a range of health ailments, posing significant hazards particularly for pregnant mothers and their children. The lawsuits come as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approaches a court-imposed 60-day deadline to decide the fate of the pesticide’s registration.
Attorneys for the court cases, filed on behalf of individuals located in four California communities (Fresno, Kings, Medera, and Tulare counties), indicate they intend to pursue class-action status, which would allow additional injured parties to join the lawsuit. The plaintiffs argue that the effects of chlorpyrifos exposure lingers in the agricultural communities where they reside. “We have found it in the houses, we have found it in carpet, in upholstered furniture, we found it in a teddy bear, and we found it on the walls and surfaces,” said Stuart Calwell, lead attorney for the plantiffs. “Then a little child picks up a teddy bear and holds on to it.” Ultimately, 100,000 people in California’s farming regions may need to remove items in their homes that were contaminated by chlorpyrifos, attorneys say.
Each of the four plaintiff families have children with developmental disabilities that they indicate were caused by chlorpyrifos exposure. This real-world occurrence is supported by the scientific literature. Studies find that children exposed to high levels of chlorpyrifos experience mental development delays, attention problems, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder problems, and pervasive developmental disorders at three years of age. Concentrations of chlorpyrifos in umbilical cord blood were also found to correspond to a decrease in the psychomotor development and a decrease in the mental development in 3-year olds. Additional research reinforces these findings, with evidence that children with high exposure levels of chlorpyrifos have changes to the brain, including enlargement of superior temporal, posterior middle temporal, and inferior postcentral gyri bilaterally, and enlarged superior frontal gyrus, gyrus rectus, cuneus, and precuneus along the mesial wall of the right hemisphere.
Meanwhile, EPA, despite a change in administration, has taken no significant action to eliminate chlorpyrifos to date. In May 2021, a federal appeals court gave EPA a 60-day deadline to provide a “legally sufficient response” to a petition originally filed in 2007, urging the agency to ban food uses of the chemical. Advocates say this is a low bar for the Biden administration to clear. With the Biden EPA, under the leadership of Administrator Michael Regan, defending a broad range of Trump-era pesticide decisions, advocates are concerned that EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs remains broken.
Like other recent lawsuits filed around toxic pesticide exposure, including Parkinson-linked paraquat and cancer-causing glyphosate, EPA inaction has made it so that the only remedy for affected individuals and communities is the court system.
Canada has begun to quietly phase out chlorpyrifos, and the European Union continues to lead the world in pesticide protections after it decided not to renew its registration for the chemical, permitting only a short grace period of 3 months for final storage, disposal, and use.
If EPA fails to ban chlorpyrifos, it will be a major blow for environmental justice, given that risks of exposure fall disproportionately on low-income African American and Latino families, including farmworker families, who are at the greatest risk of harm. Help stop the ongoing poisoning of these communities by urging EPA to ban chlorpyrifos today. But don’t stop at chlorpyrifos – as banning its use is simply the first step in eliminating other neurotoxic pesticides on the market. Tell EPA chlorpyrifos and all brain-damaging pesticides need to be banned immediately.
All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.
Graphenea.com [1]: “Graphene — What Is It? …Graphene is the thinnest compound known to man at one atom thick, the lightest material known… the strongest compound [ever] discovered… the best conductor of heat at room temperature [2]… the best conductor of electricity known… potentially an eco-friendly, sustainable solution for an almost limitless number of applications. Since the discovery…of graphene, applications within different scientific disciplines have exploded, with huge gains being made particularly in high-frequency electronics, bio, chemical and magnetic sensors, ultra-wide bandwidth photodetectors, and energy storage and generation.”
On May 28 [3], I wrote and posted an article about toxic graphene-containing face masks. Since then, the subject of graphene has blown up across the Internet.
There are now claims that COVID test swabs and even vaccines contain the substance.
A group of Spanish researchers report they’ve analyzed a vial of COVID vaccine and found it’s virtually nothing but graphene oxide—98-99% [4].
I’m reserving my opinion about that. If true, it would mean the vaccine criminals were asking for their crime to be discovered. They weren’t trying to hide the graphene in the vaccine; they were parading it for anyone to see.
I hope another independent research group analyzes another vial of COVID vaccine and reports their findings.
Meanwhile, we are suddenly living in a graphene world. The substance is everywhere. This reminds me of the massive introduction of GMO farming in the 1990s. The strategy is familiar in industry: flood the market with a new “miracle” product; when doubters start reporting on serious health risks and damage, claim they’re crazy [5], while preparing to combat law suits that will drag on for decades. [5a]
Actually, that’s been the strategy of the COVID vaccine makers; except in their case, they’re legally exempt from liability. [6]
I strongly recommend reading the whole release. The first paragraph:
“INBRAIN Neuroelectronics, a company at the intersection of medtech, deeptech and digital health dedicated to developing the world’s first GRAPHENE-BASED INTELLIGENT NEUROELECTRIC SYSTEM, today announced a collaboration with Merck, a leading science and technology company. The aim of the collaboration is to co-develop the next generation of graphene bioelectronic vagus nerve therapies targeting severe chronic diseases in Merck’s therapeutic areas through INNERVIA Bioelectronics, a subsidiary of INBRAIN Neuroelectronics.” (emphasis is mine)
They’re not just talking about “vagus nerve therapies.” This enterprise is an attempt to create a whole new frontier for global medical experimentation and treatment, in order to “cure diseases that are presently incurable.” At the center is graphene.
The phrase “intelligent neuroelectric system” suggests the corporations are planning to superimpose their own automatic nerve inputs and responses, in the body, on top of the body’s natural nervous system. To put it another way, they want to replace “deficiencies and errors” in the natural nervous system with their own catalog of preferred stimuli and responses. If the extreme dangers of this reprogramming aren’t obvious to you, think it through. Take a prime natural physical system that is already automatic and sideline it in favor of a new ironclad automatic system. And you have a running start on an AI Pavlovian human.
“Doctor, we rang the bell and the patient drooled. It’s marvelous.”
Graphene toxicity requires a great deal of attention from independent investigators. Among the many topics needing clarification—the different forms of graphene, their relative toxicities, and their relative tendencies to detach from synthetic materials and enter the body.
Here is my original May 28 graphene article about masks (with new edits):
Millions of face masks officially declared dangerous
As my readers know, for the past year I’ve been demonstrating that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has never been proven to exist. [8] Therefore, face masks are nothing more (or less) than a mind-control ritual. [9] [9a]
However, much has been written about the harm the masks cause.
And now we have an official declaration. On April 2, 2021, Health Canada issued an advisory, warning people not to “use face masks labelled to contain graphene or biomass graphene.”
Andrew Maynard covers this issue in a medium.com article, “Manufacturers have been using nanotechnology-derived graphene in face masks—now there are safety concerns.” [10]
Those concerns? Masks could create lung problems.
Of course, since COVID-19 is claimed to be a lung disease, you can see where that leads: the remedy turns out to cause what it’s supposed to prevent. I could write a book detailing how many times this “coincidence” pops up in the field of medicine.
Maynard’s article traces the safety concerns to a Chinese mask manufacturer, Shandong, but points out that millions of graphene-containing masks are in use around the world, produced by a whole host of companies.
Yesterday, I saw a mask sold to a customer. It was sealed in a plain plastic bag. No manufacturer’s name, no list of materials in the mask, nothing but a bar code. Does the mask contain graphene? No way to know.
So far, it’s not clear whether the nanoparticles of graphene in the masks also contain highly destructive metals.
The mainstream literature on graphene is ambiguous and far from reassuring: ‘yes, it’s probably toxic to the lungs; perhaps not seriously so; perhaps only temporarily; there are more questions than answers.’
Why have these masks been certified anywhere in the world for public use? Why haven’t the CDC and the WHO made definitive statements about safety concerns? Why didn’t public health agencies, long ago, run/demand definitive tests to see whether, and to what extent, the nanoparticles of graphene detach themselves from various types of masks and enter the body?
At materialstoday.com, we have, “Is graphene safe?” [11]
“But, it is the very nature of graphene that might be cause for concern: thin and lightweight, yet tough and intractable particles are notoriously worrisome in terms of the detrimental effects they can have on our health, particularly when breathed in…”
“Ken Donaldson is a respiratory toxicologist at the University of Edinburgh and he and his colleagues are among the first to raise the warning flag on graphene, at least for nanoscopic platelets of the material. It is not too great a leap of the imagination to imagine how such tiny flakes of carbon might be transported deep within the lungs similar to asbestos fibres and coal dust. Once lodged within, there is no likely mechanism for the removal or break down of such inert particles and they might reside on these sensitive tissues triggering a chronic inflammatory response or interfering with the normal cellular functions.”
Does this make any sane person feel safe about wearing a mask containing graphene particles?
“We have a new idea and a new product. It’s designed to force you to breathe in nanoparticles of graphene. Who knows what’ll happen? Try it and see.”
Yes, try it. And if you then develop a lung infection, since that is called a cardinal pandemic symptom, you could hit the jackpot and earn a diagnosis of COVID-19.
At which point the fun really begins, as you try to explain to your doctor that the cause isn’t a virus, but rather nanoparticles of graphene in your mask. If you play your cards right, you could end up in the psych ward with other “conspiracy theorists.”
“Can you believe it, nurse? I had this guy a few hours ago coughing and dripping mucus all over the place. Inflamed lungs. Classic COVID case. But he tells me he’s breathing in NANOPARTICLES. I gave him a sedative and sent him to the Crazy Pen. Where do these people get these stories? Have you ever heard of graphene? That’s what they put in pencils, right?”
“I don’t know, Doc. My cousin thinks she’s breathing in these nanos, too. I told her she needs a Thorazine drip.”
The masks are COVID-diagnosis promoters. Step one: breathe in nanoparticles of graphene. Step two: therefore develop a so-called major COVID symptom—lung infection. Step three: test false-positive on the PCR test (happens millions of times, as I’ve documented). And boom, you’re a COVID case.
In keeping with local laws, I’ve applied for a license to own a mask as a weapon. If I gain approval, I plan to seal it in a glass box and mount it on the wall next to my grenade launcher and Civil War cannonball.
cover image credit:
Simulations by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute reveal the potential of graphene oxide frameworks, pictured in black, to remove contaminants such as salt ions, seen in blue and green, from water.
Adrien Nicolaï/RPI — Wikimedia Commons
‘Toxic Legacy’ — How Glyphosate Destroys Your Health
In this book, which has been a labor of love for the past decade, Seneff explains how and why glyphosate poses an existential threat to humanity, and why it’s so important to avoid it if you care about your health and the health of your family.
“It’s been a decade of learning everything I could about glyphosate,” Seneff says. “When I first heard about it I basically dropped everything else I was doing because I was so confident that I had found the answer to the autism epidemic. That was the thing I was looking for. Back in 2012, I heard a two-hour lecture by Don Huber, and it changed my focus entirely.
I already understood the symptoms of autism, a very complex disease — lots of gut problems and mineral issues — and it all came together with his lecture. Overnight I just started poring over all the papers I could find.
Shortly after that I found Séralini’s paper,1 which had not yet been retracted at that time. It was later republished, the paper by Séralini, a French toxicologist who had shown that very low doses of glyphosate over the lifespan of a rat could cause a lot of damage.
He pointed out that after three months, everything looked good, so it’s a slow kill. This is one thing I emphasize in my book. Glyphosate is subtle, and that’s really a huge problem because people don’t [make the connection]. We have diabetes, obesity, autism, Alzheimer’s. It’s a long, long list, all the gut problems.
The microbes are being very much disturbed by the chronic poisoning with glyphosate, and then the gut becomes a central starting point for many diseases, including neurological diseases and arthritis. So, you see that disruption of the gut, and glyphosate can cause exactly the things that we’re seeing.”
Glyphosate Contamination in Common Products
Before delving into glyphosate, Seneff spent five years focusing on the potential toxicities of vaccines. She still believes vaccines can play a role in the chronic diseases we’re seeing, including autism.
However, glyphosate may actually play a more significant role. Seneff believes it contributes to and worsens damage caused by vaccines, in part because it binds very efficiently to aluminum used as an adjuvant in certain vaccines. It likely binds strongly to many other toxic metals as well.
The theory is that, by being wrapped up with glyphosate molecules, the metals can more easily penetrate various barriers in your body. This is because glyphosate causes these barriers, such as your intestinal barrier and your blood-brain-barrier, to become more porous. And, as leaky gut or leaky brain set in, the toxic metals are shuttled across, along with the glyphosate.
Interestingly, Anthony Samsel, a public health research scientist, and Zen Honeycutt, founder and director of Moms Across America, have independently found glyphosate contamination in live virus vaccines that do not contain aluminum adjuvant.
Seneff suspects glyphosate may be a contaminant in many drugs as well, particularly drugs produced by genetically engineering E. coli or yeast. They’ve also found glyphosate in tampons, which may then be absorbed through your uterine lining.
Seneff also hypothesizes that, since glyphosate is found in many vegetable-based fats, such as canola and soybean oil, studies comparing the health effects of fats may be compromised since they never consider the effects of glyphosate. Interestingly, while not fat-soluble, glyphosate can still enter fats (and is found in the vegetable oils just mentioned).
Samsel suspects glyphosate acts as a phosphate analog, because it has a phosphonate unit, and fats have phosphates (phospholipids). This is something he’s investigating right now, so eventually, we may learn more about that mechanism.
Glyphosate and the Rise in Celiac Disease
In her book, Seneff details the dramatic increase in glyphosate use since its introduction in the mid-‘70s. Estimates suggest that one pound of glyphosate is applied in the U.S. every year for every man, woman and child, in America, which is an astounding amount. It’s not even enough to buy non-GMO products, as many non-GMO items have been shown to have some of the highest levels of glyphosate.
Oats, wheat, barley and legumes like chickpeas and lentils tend to be very high in glyphosate because these crops are sprayed with glyphosate right before harvest as a desiccant to speed the drying process.
“I think that’s the reason for the epidemic in celiac disease,” Seneff says. “Samsel and I wrote a paper on that. We showed there’s a strong correlation between the rise in celiac disease over time and the rise in glyphosate usage on wheat, specifically on wheat. It matches much better to wheat than it does to the other crops, which makes sense, because wheat is the source of celiac disease.”
A case study of an American woman who tried to commit suicide by drinking glyphosate reveal some of the chemical’s effects. She developed a paralyzed gut, and this may well be what’s happening to many, on a low-grade scale. In essence, people’s guts are sort of semi-paralyzed by the glyphosate in the diet, which causes small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO).
Bacteria starts festering in the upper intestine because the peristalsis is not working properly, so food remnants get stuck. Glyphosate has also been shown to accumulate in the brain, and animal studies show it causes neuro excitotoxicity due to excess glutamate in the brain. This, in turn, “is absolutely connected to autism,” Seneff says.
In her book, Seneff also discusses the importance of sulfur for optimal health, how sulfate deficiency is connected to autism, and how glyphosate can cause sulfate deficiency.
How Glyphosate Affects Your Gut and Autoimmunity
Part of what makes glyphosate so toxic has to do with the fact that it’s a very efficient metal chelator. It binds metals and minerals really well. For example, glyphosate is a million times more effective at chelating aluminum than EDTA, a chelating agent used in heavy metal chelation treatment.
This, in turn, disrupts your gut microbes because it makes minerals unavailable to the microbes. Your gut microbes need minerals, as their enzymes depend on them for proper functioning. Glyphosate also disrupts the shikimate pathway, both in plants and microbes, and beneficial microbes are particularly sensitive to glyphosate.
When lactobacillus bacteria are killed off in your gut, your ability to digest gluten and casein (milk protein) is impaired, as this bacterium carries several enzymes your body does not have that specialize in breaking down proline, an amino acid found in gluten and casein. This, in turn, can eventually lead to autoimmune problems. Seneff explains:
“We have all these allergies to gluten and casein these days, all these different food sensitivities, and I think it’s because the lactobacillus are being killed off. They can’t support the digestion of those proteins anymore. Then the protein sticks around, the peptide sequence, and that’s what causes an immune reaction.
Then you can get an autoimmune attack through molecular mimicry — the antibody mis-recognizes a human protein because it looks like the piece of gluten that they become sensitive to, so they attack a human protein instead.”
Glyphosate Makes Harmful Fat Even More Hazardous
Interestingly, glyphosate may also contribute to the harm caused by the omega-6 fat linoleic acid (LA). LA is metabolized into arachidonic acid, which is metabolized into an endogenous cannabinoid that eases pain. The enzyme that accomplishes this conversion is cytochrome P450 enzyme, which is disrupted by glyphosate.
Seneff suspects arachidonic acid is getting redirected through enzymes that convert arachidonic acid into extremely immunogenic products instead, such as leukotrienes, which act as signaling molecules that turn on an inflammatory response. A generic term for these signaling molecules is eicocanoids. She explains:
“Leukotrienes are rightfully blamed for causing all the chronic pain we’re seeing — rheumatoid arthritis, joint and bone pain, and even, probably, problems with the brain, maybe headaches.
All the different kinds of pain we’re experiencing that are connected to inflammation could be a consequence of cytochrome P450 enzymes blocking the ability to convert arachidonic acid into the endogenous cannaboid. Instead, it gets redirected towards these signaling molecules that cause all this damage.”
On top of that, LA, when oxidized, turns into highly toxic free radicals such as 4HNE, which cause direct oxidative stress damage to cell membranes, mitochondria, stem cells and DNA. In your mitochondria, a feedback loop then occurs that causes the shutdown of your energy metabolism system, resulting in an increase in adipose tissue. Translation: Excessive LA causes accumulation of belly fat.
Glyphosate Is a Biological Toxin
Its effect on the shikimate pathway is a key mechanism by which glyphosate causes biological harm in humans. The human body does not have this pathway — a fact used by Monsanto to argue for glyphosate’s safety. But the microbes in your body do have it. Research has shown over half the microbes, on average, in your gut have the shikimate pathway and can therefore be decimated by glyphosate.
These include lactobacillus and bifidobacteria, which use the shikimate pathway to produce the aromatic amino acids tryptophan, tyrosine and phenylalanine, crucial coding amino acids that go into all the proteins of your body. They’re absolutely essential for protein assembly, and your body must rely on your diet and gut microbes to produce adequate amounts of these amino acids, as your body cannot produce them any other way.
When your gut microbes are harmed, it can result in a deficiency of tryptophan, tyrosine and phenylalanine. These amino acids are also precursors to many other important biologically active molecules. For example, tryptophan is a precursor to melatonin and serotonin. Tyrosine is a precursor to thyroid hormone, dopamine and adrenaline.
“These are all really, really important hormones that control brain behavior and regulate behavior and mood,” Seneff says. “Serotonin deficiency is connected to depression, and we have an epidemic in depression. So, I think there’s a direct path there. Also, some of the B vitamins come out of the shikimate pathway, including thiamine (B1), riboflavin (B2) and niacin (B3) …
You need thiamine for augmenting your immune system. If you don’t have a lot of thiamine, you’re not going to be able to generate a healthy immune response. That’s why it’s a part of septic protocols. If you’re wrecking it with glyphosate exposure that’s disrupting the shikimate pathway in your gut microflora, you’ve got a huge problem.”
Glycine Can Help Counteract Adverse Effects of Glyphosate
One simple remedy that can help lower your glyphosate burden is to take a glycine supplement. As explained by Seneff, the way glyphosate disrupts the shikimate pathway is by affecting an enzyme called EPSP synthase. That enzyme bonds to a molecule called phosphoenolpyruvate (PEP). The “phospho” in that name stands for phosphate.
At the place where EPSB synthase binds to PEP, there’s a glycine molecule. It’s a highly-conserved glycine in the enzyme. If that glycine is swapped out for alanine, a very similar amino acid, the EPSB synthase enzyme becomes completely insensitive to glyphosate.
“So, it’s black and white — either there’s a glycine there, in which case it’s incredibly susceptible to glyphosate, or there’s alanine, in which case it’s completely insensitive,” Seneff says.
Incidentally, this is how agricultural scientists create glyphosate-resistant GMO crops. They turn the glycine molecule into alanine, thereby rendering the plant impervious to glyphosate.
When glyphosate enters your system, it can take the place of the glycine molecule. While similar, (the “gly” in glyphosate stands for glycine) it’s not identical and does not work the same way as glycine. Hence, this replacement causes all sorts of trouble.
By taking a glycine supplement, you can counteract this chain of events by making sure there’s enough glycine present to fill up those glycine slots. As noted by Seneff, “If there’s lots of glycine, you’re going to be much less likely to pick up glyphosate.” She continues:
“I had thought about glyphosate being glycine, and knowing that it’s a glycine analog and that it was affecting places where glycine binds. Glycine acts as a neural transmitter. Glyphosate messes that up. I thought, ‘I wonder if it can get into the protein in place of glycine?’
My book actually centers on this idea that glyphosate substitutes for glycine in certain proteins. There’s a specific algorithm for where it would happen, and you can show that those proteins are suppressed by glyphosate experimentally.”
Importantly, glyphosate suppresses glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD), a very important enzyme in red blood cells that maintains NADPH in its reduced form. If you have reduced levels of NADPH, you’re at increased risk for chronic disease, as your ability to recharge antioxidants is impaired. This is yet another mechanism by which glyphosate contributes to any number of disease states.
Glyphosate’s Impact on Collagen
Yet another protein that has a high glycine content is collagen, the primary protein for your connective tissue. It constitutes about one-quarter of your body’s proteins. Because of the presence of glycine, glyphosate has the ability to impair collagen as well.
“I feel confident that glyphosate is messing up collagen,” Seneff says. “Collagen has a beautiful triple helix structure, which gives it really special properties of tensile strength and flexibility to hold water. Collagen has long, long sequences called GXY, GXY, GXY, where every third amino acid is a glycine. Those glycines hook together to form that triple helix.
There are people who have mutations in those glycines that cause joint and bone diseases, and I think glyphosate is causing that. Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is associated with glycine mutations in collagen, and there’s an increase in the prevalence of that syndrome recently.
Of course, you have many more people getting hip replacement surgery, and people have back issues, back pain and shoulder surgery, knee and foot problems. All these different problems with the joints, I suspect, are being caused by misfolded collagen because of glyphosate messing it up.”
Glyphosate’s Impact on Your Vascular System
Another mechanism of action involves the suppression of nitric oxide (NO), primarily through the suppression of endothelial nitric oxide (eNOS), which is one of three ways your body makes NO. eNOS is a close relative to cytochrome 450 enzymes which, as mentioned, are decimated by glyphosate.
“The NO works together with sulfur dioxide to control the viscosity of your blood,” Seneff explains. “NO turns into nitrate … And sulfur dioxide turns into sulfate … Nitrate is a chaotrope, and sulfate is a kosmotrope. Kosmotropes are very interesting molecules that control the viscosity of blood. It’s all about water structuring, stuff that Gerald Pollack talks about.
Kosmotropes make the water structure more like gel and the chaotropes make it more like fluid, liquid. Those two work against each other to maintain the correct viscosity of the blood while other things are going on. If you put a bunch of lipid particles into the blood, it’s going to get more viscous, so you’ve got to make it less-viscous by adding NO.
So, there’s a back and forth between NO and sulfur dioxide that’s regulated by eNOS. This is a theory that I have, and it makes a lot of sense. I have continued to gather evidence that supports it.
If glyphosate messes up eNOS, then it messes up the blood’s ability to maintain its proper viscosity, which means your blood could be too fluid. You could end up with hemorrhaging. It could be too thick, it can’t circulate, so you end up with blood clots.”
More Information
One piece of good news is that Mexico is banning glyphosate and will phase it out entirely by 2024. There are fears Mexico may also start banning U.S. imports found to be contaminated with glyphosate, which would actually work in everyone’s favor by shining a bright light on the matter.
While the ultimate answer is to ban the use of glyphosate worldwide, in the meantime, a key strategy to protect your own health is to buy certified organic or biodynamic food. Glyphosate is not permitted in organic agriculture, and even if contamination occurs, the levels are going to be far lower than that of conventionally-grown foods.
Seneff also recommends eating a high-sulfur diet, as sulfur is crucial for the health of your metabolism and immune system. “Sulfur deficiency, I think, is a driver behind some of our health problems,” she says.
Also consider taking a glycine supplement to counteract and push out any glyphosate you might be exposed to. “Glycine is not very expensive and it is very safe, so it’s an easy thing to take as a supplement, which I think could definitely help,” Seneff says.
Other health-promoting habits include eating plenty of fermented foods and getting optimal amounts of vitamin D and K2. As noted by Seneff, your vitamin D conversion is also adversely affected by glyphosate.
As is typically the case when talking to Seneff, as she is phenomenally well-informed, we cover far more details in this interview than I’ve summarized here — including environmental effects and countermeasures to speed the cleanup of soil and water — so I encourage you to listen to the interview in its entirety.
Of course, to learn more about glyphosate, be sure to pick up a copy of “Toxic Legacy.” It’s by far the best book to date on this pernicious toxin that is robbing people everywhere of their health and quality of life.
The Maine Legislature last week approved a proposal to ban aerial spraying of some herbicides, including glyphosate, in the state’s forests, Associated Press reported.
The proposal, introduced by Democratic Senate President Troy Jackson, bans the the aerial spraying of glyphosate and other synthetic herbicides as a forest management strategy.
Jackson said he was concerned the herbicides seep into rivers and streams, jeopardize ecosystems and pose threats to human health. He said the ban was a step to “protect the health and well-being of the people working and living in northern Maine, and safeguard our natural resources for future generations.”
Across the pond in Europe, the European Federation of Food, Agriculture and Tourism Trade Unions (EFFAT) recently called for an immediate ban on glyphosate-based herbicides and other harmful pesticides.
“The newly adopted position on the issue responds to EFFAT’s commitment to a more sustainable agriculture which underpins, inter alia, free trade agreements with binding requirement to respect highest environmental and social standards, investments in workers’ skills, social protection and research and development towards sustainable pest management.
“As sufficient evidence exists on the risks related to the use of glyphosate for workers, human health and biodiversity, EFFAT calls for the immediate ban of glyphosate as an active substance in herbicide products.”
A newly published analysis in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science argues that a toxic soup of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides is causing havoc beneath fields covered in corn, soybeans, wheat and other monoculture crops. The research is the most comprehensive review ever conducted on how pesticides affect soil health.
The study is discussed by two of the report’s authors, Nathan Donley and Tari Gunstone, in a recent article appearing on the Scientific American website.
The authors state that the findings should bring about immediate changes in how regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assess the risks posed by the nearly 850 pesticide ingredients approved for use in the USA.
Conducted by the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth and the University of Maryland, the research looked at almost 400 published studies that together had carried out more than 2800 experiments on how pesticides affect soil organisms. The review encompassed 275 unique species or types of soil organisms and 284 different pesticides or pesticide mixtures.
Pesticides were found to harm organisms that are critical to maintaining healthy soils in over 70 per cent of cases. But Donley and Gunstone say this type of harm is not considered in the EPA’s safety reviews, which ignore pesticide harm to earthworms, springtails, beetles and thousands of other subterranean species.
The EPA uses a single test species to estimate risk to all soil organisms, the European honeybee, which spends its entire life above ground in artificial boxes. But 50-100 per cent of all pesticides end up in soil.
The researchers conclude that the ongoing escalation of pesticide-intensive agriculture and pollution are major driving factors in the decline of soil organisms. By carrying out wholly inadequate reviews, the regulatory system serves to protect the pesticide industry.
The study comes in the wake of other recent findings that indicate high levels of the weedkiller chemical glyphosate and its toxic breakdown product AMPA have been found in topsoil samples from no-till fields in Brazil.
Writing on the GMWatch website, Claire Robinson and Jonathan Matthews note that, despite this, the agrochemical companies seeking the renewal of the authorisation of glyphosate by the European Union in 2022 are saying that one of the greatest benefits of glyphosate is its ability to foster healthier soils by reducing the need for tillage (or ploughing).
This in itself is misleading because farmers are resorting to ploughing given increasing weed resistance to glyphosate and organic agriculture also incorporates no till methods. At the same time, proponents of glyphosate conveniently ignore or deny its toxicity to soils, water, humans and wildlife.
With that in mind, it is noteworthy that GMWatch also refers to another recent study which says that glyphosate is responsible for a five per cent increase in infant mortality in Brazil.
The new study, ‘Pesticides in a case study on no-tillage farming systems and surrounding forest patches in Brazil’ in the journal Scientific Reports, leads the researchers to conclude that glyphosate-contaminated soil can adversely impact food quality and human health and ecological processes for ecosystem services maintenance. They argue that glyphosate and AMPA presence in soil may promote toxicity to key species for biodiversity conservation, which are fundamental for maintaining functioning ecological systems.
These studies reiterate the need to shift away from increasingly discredited ‘green revolution’ ideology and practices. This chemical-intensive model has helped the drive towards greater monocropping and has resulted in less diverse diets and less nutritious foods. Its long-term impact has led to soil degradation and mineral imbalances, which in turn have adversely affected human health.
If we turn to India, for instance, that country is losing 5334 million tonnes of soil every year due to soil erosion and degradation, much of which is attributed to the indiscreet and excessive use of synthetic agrochemicals. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research reports that soil is becoming deficient in nutrients and fertility.
India is not unique in this respect. Maria-Helena Semedo of the Food and Agriculture Organization stated back in 2014 that if current rates of degradation continue all of the world’s topsoil could be gone within 60 years. She noted that about a third of the world’s soil had already been degraded. There is general agreement that chemical-heavy farming techniques are a major cause.
It can take 500 years to generate an inch of soil yet just a few generations to destroy. When you drench soil with proprietary synthetic agrochemicals as part of a model of chemical-dependent farming, you harm essential micro-organisms and end up feeding soil a limited doughnut diet of toxic inputs.
Armed with their multi-billion-dollar money-spinning synthetic biocides, this is what the agrochemical companies have been doing for decades. In their arrogance, these companies claim to have knowledge that they do not possess and then attempt to get the public and co-opted agencies and politicians to bow before the altar of corporate ‘science’ and its bought-and-paid-for scientific priesthood.
The damaging impacts of their products on health and the environment have been widely reported for decades, starting with Rachel Carson’s ground-breaking 1962 book Silent Spring.
As the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Conference convened its 42nd Session on Monday, Pesticide Action Network Asia Pacific (PANAP) called on the FAO to review its desert locust program and stop the use of chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to brain damage and other neurodevelopmental disorders in children.
An overview of the FAO desert locust response shows the use of several Highly Hazardous Pesticides (HHPs), including chlorpyrifos. According to data available on the FAO’s website, more than half a million liters of chlorpyrifos was purchased and delivered by the FAO for desert locust control in Ethiopia (490,000 liters), Uganda (47,000 liters), Yemen (5,000 liters) and Sudan (4,800 liters).
Governments, meanwhile, separately purchased and used hundreds of thousands of liters of chlorpyrifos for desert locust response. These were the governments of Eritrea (41,250 liters), Ethiopia (145,000 liters), Kenya (38,666 liters), Sudan (80,000), Uganda (1,000 liters), and Yemen (26,740).
Overall, both the FAO and governments have used around two million liters of pesticides in desert locust affected countries since January 2020, almost half of which (879,456 liters) is chlorpyrifos.
Chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate pesticide, is a potent neurotoxin at low levels of exposure, causing delayed cognitive and motor development, reduced IQ, and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It is associated with several cancers and causes birth defects. It is also extremely toxic to fish, birds, bees and other beneficial insects.
In addition, on April 7th this year, the Council of the European Union decided to submit a proposal to the secretariat of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) for the listing of chlorpyrifos under Annex A of the Convention, for global phase-out of its production and use. POPs are chemicals that travel long distances to cold regions of the world, particularly the Arctic and Antarctic, where they persist in the environment, bioaccumulate in the food chain and, through their toxicity, threaten both wildlife and humans. “Peristent Organic Pollutants are particularly prone to evaporating from warm regions of the world, so it is highly likely that some of the chlorpyrifos sprayed in Africa will find its way to the Inuit children living in the Arctic,” said Dr. Meriel Watts, PANAP director of science and policy.
As part of its campaign to Protect Our Children from Toxic Pesticides, PANAP is calling for a global ban on chlorpyrifos. Chlorpyrifos is currently banned in 35 countries, according to PAN’s latest consolidated list of banned pesticides.
Other HHPs used in the FAO’s desert locust response program are malathion, deltamethrin, and fenitrothion. Clorpyrifos, malathion (banned in 32 countries) and deltamethrin are also among PANAP’s Terrible 20 pesticides that are especially toxic to children.
The FAO’s Practical guidelines on pesticide risk reduction for locust control recommends a minimum buffer distance for “ecologically sensitive areas” (1,500 meters or about one mile when aerially sprayed, and 100 meters or about 330 feet when sprayed on foot). It instructs locust control staff to wear appropriate personal protective equipment, and to tell local populations to “follow precautionary measures” before control operations.
However, environmental groups have reported that communities in Kenya were not given timely warning before spraying. Pesticide drift from aerial spraying can also reach several miles and cause extensive poisoning of village inhabitants and the surrounding ecosystem.
The FAO’s Pesticide Referee Group recommends organophosphate pesticides as a “last resort” method in locust control. But the FAO insists that the current emergency status of the desert locust crisis warrants the use of these pesticides as “the most appropriate tool.”
“The FAO’s path of choosing to use Highly Hazardous Pesticides, including potential POPs, for desert locust control when more agroecological alternatives are available is alarming. It may have disastrous outcomes for succeeding generations. It should be noted that the use of these toxic pesticides occurs at a time when the UN agency has forged a controversial partnership with CropLife International, the industry association of the world’s biggest pesticide manufacturers,” Watts added.
Hundreds of civil society organisations and scientists around the world are calling on the FAO to stop its deepening collaboration with CropLife, raising concerns that it ties the FAO with manufacturers of harmful pesticides and unsustainable technologies. PANAP is co-coordinating the global campaign to stop this #ToxicAlliance.
On June 13, 2021, Swiss citizens are called to vote for the outlawing of synthetic pesticides. A citizens’ initiative, turned referendum, supported and endorsed by Navdanya International on the path towards a true agrofood systems transition. In case the ‘Yes’ vote should win, the ban would extend from agriculture, to private use, and to the import and marketing of foodstuffs containing synthetic chemicals. Voters will also have to decide on the proposal to remove public subsidies for farmers who are not willing to convert to ecological production practices.
The initiative holds significant symbolic value as Switzerland is home to one of the most powerful agribusiness corporations in the world, Syngenta. Recently acquired by ChemChina, Syngenta was recently at the center of the Paraquat Papers scandal, named after the herbicide produced by the company and considered one of the most toxic and dangerous in the world.
The Swiss initiative is intended to inspire similar actions in other countries.
The president of Navdanya International, Vandana Shiva, commented: “We are members of one Earth family. Poisons and pesticides kill insects and biodiversity, they are destroying the infrastructure of life. Poisons are causing a health emergency, as chronic diseases such as cancer, autism, infertility are connected to toxins in food and environmental pollution. Through knowledge manipulation and propaganda, the Poison Cartel also undermines independent science and threatens democracy by trying to silence citizens’ efforts towards pesticide-free communities. The health of the planet, her biodiversity, our health makes poison-free food and farming a survival imperative. As our work in Navdanya over 3 decades has shown, we can grow more and better food through biodiversity-intensive, chemical-free organic farming. I congratulate and support the Swiss Referendum as a significant step towards Earth Democracy to defend the rights of the biodiversity of species, including all human beings. Poison free food and farming is our birthright.”
Navdanya International
Good news: Vandana Shiva supports our initiative! «We are members of One Earth Family. Poisons and Pesticides kill insects and biodiversity, they are destroying the infrastructure of life. Poisons are causing a health emergency. (…) (1/6) pic.twitter.com/Pg0G7ovxDH
— #PestizidinitiativeJA am 13. Juni (@LebenstattGift) June 4, 2021
The volatile nature of the pesticide dicamba has meant that it can wind up miles away from where it was sprayed.
Dicamba, and dicamba-resistant seeds, were meant to be the next huge product for Monsanto, which was bought by agrochemical giant Bayer back in 2018. But “dicamba drift,” the name for the phenomenon in which dicamba particles float through the air onto plants that have no protection against it, has affected farmers and forests across the country. Most often, we’ve seen dicamba drift pegged as a damaging agent on unprotected soybean fields, but soy is far from the only victim. A new lawsuit claims that dicamba drift leveled extensive damage on vineyards—in Texas.
When we think of American wine production we tend to think of California first, then maybe Washington state, Oregon and the Finger Lakes region of New York. But grapes are grown just about everywhere and many wine grape varieties are well suited for non-coastal environments as well. In the High Plains region of Texas, just south of the Texas Panhandle, wine grape (and wine) production has been a recent local success story; Texas wines have even won awards held elsewhere.
In the larger wine-grape-growing regions of the United States, like in Northern California, dicamba drift has not been a substantial problem. Dicamba can drift for about three miles from where it was applied, which means that any affected crops need to be within that range to be hit. Napa and Sonoma counties in California, just for example, don’t have substantial dicamba-treated crops that close to the vineyards; there’s much more money to be made in growing grapes in those counties than growing cotton or soy.
But in Texas, cotton is a major crop and can be very close to the vineyards. Those vineyards’ owners, according to a press release from the law firm that filed the case, “saw their highly productive vineyards wither and, in some cases, die as a result of the dicamba-resistant seed system’s use on over two million surrounding acres of cotton.” That release says that 57 Texas wine grape growers have filed suit against Bayer-Monsanto and BASF (which also sells dicamba products) for “hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The suit alleges that some grape growers saw a truly insane 90 percent reduction in their yield owing to dicamba drift. And grapevines, unlike some other crops, cannot simply be replanted the next year for a similar yield; they require decades to mature and produce the right quality of fruit for some wines.
The European Federation of Food, Agriculture and Tourism Trade Unions (EFFAT) has called for an immediate ban on glyphosate-based herbicides and other harmful pesticides.
In a press release on Friday EFFAT stated “Protecting agri-workers’ health is EFFAT’s number one priority. EFFAT calls for an immediate ban on glyphosate in the renewal process, which ends in 2022. EFFAT also calls for more investments in the promotion of alternatives to the use of glyphosate and other harmful pesticides and urges a clear governance in charge of a smooth transition with the involvement of Trade Unions. Existing jobs must be protected and new quality ones created.
“The newly adopted position on the issue responds to EFFAT’s commitment to a more sustainable agriculture which underpins, inter alia, free trade agreements with binding requirement to respect highest environmental and social standards, investments in workers’ skills, social protection and research and development towards sustainable pest management.
“As sufficient evidence exists on the risks related to the use of glyphosate for workers, human health and biodiversity, EFFAT calls for the immediate ban of glyphosate as an active substance in herbicide products in the renewal process which is expected to end in 2022. The precautionary principle should guide EFSA and ECHA assessments.
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“If a transition period is to be set, it should be as short as possible and only apply for limited cases in professional use, whilst for uses in public areas, private gardens, railway tracks, desiccation, and all cases where Integrated Pest management (IPM) can be used, the ban should apply immediately. In any case, there should be no more use of glyphosate in Europe from 2024.
“EFSA, ECHA and the European Commission should carry out their assessment in atransparent and reliable way, free of the influence of the agro-chemical industry. The protection of agricultural workers’ health and safety must be considered as one of the main priorities throughout the scientific evaluation that will guide the process. The use of Personal protective equipment (PPE) should not be given a prominent position in the scientific assessment, as evidence shows that PPE is not always available, and its effectiveness is often over-estimated.
“Alternatives to the use of glyphosate and other harmful chemicals already exist and must be further promoted. This includes agronomic practices, mechanical and biological weed control, animal grazing and natural herbicides.
“A 13-week pilot study run by the Ramazzini Institute in Bologna in 2019 demonstrates that exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides from prenatal period to adulthood induced endocrine disruptive effects and altered reproductive developmental parameters in male and female rats. A recent study has proven glyphosate acts as an endocrine disruptor in the case of exposure during pregnancy.
“EFFAT supports the ambitious environmental objectives of the Green Deal and the Farm to Fork strategy, including the 50% reduction target for use and risk of pesticides by 2030.1 However, acting solely at a European level will not be sufficient to protect consumers’ health, safeguard our ecosystems and biodiversity and prevent soil erosion. On the contrary, it may affect jobs and the competitiveness of the EU agriculture sector. A vision towards a more sustainable agriculture without glyphosate and other hazardous chemical must be pursued at a global level. The EU should be at the forefront of this radical change, since the decisions taken in the EU will also have a substantial impact in other countries.
“It is not acceptable that harmful pesticides already banned in the EU keep being produced and exported by European agro-chemical companies. Foodstuff produced using pesticides banned in Europe should not enter the EU market.
“If the EU were to adopt a different approach to Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), this could contribute to building a more sustainable vision for the agriculture sector. Agriculture and food always require specific attention in the negotiation of FTAs, as the economic, social and environmental sustainability of these sectors is fragile and easily disrupted. Moreover, the respect of equal environmental and social standards must be a precondition to engage in negotiations.”
RFK, Jr. and Black Warrior Riverkeeper Nelson Brooke on Holding Corporate Polluters Accountable
RFK, Jr. and Black Warrior Riverkeeper Nelson Brooke on Holding Corporate Polluters Accountable
Listen as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. interviews Riverkeeper Nelson Brooke, spokesman and patrolman for the Black Warrior River watershed in Alabama, on how he is fighting back against powerful, entrenched interests.
The Black Warrior Riverkeeper organization is the muscle that help keep Alabama’s watershed clean by standing up to major polluters, holding them accountable when state and federal agencies fail to act.
Riverkeeper Nelson Brooke, spokesman and patrolman for the Black Warrior River watershed in Alabama, told Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the “RFK Jr The Defender Podcast” that in the south, elected officials and politicians have handed the keys to polluters and allowed them to get rich by polluting the state and sickening its citizens.
Brooke said:
“A lot of us don’t even realize that we’re unfortunately being exposed to all of this stuff. So we’re having to fight really hard to educate the public about all these problems and fight these really entrenched, powerful interests who are used to getting their way. And unfortunately, that comes with fighting the elected officials and the regulatory agencies that are also essentially bought and paid for. They’re captured as a part of this fossil fuel pollution-generating wealth machine.”
The Black Warrior Riverkeeper uses the Clean Water Act and other environmental statutes to hold corporate polluters accountable in federal court. They often build their cases by collecting water samples from pipes that discharge pollution, and have the samples analyzed in a lab.
One of the biggest polluters in Alabama is the coal industry. The coal ash generated by power plants is incredibly toxic, said Brooke. And it’s not just a local issue — it’s a global problem, as the coal ash is shipped all over the world.
The organization works with folks from all backgrounds, connecting around the common belief that we all have a right to clean water, and we shouldn’t have to fight for it. They are looking to the future and fighting for a better one. Their goal is to leave the state better than they found it for future generations, Brooke said.
Glyphosate-based herbicides such as Roundup activate mechanisms involved in cancer development, including DNA damage – and these effects occur at doses assumed by regulators to have no adverse effects, a new study shows. The DNA damage was caused by oxidative stress, a destructive imbalance in the body that can cause a long list of diseases, GMWatch reported Tuesday.
The study also found that the isolated active ingredient of Roundup – glyphosate alone – damaged DNA. This finding, according to the EU’s pesticide law, should result in a ban on glyphosate and all its formulations. In addition, the results obtained in the study could strengthen the legal cases of the cancer sufferers in the US who are suing Bayer/Monsanto because they believe that exposure to Roundup caused their disease. Three such cases have already been decided in favour of the plaintiffs.
The new study is currently published on the pre-print website bioRxiv and has not yet been peer reviewed.
How the study was done
The new study, led by Dr Michael Antoniou and Dr Robin Mesnage at King’s College London, builds on the findings of a previous study by the same authors. In the previous study, the researchers compared the effects in rats of a Roundup formulation, MON 52276, with those of its “active ingredient”, glyphosate, tested alone. The findings showed that glyphosate and Roundup herbicide, given at doses that regulators say are safe, resulted in the animals suffering gut microbiome disturbances and oxidative stress, with indications that the liver was affected and possibly damaged.
In the followup study, the researchers analysed the liver tissue from the same rats to see if indeed damage had occurred.
The researchers carried out some of the standard tests that regulators require the pesticide industry to conduct to gain market authorisation for their products – namely blood biochemistry and kidney and liver histopathology (microscopic examination of tissue).
They also carried out in-depth tests (molecular profiling) that are not demanded by regulators or typically carried out by the industry. One type of test looked for adverse effects at a profound molecular level of biological functioning through analysis of gene expression (transcriptomics) and epigenetics (DNA methylation) in the liver and kidneys. Another type of test, using specialised genetically engineered cell lines, was intended to highlight changes in function linked with cancer formation.
In addition, the researchers carried out tests that can detect direct damage to DNA.
Roundup causes fatty liver disease – confirmed
The standard tests, histopathology and blood biochemistry analysis, found adverse effects from the Roundup treatment, namely a dose-dependent and statistically significant increase in fatty liver disease and liver cell death.
The finding of fatty liver disease from exposure to the MON 52276 formulation of Roundup confirmed the same researchers’ previous observation that an ultra-low dose of another Roundup formulation, Roundup Grand Travaux Plus, administered to the same strain of Sprague-Dawley rats over a 2-year period, caused non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
An increase in liver and kidney lesions was also detected in animals treated with glyphosate, although this did not reach statistical significance. However, the authors commented that an experiment of longer duration using more animals may have resulted in statistical significance.
Non-standard tests most revealing
Worryingly for public health, it was the non-standard molecular profiling tests that are not required by pesticide regulators that were most revealing.
First, Roundup was found to alter the expression of 96 genes in the liver specifically linked to DNA damage and oxidative stress, as well as disruption of circadian rhythms or “body clocks”. The most affected genes in liver also had their expression similarly altered in kidneys. Crucially, a core set of genes whose expression was altered by Roundup was similarly changed in the glyphosate-treated animals. This strongly suggests that the key changes in gene function reflective of oxidative stress and DNA damage was due to glyphosate and not the additional substances (adjuvants) present in the Roundup formulation.
Second, direct DNA damage to the liver was found to increase with glyphosate exposure.
These findings potentially constitute a bombshell that could end the authorization of glyphosate in the EU. That’s because the EU pesticide regulation (1107/2009) has what’s known as hazard-based cut-off criteria. This means that if a pesticide active ingredient is shown to cause a certain type of harm to health at whatever dose, it must be banned. One of the named types of harm is damage to DNA. The discovery that glyphosate alone damages DNA in a living animal should, if regulators follow the law, result in a ban on glyphosate.
Third, both glyphosate and Roundup were found to cause epigenetic changes known as DNA methylation. Epigenetics describes consists of layers of molecular structures associated with DNA that control the underlying function of genes. The defining feature of epigenetic changes is that they can alter how genes work but do not involve changes to the actual DNA sequence. These types of changes were found at over 5,000 genomic sites for glyphosate and over 4,000 for Roundup. This is a concern because such alterations are typically found at high frequency in cancer tissues.
Cancer
The researchers performed further laboratory tests in mouse cell lines, which are designed to highlight effects that can lead to cancer formation. Glyphosate and three Roundup formulations were assessed in these tester cell lines. It was found that two formulations of Roundup herbicide, but not glyphosate, activated oxidative stress and misfolded protein responses, both clear markers of carcinogenicity.
Ending animal testing not yet feasible
Interestingly, glyphosate was shown to damage DNA in living animals but not in the cell culture system. This shows that in vitro tests (lab tests not performed in living organisms) cannot fully substitute for tests in a living animal because certain effects will be missed. This is because animals (including humans) are whole organisms whose complexity cannot be replicated in a flask, petri dish, or test tube. While many people (GMWatch included) would like to see an end to animal testing, as long as pesticides and other chemicals are allowed to be released into the environment, such a move would put public health at risk.
Roundup more toxic than glyphosate
In summary, in general Roundup was found to be more toxic than glyphosate, confirming and building on previous observations. However, taken together, the results from the various assays conducted show that both glyphosate and Roundup herbicides activate mechanisms involved in cancer development, causing gene expression changes reflecting oxidative stress and DNA damage. Also, glyphosate alone was clearly able to induce DNA damage.
These findings directly challenge the global regulatory practice of only assessing the isolated declared active ingredient (glyphosate) and not the complete commercial formulations (Roundup) as sold and used.
The study further highlights the power of in-depth molecular profiling “omics” methods to detect changes that are missed by relying solely on conventional biochemical and histopathological measurements conducted in standardised industry tests on pesticide active ingredients. The study paves the way for future investigations by identifying gene expression changes and altered DNA methylation sites, which can serve as biomarkers and potential predictors of negative health outcomes resulting from exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides.
Investigating Roundup health effects in people
Commenting on the implications of the results, study lead Dr Michael Antoniou said, “The biomarkers we identified can be tested for in people, but we don’t know if this particular pattern of biomarkers is unique to glyphosate-based herbicide exposure. Thus the biomarkers would need to be correlated with a history of exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides and measurements of glyphosate in urine.
“If high levels of glyphosate were found in the urine, and this correlated with the biomarkers identified in the new study and the person’s history of glyphosate herbicide exposure, this would indicate that exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides might be responsible for any health effects that are both indicated by our findings and found in the person. These findings should be tested first by investigations of herbicide applicators, as their exposure can be high and details of the particular herbicides used are often recorded, which would enable clearer results to be obtained.”
“Safe” and “no effect” doses shown to be harmful
In the 90-day rat feeding study, different groups of animals were fed three different doses of glyphosate and the glyphosate-equivalent dose of Roundup MON 52276. The lowest dose was the concentration that regulators assume to be safe to ingest on a daily basis over a lifetime (the EU acceptable daily intake or ADI: 0.5 mg per kg of bodyweight per day). The middle dose was the dose that EU regulators concluded had no observable adverse effect (the “no observable adverse effect” level or NOAEL) in industry-sponsored rat feeding studies (50 mg per kg of bodyweight per day). The highest dose was 175 mg, the dose that US regulators concluded had no observable adverse effect.
Adverse effects were found from Roundup exposure at all dose levels in a dose-dependent fashion. These findings show that the glyphosate ADI for the EU is not safe to ingest if it comes as part of a formulated herbicide – as is the case with public exposures to herbicides. Likewise, it shows that the EU and US regulators were only able to conclude that glyphosate had “no observable adverse effect” at the levels mentioned above because the tests that they require industry to carry out are inadequate and insufficiently sensitive.
Implications for Roundup/cancer litigation
Summarising the implications of the new study, Dr Antoniou commented, “Our results are the first to simultaneously show glyphosate and Roundup toxicity in a whole mammalian model system and provide a mechanism – oxidative stress – by which DNA damage has been observed in other systems, such as mammalian tissue culture cells.
“These findings have implications for the Roundup/cancer litigation in the US. They show that glyphosate and Roundup score positive in various tests of carcinogenicity (transcriptome/epigenome changes, oxidative stress, protein misfolding, and DNA damage) in a living animal (rat) that is accepted as a surrogate for human health effects. In my view, this strengthens the case that exposure to Roundup herbicides can lead to the type of cancer suffered by many plaintiffs, non-Hodgkin lymphoma.”
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The new study:
In-depth comparative toxicogenomics of glyphosate and Roundup herbicides: histopathology, transcriptome and epigenome signatures, and DNA damage.
Robin Mesnage, Mariam Ibragim, Daniele Mandrioli, Laura Falcioni, Fiorella Belpoggi, Inger Brandsma, Emma Bourne, Emanuel Savage, Charles A Mein, Michael N Antoniou.
bioRxiv, doi: doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.12.439463
Posted April 13, 2021. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.12.439463v1
Abstract
Background Health effects from exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides is an intense matter of debate. Toxicity including genotoxicity of glyphosate alone has been repeatedly tested over the last 40 years. Contrastingly, few studies have conducted comparative investigations between glyphosate and its commercial herbicide formulations, such as Roundup. We thus performed the first in-depth comparative toxicogenomic evaluation of glyphosate and a typical European Union Roundup formulation by determining alterations in transcriptome and epigenome profiles.
Methods
Glyphosate and the European Union reference commercial formulation Roundup MON 52276 (both at 0.5, 50, 175 mg/kg bw/day glyphosate equivalent concentration) were administered to rats in a subchronic 90-day toxicity study. Standard clinical biochemistry and kidney and liver histopathology was performed. In addition, transcriptomics and DNA methylation profiling of liver and selective gene expression analysis of kidneys was conducted. Furthermore, a panel of six mouse embryonic reporter stem cell lines validated to identify carcinogenic outcomes (DNA damage, oxidative stress, and protein misfolding) were used to provide insight into the mechanisms underlying the toxicity of glyphosate and 3 Roundup formulations.
Results
Histopathology and serum biochemistry analysis showed that MON 52276 but not glyphosate treatment was associated with a statistically significant increase in hepatic steatosis and necrosis. Similar lesions were also present in the liver of glyphosate-treated groups but not in the control group. MON 52276 altered the expression of 96 genes in liver, with the most affected biological functions being TP53 activation by DNA damage and oxidative stress as well as the regulation of circadian rhythms. The most affected genes in liver also had their expression similarly altered in kidneys. DNA methylation profiling of liver revealed 5,727 and 4,496 differentially methylated CpG sites between the control group and the group of rats exposed to glyphosate and MON 52276, respectively. Direct DNA damage measurement by apurinic/apyrimidinic lesion formation in liver was increased with glyphosate exposure. Mechanistic evaluations showed that two Roundup herbicides but not glyphosate activated oxidative stress and misfolded protein responses.
Conclusions
Taken together, the results of our study show that Roundup herbicides are more toxic than glyphosate, activating mechanisms involved in cellular carcinogenesis and causing gene expression changes reflecting DNA damage. This further highlights the power of high-throughput ‘omics’ methods to detect metabolic changes, which would be missed by relying solely on conventional biochemical and histopathological measurements. Our study paves the way for future investigations by reporting a panel of gene expression changes and DNA methylation sites, which can serve as biomarkers and potential predictors of negative health outcomes resulting from exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides.
Author and pediatrician Dr. Michelle Perro discusses the impact of environmental toxins and genetically modified foods on children’s health in an interview with Robert Verkerk, Ph.D., founder, Alliance for Natural Health International.
Dr. Michelle Perro is a renowned, California-based pediatrician of some 40 years standing. She began her career in acute care, where she went on to run an emergency department and then to work with sexual assault and abuse victims, including children.
But Perro’s professional life changed dramatically in 2006. A parent of a patient introduced her to the impact to a child’s health caused by environmental toxicants and genetically modified foods which ignited her deep passion for making change. Michelle Perro hasn’t looked back since.
Perro’s book, “What’s Making Our Children Sick?,” co-authored with Vincanne Adams Ph.D. in 2018, was prompted by her horror of the change in the landscape of children’s health. It offers a “bird’s eye view” of the effects of genetically modified organisms and associated pesticides on her patient’s health and what then goes wrong.
Perros is is also a co-founder and executive director of GMO Science, a science-based website focusing on the relationships between genetic modification, environmental toxicants and health. You can also find her column, “Pediatric Pearls,” in the integrative journal, The Townsend Letter.
Perro’s newest project is linked to the launch of a new website expected in July 2021. The project will include a weekly zoom meeting aimed at empowering parents to take back the health of their children and community. Her intent is to reach more parents who need her support and vast expertise wherever they may be in the world. The new initiative will be a membership program with barriers to access removed for the financially challenged.
Perro says:
“If I could use any meme for how children are today, I would say that sick is the new normal. And sick has become so commonplace that diseases that are indeed dis-eases have become normalized, such as chronic asthma, allergies, gut issues, neurologic issues — ADHD to autism spectrum disorders. And there are many others, obesity, metabolic disturbances and every other disorder is becoming normalized because they are so commonplace.”
Science today is very good at looking at individual factors that may be contributing to children’s health issues, but they don’t look at the combined miasma of chemicals and radiation to which kids are now exposed. Every disorder mentioned has increased in recent decades and many are now at epidemic proportions. Have you noticed the difference between the kids of the ‘60s and ‘70s and those of today? They just don’t look the same anymore on the outside — and that’s before you start looking at what might be happening within their bodies.
One of the few good things one might be able to say about the pandemic is that flawed science has been widely on display. Once people become more aware of this, it’s not inconceivable that the current, almost ubiquitous, blind worship of science, regardless of its quality, the extent to which data have been massaged or its biases, might become a thing of the past.
Genetic engineering, gain of function and the V
Perro says:
“I have been concerned about genetic engineering from many perspectives. In terms of microbes, in terms of gain of function … We’ve been experimenting with microbes and making them more harmful for decades … We’ve done some pretty good damage … Trying to make organisms more lethal for warfare.
“I don’t mind sharing that I’m of the mindset that it’s a genetically engineered organism. It doesn’t act like a typical virus. It acts very uniquely.
“By the definition of what a vaccine is — these jabs are not vaccines. These are genetically produced compounds made with messenger RNA that then tells your DNA what to transcribe … Some of these medical interventions have been created using adenoviruses. Adenoviruses are common infections in kids … That they don’t react with our own DNA is misguided.”
Watch here as Perro shares a wealth of information in her very clear, “shoot-from-the-hip,” no messing style. Imagine what children’s health would look like if all pediatricians were on a similar page?
Cause and effect
All of the body systems work and communicate together forming a complex network. Unlike mainstream medical practitioners, integrative medicine physicians look at the body as a whole organism. A soul encased in a body.
Mainstream medicine is outdated and no longer relevant to the dangers facing our children today. No one is looking at environmental toxicity nor are they looking at multiple exposures. There are very few data on the “toxic soup” — the mixture of chemicals and human-made radiation sources — in the scientific literature.
Perro says:
“Mainstream medicine is outdated and no longer relevant to the dangers facing our children today. I’d say the leading cause of children’s demise right now is the alterations to the microbiota, the microbiome.”
Censorship and marginalization
Because we are a threat to the corporatocracies, it’s created a neat way to package those who oppose its narrative and create doubt about the veracity of the message from anyone who dares to speak out. Creating fear and doubt in a person’s mind is the start of when you bring them over to your way of thinking.
Perro says:
“We as integrative medicine practitioners, particularly during this particular era in this last year, have been marginalized with our integrative tools. I think it’s horrific how we’ve been marginalized to kind of promote a single-minded agenda and to discredit those of us that practice holistically. There has been a campaign to discredit and censor our group.”
She says medical education hasn’t changed much in 40 years because of the ownership by Big Pharma. M.D.s have the least knowledge of holistic health.
Perro makes a strong call for us to take back our power. The big corporatocracies are doing everything they can to remove local control of local communities. Every citizen can become an activist. Every citizen can become their own scientist. Every citizen can become their own legislator. We need to come together to form a stronger voice. There is power in positive thinking. Your brain changes your gut, your gut changes your brain. When you think that way your health will change.
Perro adds:
“By keeping us separate, by keeping us masked, they’re trying to stop us aligning … We have more power in groups and organizing ourselves … We can do something!”
That’s what we do at Alliance for Natural Health. It’s all about bottom up. It’s all about empowerment. It’s all about change.
The wireless radiation-COVID connection cannot be ignored if one is truly committed to discovering the underlying medical causes of whatever this COVID thing is. I have dedicated most of my articles to exposing the scamdemic, the fake death count, the fake numbers, the fake PCR test, the fake vaccine, the non-existent virus and more. However, I am writing this to bring some focus back to what could be a major factor in causing the genuine and legitimate illness some people have experienced from what is called COVID. Early on in the pandemic I talked about the 5G-coronavirus connection. Now, I’d like to broaden the focus to EMF (Electromagnetic Fields or Frequencies) and RFR (Radio Frequency Radiation) in general, both of which are forms of non-ionizing radiation. A study this year from January 2021 entitled “Evidence for a Connection between COVID-19 and Exposure to Radiofrequency Radiation from Wireless Telecommunications Including Microwaves and Millimeter Waves” analyzes this theme and finds some compelling evidence to support the radiation-COVID connection.
Uncovering the Wireless Radiation-COVID Connection
A hallmark of Operation Coronavirus has been the invention of an entirely new disease (COVID-19) with such broad and vague symptoms that virtually anything, but especially the common cold, flu and pneumonia, could be reclassified and recategorized as this new disease. My April 2020 article pointed out how it was crucial to avoid the trap of thinking COVID was some new thing, when there was not 1 disease and not 1 cause. That being said, it is beyond coincidence that many COVID symptoms match up with many effects of radiation exposure. The authors of the study state they have examined “a large body of peer reviewed literature, since before World War II, on the biological effects of wireless radiation that impact many aspects of our health” and that from this research they were able to discover “intersections between the pathophysiology of COVID-19 and detrimental bioeffects of wireless radiation exposure.” Pathophysiology is defined as “a convergence of pathology with physiology” and is the study of the “disordered physiological processes that cause, result from, or are otherwise associated with a disease or injury.” In simple English, the study found that many of the so-called effects or symptoms blamed on COVID are identical or remarkably similar to ones caused by wireless radiation.
Hypoxia and Hypoxemia
Let’s start with these 2 terms, hypoxia and hypoxemia, which both refer to conditions of under-oxygenation in the body. In the article Masks Cause Damage: Study Reveals Mask-Hypoxia-Blood Clot Connection, I highlighted how wearing masks limits oxygen intake which can then lead to potentially fatal blood clots. This study also found very similar effects between EMF/RFR and COVID when analyzing the blood:
“Two recent studies documented the formation of erythrocyte aggregates (Havas, 2013) and erythrocyte aggregates and echinocyte formation upon human exposure to 4G-LTE smart phone radiation (microwaves) (Rubik, 2014) … Exposure to radiation from a cell phone for two consecutive 45-minute periods caused two types of effects: initially increased stickiness of peripheral red blood cells and rouleaux formation (rolls of stacked red blood cells) and subsequently formation of echinocytes (spiky red blood cells). Similar red blood cell changes have been described in peripheral blood of COVID-19 patients (Lakhdari et al., 2020). Rouleaux formation is observed in 1/3 of COVID-19 patients, whereas spherocytes and echinocytes have been observed at variable levels. Rouleaux formation impedes the microcirculation. These blood changes may also impede oxygen transport, contributing to hypoxia, and increase the risk of
thrombosis (Wagner et al., 2013) and therefore stroke, which can manifest in COVID … In short, both RFR exposure and COVID-19 can cause deleterious effects on red blood cells and reduced hemoglobin levels contributing to hypoxia in COVID.”
Next, the study found that that oxidative stress was another indicator of a radiation-COVID connection. It defines oxidative stress as a “condition reflecting an imbalance between an increased production of ROS [Reactive Oxygen Species] and an inability of the organism to detoxify the ROS or to repair the damage they cause to biomolecules and tissue”:
“Immune dysregulation … has been identified in the cytokine storm accompanying severe COVID-19 infections and generates oxidative stress (Cecchini and Cecchini, 2020). Oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysfunction may further perpetuate the cytokine storm, worsening tissue damage, and increasing the risk of severe illness and death. Similarly low-level RFR generates ROS in cells that cause oxidative damage. In fact, oxidative stress is considered as one of the primary mechanisms in which RFR exposure causes cellular damage. Among 100 currently available peer-reviewed studies investigating oxidative effects of low-intensity RFR, 93 studies confirmed that RFR induces oxidative effects in biological systems (Yakymenko et al., 2015) … Oxidative stress is also an accepted mechanism causing endothelial damage (Higashi et al., 2009). This may manifest in patients with severe COVID-19 in addition to increasing the risk for blood clot formation and worsening hypoxemia (Cecchini and Cecchini, 2020).”
Immune Dysregulation, Calcium Levels, Heart Disease and More
The study proceeds to look at all the ways that COVID elicits the same kind of response as EMF radiation, including the immune response, intracellular calcium levels, heart disease and arrythmias. In all cases, there is strong evidence of a radiation-COVID connection:
“In short, COVID-19 can lead to immune dysregulation as well as cytokine storm. By comparison, exposure to low-level RFR as observed in animal studies can also compromise the immune system, with chronic daily exposure producing immunosuppression or immune dysregulation including hyperactivation … cardiac arrhythmias are more commonly
encountered in critically ill patients with COVID … regarding RFR exposure bioeffects, in 1969 Christopher Dodge of the Biosciences Division, U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington DC, reviewed 54papers and reported that RFR can adversely affects all major systems of the body, including impeding blood circulation; altering blood pressure and heart rate;affecting electrocardiograph readings; and causing chest pain and heart palpitations (Dodge, 1969). In the 1970s
Glaser reviewed more than 2000 publications on RFR exposure bioeffects and concluded that microwave radiation can alter the ECG (electrocardiogram), cause chest pain, hypercoagulation, thrombosis, and hypertension in addition to myocardial infarction (Glaser, 1971; 1976).”
The study also specifically mentions 5G:
“Most recently, Bandara and Weller (2017) present evidence that people who live near radar installations (millimeter waves: 5G frequencies) have a greater risk of developing cancer and experiencing heart attacks. Similarly, those occupationally exposed have a greater risk of coronary heart disease. Microwave radiation affects the heart, and some people are more vulnerable if they have an underlying heart abnormality (Cleary, 1969). In short, both COVID–19 and RFR exposure can affect the heart and cardiovascular system, directly and/or indirectly.”
The Conclusion of the Study
The point of the study was not to prove causation, but rather to show there is some kind of radiation-COVID connection that needs to be further investigated. The authors write that:
“evidence from the literature summarized here suggests a connection between several adverse health effects of RFR exposure and the clinical course of COVID-19. The evidence indicates that RFR may weaken the host, exacerbate COVID-19 disease, and thereby worsen the pandemic. This evidence presented here does not claim causation. Clearly COVID-19 occurs in regions with little wireless communication. In addition, the relative morbidity caused by RFR exposure in COVID-19 is unknown. The question of causation could be investigated in controlled laboratory experiments.”
Here is their conclusion:
“We conclude that RFR and, in particular, 5G, which involves 4G infrastructure densification, has exacerbated COVID-19 prevalence and severity by weakening host immunity and increasing SARS-CoV-2 virulence by (1) causing morphologic changes in erythrocytes including echinocyte and rouleaux formation that may be contributing to hypercoagulation; (2) impairing microcirculation and reducing erythrocyte and hemoglobin levels exacerbating hypoxia; (3) amplifying immune system dysfunction, including immunosuppression, autoimmunity, and hyperinflammation; (4) increasing cellular oxidative stress and the production of free radicals exacerbating vascular injury and organ damage; (5) augmenting intracellular Ca2+ essential for viral entry, replication, and release, in addition to promoting pro-inflammatory pathways; and (6) worsening heart arrhythmias and cardiac disorders. In short, RFR is a ubiquitous environmental stressor that contributes to adverse health outcomes of COVID-19. We invoke the Precautionary Principle and strongly recommend a moratorium on 5G wireless infrastructure…”
It’s always going to be more sexy and spectacular to sell a story of a killer virus rather than explain that each individual is responsible for their own state of health according to how well they cultivate, much like a farmer, their own inner bio-terrain. It’s always going to be more preferable for Big Gov and the Corporatocracy to blame an invisible enemy rather than admit that, in their unbridled quest for domination and control, their poisoning of the environment – even if by unseen frequencies in the airwaves – is contributing to major disease and sickness in the population. It’s just too easy and convenient for the dark forces that rule this world to blame it all on a virus, especially when the alleged effects of a coronavirus so closely mimic the effects of EMF radiation. The COVID op is a chance for us to wake up to a broader picture of reality, particularly in terms of understanding health, disease, viruses, radiation and the worldwide conspiracy.
The Dimming, Full Length Climate Engineering Documentary
GeoeongineeringWatch.org is excited to announce the release of our groundbreaking documentary that conclusively exposes the existence of global climate engineering operations.
Global climate engineering operations are a reality. Atmospheric particle testing conducted by GeoengineeringWatch.org has now proven that the lingering, spreading jet aircraft trails, so commonly visible in our skies, are not just condensation as we have officially been told. Over 75 years ago global powers committed the planet and populations to a climate engineering experiment from which there is no return. The intentional dimming of direct sunlight by aircraft dispersed particles, a form of global warming mitigation known as “Solar Radiation Management”, has and is causing catastrophic damage to the planet’s life support systems. The highly toxic fallout from the ongoing geoengineering operations is also inflicting unquantifiable damage to human health. Why aren’t scientists or official sources disclosing the ongoing climate engineering operations? Who is responsible for carrying out these programs? What will the consequences be if geoengineering / solar radiation management operations are allowed to continue? The Dimming documentary will provide answers to these questions and many more. Thank you for viewing and for notifying others of The Dimming film release.
[As a service to protect truth from censorship and to share widely, mirrored copies of this video are available at Truth Comes to Light BitChute and Lbry/Odysee channels. All credit, along with our sincere thanks, goes to the original source of this video. Please follow links provided to support their work.]
Geoengineering is wreaking havoc all over the world, from fires to ice.
After the passing of the recent engineered winter weather onslaught on Northern California, the climate engineers are yet again cutting off the flow of precipitation to parts of the US West.
What will be left after the weather-makers have wrought their decimation on formerly thriving forests? Scorched mountains, ridges and canyons, all of it devoid of life.
Above it all the atmospheric aerosol dispersions continue unabated. The new installment of Into The Wild is below.
EPA Approves Chemical ‘Air Treatment’ Against COVID, Despite Known Health Hazards
Georgia and Tennessee are first states to gain approval to diffuse a chemical known to trigger asthma and other serious respiratory illnesses throughout schools, healthcare and food processing facilities and intrastate transportation.
In mid-January, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved requests from two southern states (Georgia and Tennessee) asking for an emergency exemption that would allow them to aerosolize selected indoor spaces with an antiviral “air treatment” called Grignard Pure.
Grignard Pure is a nanoparticle-based product. Its active ingredient is a substance called triethylene glycol (TEG).
The EPA’s approval slid in under Section 18 of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), which allows the agency to green-light pesticides for unregistered uses in defined geographic areas for up to a year during public health emergencies deemed “urgent” and “non-routine.”
Grignard Pure contains TEG as a standalone chemical compound, but TEG is also a component of some polyethylene glycol (PEG) compounds (those of low molecular weight).
An estimated 72% of the general population has anti-PEG antibodies (including elevated levels in 8% of Americans) that can set those individuals up for adverse reactions when later exposed to PEG-containing substances.
Pharmaceutical and biotech companies, acutely aware of the correlation between anti-drug antibodies and increased adverse effects, acknowledge that the phenomenon poses a “vexing” and “serious” clinical problem — one that has come into sharp relief as recipients of COVID mRNA injections experience severe allergic reactions.
In light of the interrelationship between PEG and TEG, the planned diffusion of nanoparticle-based TEG in public spaces — including through building heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems — introduces important new questions: Could individuals already sensitized to PEG go into anaphylaxis when they inhale TEG? Or conversely, might people who are exposed to aerosolized TEG then become sensitized to PEG — and run the risk of an adverse reaction when they subsequently encounter a PEG-containing mRNA injection or another “PEGylated” drug?
The newest kid on the block: ‘atmospheric viricides’
The Grignard company describes itself as “an innovative leader in specialty chemical solutions for every industry need,” ranging from precision cleaners and wastewater treatments to “atmospheric effects” for the entertainment industry. In fact, the company’s Grignard FX branch is North America’s “largest producer of theatrical fog and haze fluids” for movies, stadium concerts and theater, as well as being the manufacturer of stage blood promoted as “so realistic they will freak out.”
The company now intends to parlay its extensive theatrical experience into the realm of atmospheric viricides, promising “a light atmospheric haze throughout an indoor space that inactivates enveloped viruses such as the novel coronavirus on non-porous hard surfaces and in the air.”
According to the EPA, the Grignard Pure product has the ability to “permeate and kill. . . over 98 percent of COVID-19 [virus] particles.” Dispersal of Grignard Pure is proposed “via a building’s HVAC system, or using conventional haze/fog machines typically deployed in entertainment venues and in fire training.”
In an example of the revolving regulator-industry door, a four-decade veteran of EPA pesticide regulation is now a leading consultant for Grignard, helping the company market the anti-COVID fluid as the solution to a “critical challenge.”
Meanwhile, outgoing EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler touted Grignard Pure as a “first-of-its kind” tool to “help fight the spread of the novel coronavirus,” vowing in the agency’s press release that “There is no higher priority for EPA than protecting the health and safety of Americans.”
Respiratory irritant
EPA’s emergency go-ahead permits Georgia and Tennessee to diffuse Grignard Pure continuously in “breakrooms, locker rooms, bathrooms, lobbies, elevators, eating areas and food preparation areas” in government, health care and food processing facilities as well as intrastate transportation — anywhere “where people are conducting activity deemed essential by the state.”
The EPA endorsed the product’s emergency use in food preparation and eating areas despite warnings in the triethylene glycol safety data sheet not to store TEG “near food, foodstuffs or potable water supplies.”
Did the EPA conduct an objective assessment of benefits versus risks? The agency’s press release does not say, nor does it include any warnings other than a one-sentence statement that “TEG may be an irritant for sensitive populations.” (Canadian fog and smoke safety guidelines for the live performance industry, on the other hand, specify that high-risk individuals — such as children, pregnant women and people with asthma or serious illnesses — should avoid exposure).
But if the EPA is unconcerned about the known short-term effects of exposure to glycol-containing fluids (including symptoms that sound a lot like COVID) or the potential for longer-term harm, the American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (ACAAI) is much more up front about the risks. Addressing glycol-reliant fog machines, the ACAAI states:
“In people with asthma and airways hyper-reactivity, the irritant effect of short-term exposure to water-based fog machines — particularly when the chemical glycol is used — could trigger acute asthma symptoms including cough, wheeze, chest tightness and shortness of breath. Even in a person without asthma, short term exposure to glycol-containing fog machines can be associated with headaches, dizziness, drowsiness, and eye irritation. Prolonged exposure to this substance in a person with asthma could trigger even more severe respiratory difficulty and could cause bronchitic symptoms even in those without asthma. Long term exposure to smoke and fog can result in upper airway and voice symptoms as well, while extended (multi-year) exposure … has been associated with both short-term and long-term respiratory health problems.”
Confusingly, the TEG safety data sheet warns that “repeated excessive aerosol exposures may cause respiratory tract irritation and even death” but reports “no relevant information found” pertaining to respiratory toxicity. This may be because most TEG toxicity studies have focused on oral or dermal exposures, rather than inhalation, and primarily have studied reproductive endpoints or carcinogenicity.
The EPA undoubtedly is aware that inhalation exposures can produce different results than oral or dermal routes of administration. A 2007 study of TEG toxicology — though premised on the now obsolete assumptions that “aerosol exposure is not a usual exposure mode” and that TEG exposure is “mainly occupational” — concluded that “repeated exposures to a TEG aerosol may result in respiratory tract irritation, with cough, shortness of breath and tightness of the chest.”
Another study conducted in 2019 reported that rats exposed to an aerosol combination of TEG and a disinfectant (benzalkonium chloride) for two weeks exhibited severe respiratory symptoms as well as “significant ulceration and degenerative necrosis … in the nasal cavities.”
A mouse study found that mice exposed to “respirable aerosols” of TEG also manifested a number of “nonspecific indications of toxicity,” including irritation, fluid imbalance, liver dysfunction and decreased body weight, along with “unexplained mortality” in female mice two to three days after exposure to the highest concentration of TEG.
What about the nanoparticles?
In September 2020, Brazilian researchers published an extensive discussion of nanotechnology “for COVID-19 virus management.” Although eager to play up nanotechnology’s current and potential anti-COVID applications — including in disinfectants, personal protective equipment, nano-based sensors, “enhanced activity” drugs and nano-based vaccines — the authors also acknowledged some “bottlenecks,” one of the major ones being to ensure nanomaterials’ safe use!
A key observation by the Brazilian authors is that most studies only evaluate nanoparticle biocompatibility in vitro (that is, in a petri dish), rather than in vivo (in actual animals or humans). They state that without high-quality in-vivo studies, it is impossible to fully understand “the toxicokinetic behaviour of the nanoparticles in the body, especially for long-term exposure.”
Elaborating, the Brazilian researchers said: “Due to the multifaceted interactions between nanomaterials and biological systems (in vivo), it is very challenging to foresee the behaviour of these materials under physiological conditions,” particularly given that “[t]he fate and behaviour of nanomaterials in the body can … change when they reach blood circulation”
These interactions — critical to the production of adverse events — are, as yet, poorly understood.
As far as scientists in the burgeoning field of nanotechnology are concerned, the sky’s the limit for nanotech applications. However, these same experts also freely admit that nanoparticles have toxic effects that are “a strong limiting factor” hindering their wider use:
“The small size of NPs [nanoparticles] allows them … to be carried by the bloodstream and lymph stream to different organs and tissues, including the brain, heart, liver, kidneys, spleen, bone marrow, and nervous system … Experiments modeling the toxic effects of NPs on the body have shown that NPs cause thrombosis … , inflammation of the upper and lower respiratory tracts, neurodegenerative disorders, stroke, myocardial infarction, and other disorders. Note that NPs may enter not only organs, tissues, and cells, but also. . . mitochondria and nuclei; this may drastically alter cell metabolism and cause DNA lesions, mutations, and cell death.”
Unanswered questions
TEG is not a new substance. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, for example, doctors working on infant hospital wards explored the use of triethylene glycol vapors as “a method of disinfecting air in closed and heavily contaminated spaces.”
Reporting on one study’s disappointing results, which deemed TEG ineffective in preventing airborne transmission, the clinicians concluded that glycol vaporization in public buildings was “not yet ready for general use.”
Thanks to 21st-century developments in polymer chemistry and nanotechnology, TEG has now circled back around in the form of Grignard Pure — although the latter likely bears scant resemblance to the TEG vapors used in the 1950s.
Unfortunately for the Georgia and Tennessee residents who are about to be continuously exposed to Grignard Pure (with Nevada possibly being next in line due to heavy lobbying by Las Vegas entrepreneurs), neither Grignard nor the EPA are addressing the thorny safety issues of potential TEG-PEG cross-reactivity, toxic buildup of nanoparticles in the body or synergistic toxicity from TEG-nanoparticle interactions.
It is unclear whether the EPA provided an opportunity for public comment before rushing to approve Grignard Pure. Regardless, concerned citizens may wish to ask the agency some pointed questions about which safety data did — or did not — factor into its decision and how it plans to protect the health and safety of Americans.
A Death, Another Settlement and Thousands of Claims Pending as Bayer Tries to End Roundup Litigation
Seven months after Bayer AG announced plans for a sweeping settlement of U.S. Roundup cancer litigation, the German owner of Monsanto Co. continues to work to settle tens of thousands of claims brought by people suffering from cancer they say was caused by Monsanto’s weed killing products. On Wednesday, one more case appeared to find closure, though the plaintiff did not live to see it.
Lawyers for Jaime Alvarez Calderon, agreed earlier this week to a settlement offered by Bayer after U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria on Monday denied summary judgment in favor of Monsanto, allowing the case to move closer to a trial.
The settlement will go to Alvarez’s four sons because their 65-year-old father, a longtime winery worker in Napa County, California, died just over a year ago from non-Hodgkin lymphoma he blamed on his work spraying Roundup around winery property for years.
In a hearing held in federal court Wednesday, Alvarez family lawyer David Diamond told Judge Chhabria that the settlement would close out the case.
After the hearing, Diamond said Alvarez had worked in the wineries for 33 years, using a backpack sprayer to apply Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicides to sprawling acreage for the Sutter Home group of wineries. He would often go home in the evenings with clothing wet with herbicide due to leaks in the equipment and weed killer that drifted in the wind. He was diagnosed in 2014 with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, undergoing multiple rounds of chemotherapy and other treatments before dying in December 2019.
Diamond said he was happy to settle the case but has “400 plus” more Roundup cases still unresolved.
He is not alone. At least half a dozen other U.S. law firms have Roundup plaintiffs they are seeking trial settings for in 2021 and beyond.
Since buying Monsanto in 2018, Bayer has been struggling to figure out how to put an end to the litigation that includes more than 100,000 plaintiffs in the United States. The company lost all three trials held to date and has lost the early rounds of appeals seeking to overturn the trial losses. Juries in each of the trials found that Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicides do cause cancer and that Monsanto spent decades hiding the risks.
In addition to efforts to resolve claims currently pending, Bayer also hopes to create a mechanism for resolving potential claims that it could face from Roundup users who develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma in the future. Its initial plan for handling future litigation was rejected by Judge Chhabria and the company has yet to announce a new plan.
The long-anticipated draft biological evaluation released by the EPA found that 1,676 endangered species are likely to be harmed by glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup, the world’s most-used pesticide.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a draft biological evaluation last week finding that glyphosate is likely to injure or kill 93% of the plants and animals protected under the Endangered Species Act.
The long-anticipated draft biological evaluation released by the agency’s pesticide office found that 1,676 endangered species are likely to be harmed by glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and the world’s most-used pesticide.
The draft biological opinion also found that glyphosate adversely modifies critical habitat for 759 endangered species, or 96% of all species for which critical habitat has been designated.
“The hideous impacts of glyphosate on the nation’s most endangered species are impossible to ignore now,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Glyphosate use is so widespread that even the EPA’s notoriously industry-friendly pesticide office had to conclude that there are hardly any endangered species that can manage to evade its toxic impacts.
Hundreds of millions of pounds of glyphosate are used each year in the U.S., mostly in agriculture but also on lawns, gardens, landscaping, roadsides, schoolyards, national forests, rangelands, power lines and more.
According to the EPA, 280 million pounds of glyphosate are used just in agriculture, and glyphosate is sprayed on 298 million acres of crop land each year. 84% of glyphosate pounds applied in agriculture are applied to soy, corn and cotton, commodity crops that are genetically engineered to tolerate being drenched with quantities of glyphosate that would normally kill a plant.
Glyphosate is also widely used in fruit and vegetable production.
“As we prepare to feast on our favorite Thanksgiving dishes, the ugly truth of how harmful industrial-scale agriculture has become in the U.S. has never been so apparent,” said Burd. “If we want to stop the extinction of amazing creatures like monarch butterflies, we need the EPA to take action to stop the out-of-control spraying of deadly poisons.”
The EPA has, for decades, steadfastly refused to comply with its obligation under the Endangered Species Act to assess the harms of pesticides to protected plants and animals. But it was finally forced to do this evaluation under the terms of a 2016 legal agreement with the Center for Biological Diversity.
Emails obtained in litigation brought against Monsanto/Bayer by cancer victims and their families have uncovered a disturbingly cozy relationship between the agency and the company on matters involving the glyphosate risk assessment.
In one example, when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced it would be reviewing glyphosate’s safety, an EPA official assured Monsanto he would work to thwart the review, saying, “If I can kill this, I should get a medal.” The Health and Human Services review was delayed for three years.
Monsanto/Bayer has also enjoyed broad support from the Trump White House. A domestic policy advisor in the Trump administration stated, “We have Monsanto’s back on pesticides regulation.”
Earlier this year, relying on confidential industry research, the EPA reapproved glyphosate. The EPA’s assessment contradicts a 2015 World Health Organization analysis of published research that determined glyphosate is a probable carcinogen.
President-elect Joe Biden has already tapped Michael McCabe, a former consultant to chemical giant DuPont, to join his Environmental Protection Agency transition board, drawing broad outrage, including from Erin Brockovich.
Parents of Brain-Injured Child Sue Pesticide Maker for ‘Selfish, Greedy, Malicious’ Manipulation of Science
For the second time in under a month, parents of a brain-injured child have sued the maker of the pesticide chlorpyrifos, claiming the company not only caused their child’s injuries, but did so despite knowing its product could cause brain damage in children, including unborn children whose mothers had come in contact with the chemical.
On Tuesday, Carmela Zamora Avila and Reymundo Arciniega Herrara sued Corteva, Inc. (formerly Dow) in California Superior Court. In the complaint, the parents, both farmworkers, allege their daughter Britney, now 13, was exposed to chlorpyrifos in utero and that as a result, she now has autism, obesity and vision problems.
Chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate linked to neurological damage in children and fetuses, is widely used on common fruits and vegetables.
Last year, California banned the chemical. In February 2020, Corteva said it would no longer sell the pesticide — citing financial, not safety reasons. Other manufacturers however, including Gharda Chemicals, continue to make and sell chlorpyrifos-based pesticides.
According to the lawsuit filed by Avila and Herrara, six years before their daughter Britney was conceived, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducted a thorough review of data submitted by Dow and determined that chlorpyrifos is toxic to the developing nervous system and brain of mammals and children and that, “therefore, an additional safety factor was required for uses that might expose children to chlorpyrifos.”
The EPA subsequently banned chlorpyrifos for residential use, but continued to allow its use for commercial agriculture. That’s how Britney’s mother was exposed — she picked grapes and cleaned grapefruit fields as an agricultural field worker and as a packing house worker during her pregnancy, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit alleges that for decades, Dow knew that chlorpyrifos could harm children:
“Beginning in the 1980s and continuing into the 1990s and 2000s, Dow engaged in a pattern of conduct designed to hide the dangers of chlorpyrifos from its customers and the general public. At best, this conduct could be characterized as the negligent failure to test for certain specific harms or to appreciate and take appropriate measures to protect from those harms associated with chlorpyrifos. At worst, it amounted to selfish, greedy, malicious, and willful manipulation of the scientific data and the public’s perception of the harms of Lorsban—that is, chlorpyrifos and chlorpyrifos oxon.”
“For years, the EPA and state and federal lawmakers have chosen to protect Big Chemical’s profits over the health of our children,” said Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman of Children’s Health Defense. “This leaves parents no choice but to pursue justice through the legal system for children whose lives have been devastated by Dow’s chlorpyrifos, a known neurotoxin.”
In September, parents of another child, also in California, sued Corteva alleging their son suffered “severe neurological injuries … as a result of his in utero, infant and ongoing exposure to the pesticide chlorpyrifos and its more toxic oxygen analog, chlorpyrifos oxon.”
Environmental activists have for years fought for a federal ban on chlorpyrifos. Near the end of the Obama administration, they won a legal battle that resulted in a decision forcing the EPA to ban the chemical. But in the first year of the Trump administration, newly appointed EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt revoked the ban, despite the lack of any new scientific assessment to justify his decision, according to an article in the National Law Review.
In 2019, EU countries banned chlorpyrifos. In the U.S., Hawaii passed a ban that will take effect in 2022. As the Washington Post reported earlier this year, New York lawmakers also approved legislation to ban the pesticide by late 2021. Gov. Andrew Cuomo vetoed that legislation late last year, but directed the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation to phase in a ban in coming months through a public rulemaking.
All Sickness Should Be Considered a Consequence of Starvation or Poisoning Until Proven Otherwise
“…the viruses that we are told will kill us all are actually not potent enough to grow on and kill a sample of egg tissue in the laboratory — unless the virologist first starves (withdraws nutrients from the tissue culture) and poisons (with antibiotics and strong oxidizing agents like bleach) the tissues.”
“,,,The point is, sickness should be considered a consequence of starvation or poisoning until proven otherwise. The bacteria are there to clean up the dead tissue; the “viruses” arise to communicate the type of starvation or poisoning that has occurred.”
A realistic understanding of how and why any living organism gets sick must start with the idea that starvation and poisoning are two main causes. In a remarkable ironic twist, this fact is actually demonstrated in the practices of modern virology.
If we investigate the question of how virologists “prove” that a virus causes disease, it goes like this. A virologist takes a sample from a sick person, usually either mucus, lung secretions, blood or urine. Then they centrifuge this mixture of cellular debris, viruses, bacteria, possibly fungal components, genetic material and whatever toxins were present in the person who is sick. The centrifuged components are then inoculated on a tissue culture usually derived from monkey kidney cells, fetal tissue, cancer cells or egg yolks. Then, and this is key, the virus is not able to grow on the tissue culture if it is simply inoculated onto the tissue. In other words, the viruses that we are told will kill us all are actually not potent enough to grow on and kill a sample of egg tissue in the laboratory — unless the virologist first starves (withdraws nutrients from the tissue culture) and poisons (with antibiotics and strong oxidizing agents like bleach) the tissues. The tissue, of course, disintegrates into its myriad cellular components, spewing out its genetic material into the final unpurified mess. Interesting to note is that when one does a careful control and uses saline as the initial inoculant, the starved and poisoned tissue is killed and disintegrates in the same fashion. It is not the “virus” that is killing the tissue, it is the starving and poisoning. Somehow, this has escaped the attention of the entire medical community.
So it is with us. When we are starved — for nutrients, love, acceptance, warmth, shelter, security, peace, cholesterol, minerals and many, many other things — we get sick. This outcome has been proven over and over again with such diseases as scurvy, beriberi, pellagra and many others. Then, as in the viral culture, if one introduces a toxin, the starved organism will deteriorate and sicken even more. The type of poisons are many; it could be glyphosate, arsenic, lead, mercury, aluminum in vaccines or in the air, or the many forms of electromagnetic-field poisoning that is threatening our world. The point is, sickness should be considered a consequence of starvation or poisoning until proven otherwise. The bacteria are there to clean up the dead tissue; the “viruses” arise to communicate the type of starvation or poisoning that has occurred.
Welcome back to New World Next Week — the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news. This week:
in relation to viruses is a phrase used by naturopathic practitioner Dr. Robert Young, whose research shatters the official coronavirus narrative. Young has recently been outspoken in his quest to alert people to the real nature and cause of COVID. Via his blog and various interviews (here, here and here), Young has been revealing that COVID not associated with any virus, but rather is associated pathological blood coagulation due to toxicity. Some of this toxicity is introduced right into your bloodstream via vaccines, however there are many causes of it. He views COVID as a biochemical poisoning of bodily fluids causing cellular breakdown and genetic mutation. He claims COVID symptoms are first and foremost circulatory problems. He also connects COVID to the acidity/alkalinity level inside the body. The corona effect (which I wrote briefly about in Deep Down the Virus Rabbit Hole – Question Everything) shows deformed red blood cells which indicate oxygen deprivation and radiation poisoning. What is going here? Let’s take a closer look.
Polio was Not Caused by a Virus Polio, and COVID is Not Caused by a Virus Either
Before we get into COVID, let’s go back in time a little. Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it, as the saying from George Santayana goes. Humanity has gone though similar pandemics in the past, but were we always told the full truth about what caused them? In this article, Young exposes how polio was not cause by a virus, despite popular belief, but was actually caused by poisoning from the pesticide DDT. Remember too that the cancer-causing monkey virus SV-40 (Simian Virus 40) was found in all polio vaccines administered to Americans up until around 1963. Young writes:
“I am suggesting in this article that there are significant findings based on historical and past and current research, including my own research that the theory of Polio and possibly other modern-day diseases, such as Post-Polio Syndrome, Polio Vaccine-Induced Paralysis, Legionnaires, CNS disease, Cancer and AIDS may be caused by acidic chemical poisoning from DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) and other related DDT pesticides, acidic vaccinations, and other factors including lifestyle and dietary factors rather than from a lone infectious Poliovirus.”
“Farr’s Law requires, for an epidemic to be a valid example of contagion, that the epidemic increase its incidence rates exponentially. Since polio has been ubiquitous since the beginning of human history, its incidence rate should have peaked long ago and universal immunity conferred, if immunity was ever required, and if the poliovirus was actually a predator.”
“The non-funded, ostracized theory of poison causality far exceeds all other theories in simplicity, exactitude, and directness regarding correlations within all data areas: dosage, physiology, etiology, epidemiology, economics, and politics.”
Likewise, Young believes there is no virus that causes COVID.
According to Dr. Young, COVID = Pathological Blood Coagulation
As I have previously stated, when it comes to COVID, there is not 1 virus, not 1 cause and not 1 disease. Part of the psy-op is to convince you that there is a single killer virus out there, and that if we could just find and isolate this virus, we could destroy it and rescue the world from this dreaded pandemic. It’s an illusion.
Young reveals that what the WHO has called “COVID” is a biochemical poisoning of bodily fluids causing cellular membrane breakdown and genetic mutation. This means deterioration of cell membranes, due to a toxic environment, created due to a compromised bioterrain (see here for the background on bio terrain, and the importance of terrain theory over germ theory). COVID is not a viral condition. COVID symptoms are circulatory problems that stem from pathological blood coagulation. In technical medical terms, this coagulation (lumping and sticking together of red blood cells) is known as DIC or Disseminated Intervascular Coagulation. Blood coagulation means the blood changes from a liquid to a gel or semi-solid state, forming a blood clot. This can be potentially dangerous, because when blood coagulates or clots, it can get stuck and prevent blood flow. In this state the blood does not fully and freely intake oxygen and release waste products. When blood clots, it can’t enter the capillary system to facilitate the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Young stresses that blood coagulation signals:
1. the inability of the blood to remove its waste products and pick up oxygen; and
People suffering from this kind of pathological blood coagulation will experience oxygen deprivation (hypoxia or under oxygenation). They will likely feel short of breath and have symptoms identical to high altitude sickness. Not coincidentally, this is exactly in line with what Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell from New York said when he went public months ago (during the peak of COVID fear) to tell the world about how his patients seemed to be suffering not from a viral pneumonia, but from altitude sickness.
The corona effect: spiky, crown-like cells develop and eventually become pathogenic.
Image credit: Dr. Robert O. Young
“The “Corona Effect” is the oxidation of the cellular membrane and genetic mutations which gives rise to cellular pleomorphism or biological transformation and the appearance of “crowning”, “spiking” and “knobing” projections as the microzymas or anatomical indestructible matter changes its form and its function.”
Corona is the Latin word for crown, so Young is using it to describe the spiky nature of these microzymas, exosomes or tiny particles which are budding and offshooting from the cells. Again, if you haven’t already, I suggest you read my article Deep Down the Virus Rabbit Hole – Question Everything for the background to the true nature of viruses, exosome theory and much more, since it will explain a lot of this. Young continues:
“These biological transformations of the body cells [are] the genesis of all bacteria, all yeast, all mold, all bacteriophages, all endotoxins or cell fragments, exotoxins and mycotoxins or metabolic acidic waste. The cause of pleomorphism or cellular transformations of the body cells affecting the cell membrane and its genetic matter is the result of an acidic lifestyle including diet. The disturbing contributing factors include all electrical and magnetic fields (EMF 1G to 5G), all acidic foods, all acidic fluids, all environmental toxins, including carbon monoxide, all insecticides, pesticides and herbicides found in non-organic foods (i.e., glyphosate), all acidic water (pH below 7.4), all acidic legend drugs including all antibiotics and drugs that contain HCL, all recreational drugs including marijuana (THC is an oxidant), all acidic supplements including all enzymes, all probiotics, all algae, all mushrooms, or all acidic supplements and foods, all acidic thoughts, all acidic feelings and all acidic beliefs.
This is the one cause of ALL sickness and disease and there is no other cause. Once again, the one sickness and one disease is the over-acidification of the interstitial fluids of the Interstitium due to an inverted way of living, eating, drinking, breathing, thinking, feeling and believing.”
Young then makes the startling claim that viruses do not exist. This is a little different from what others such as virologist Dr. Stefan Lanka and Dr. Andy Kaufman have said (namely that viruses exist but that there is no evidence they cause disease):
“All viruses DO NOT EXIST and therefore do NOT cause infections. All infections are born in us and from us and are outfections of the cell due to an acidic fluid environment.”
Young is strong believer in terrain theory over germ theory: that we are ultimately entirely responsible for our state of health, and that we only procure disease when we allow our inner terrain to become acidic, not only through bad food, but through a host of other possible means, including even our habitual feelings and thoughts, which have a tremendous yet often misunderstood and ignored biochemical effect on our bodies.
Young mentions how appearance of HIV and “COVID”/SARS-CoV-2 are identical to the appearance of an exosome. He also emphasizes that toxic insults like vaccines can cause blood clots (see here for list of top 10 vaccine ingredients and adjuvants, and here for a list of top 10 reasons never to vaccinate) – which are the same thing as blood coagulation.
Corona Effect: COVID is Acidic Poisoning
Young talks about how COVID is acidic poisoning: carbon dioxide poisoning, carbon monoxide poisoning, methane poisoning, lactic acid poisoning, uric acid poisoning, etc. He talks about how the largest organ of the human body is the interstitium, not the skin. The interstitium is a contiguous fluid-filled space existing between a structural barrier, such as a cell wall or the skin, and internal structures, such as organs, including muscles and the circulatory system. The interstitium is the dumping ground for metabolic waste products from the cells. Then it goes to the lymphatic fluid to be eliminated from the body. Young mentions how the body has 3 main types of fluids – intervascular fluids (fluids in the blood), intercellular fluids (fluids inside the cells) and interstitial fluids (fluids in the interstitium, surrounding the cells, which account for 50-60% of all body’s fluids). If doctors regularly tested the interstitial fluids (not just the intervascular fluids) during diagnosis, they would become aware of the deeper cause of disease, and also become aware of the ineffectiveness of Big Pharma medicines (petrochemical pills).
So What is the Solution?
As Dr. Kyle-Sidell said, giving ventilators to people with these symptoms and conditions is not helpful. In fact, it’s making things worse, because the ventilators have excessive pressure which can lead to blowing people’s lungs out and killing them. Other whistleblowers, such as New York nurse Erin Marie Olszewski, have stated that COVID patients were being killed with ventilators. The problem is not a lack of oxygen per se, but rather the inability of the body to actually intake that oxygen.
Young stresses that it makes no sense to ventilate someone with DIC. More oxygen won’t help, because the problem is in the blood; it can’t fully take in the O2 and get rid of waste products like CO2. The solution is to increase systemic circulation, alkalize the interstitial fluids and open up pathways so cells can function properly. Incidentally, he mentions that the reason hydroxychloroquine has been apparently working for many COVID patients is because it raises blood pH, thus bringing much need alkalinity to the patient’s blood. Young writes:
“There is only one treatment and that one treatment will restore health, vitality and energy to the organism (human or animal) by restoring the alkaline design of all body fluids, including the interstitial fluids that flow through every body cell that makes up every organ, gland and tissue …”
Final Thoughts
COVID is a wake up call for all of us. It is time to look deeply at the base assumptions we have taken for granted about health, medicine, the body, disease, viruses, bacteria and much more. Hopefully the world can use this crisis, manufactured as it is, to re-examine the fundamentals, so we can emerge from this less susceptible to fear, anxiety and propaganda, and more assured of our own power in our capacity to be fully in charge of our own health.
“Our patients are dying from a lack of oxygen-carrying capacity not a lack of respiratory capacity or lack of oxygen in the atmosphere or lack of oxygen in the respirator machine. They’re dying because we’re not treating the hemoglobin.” – Dr. Zach Bush
Is the approach to healing COVID19 patients with respirators all wrong?
Triple board-certified physician, Founder and CEO of ION*Biome and Executive Producer for the docu-series, Farmer’s Footprint, Dr. Zach Bush, explains why COVID19 actually isn’t a respiratory virus, explores humanity’s awakening in the global shutdown, how spraying pesticides and insecticides has increased COVID19’s impact and the use of hydroxychloroquine and cyanide poisoning kits against COVID19.
Discover what tools and methods might be the key to help heal COVID19 patients efficiently and quickly.
[1:30] Humanity’s Awakening In The Global Shutdown
-The incredible work Dr. Zach has done to further improve our connection to the earth.
-How Mother Nature has designed herself so that when there is an extreme event, she responds with more life and biodiversity.
[16:00] Why COVID19 Actually Isn’t A Respiratory Virus
-Looking at the stats of COVID19 and the fact that patients do not have a fever, do not have a low white blood cell count and do not have any change in their respiratory rate to conclude that COVID19 is a respiratory virus.
-What COVID19 actually is: a toxin poisoning to the red blood cell to a small percentage of people around the world in the cities with the highest rates of air pollution.
-Similarities between COVID19 symptoms and someone who has had cyanide poisoning; not pneumonia. (19:00)
-How pharmaceuticals create an imbalance and put people at risk for cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, and diabetes during this “COVID19 pandemic.” (24:00)
[25:00] How Spraying Insecticide Has Increased COVID19’s Impact
-How our mortality significantly went up this year due to the toxicity of the planet with all of the pollution and chemicals dumped into the environment.
-Why spraying insecticide and toxic chemicals all over and into the air to try to sterilize the environment has increased COVID19’s impact on humans.
-The importance of understanding that we are killing ourselves faster by harming the environment because our natural microbiome is what prevents disease and disorders.
[31:00] Use of Hydroxychloroquine And Cyanide Poisoning Kits Against COVID19
-Unpacking the fact that Wuhan has the most damaged ecosystem on the planet with all of the glyphosate being sprayed and has the biggest production of chemical raised pork.
-Similarities between SARS and COVID19 symptoms including the approach to stopping them.
-What a hypoxic injury is as cyanide and other toxins enter red blood cells thus making the use of a respirator useless. (33:00)
-Unpacking why COVID19 patients are not dying from a lack of respiratory capacity, lack of oxygen in the atmosphere, or lack of oxygen in the respirator machine but from their lack of oxygen-carrying capacity.
[41:00] The Man-Made Environmental Devastation Created On Farms
-How Mother Earth is doing throughout all of this as she tries to breathe through her soils and oceans.
-The devastation that our planet has gone through including the impact of Roundup being sprayed everywhere.
-Why we’ll continue to see more coronaviruses impacting humanity as our air quality continues to suffer from CO2, methane, PM2.5, and other greenhouse gases. (47:50)
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Bayer Buys Its Way Out: Some Disturbing Implications of GMOs & …
It’s been quite some time since we’ve had any stories about the ongoing debate about GMOs, but M.W. found and shared this article (thank you!) and I have to talk about it, because it raises once again a disturbing trend in modern society that I’ve talked about before, but only in a round-about way. Today I want to address it more directly (hopefully), because there’s something in this article that fell on me like an Acme anvil in a Road Runner cartoon. Here’s the article:
Here’s the central point of the matter: Bayer, whom we less-than-respectfully refer to on this site as I.G. Farbensanto, apparently bought more than just Monsanto’s GMO patents and seeds; it also bought Monsanto’s “business model” and “playbook,” not that Bayer needed any instruction on ethically questionable business practices. But hey, the Trafficantes might learn a trick or two from the Gambinos if the two families merged. IN this case, Bayer has employed the Monsanto-Agent Orange model to buy its way out of a multitude of lawsuits:
$10.9 Billion of Bayer’s capital will be forked over to resolve the Roundup-NHL litigation, but Bayer admits no wrongdoing. There will be no warning labels. $8.8-9.6 Billion will cover current cases, except Johnson, Hardeman and Pilliod, which will continue through an appeals process.
In something of a surprise, $1.25 Billion will be set aside for a separate class agreement aimed to address potential future litigation and provide medical outreach for underserved communities to detect and treat NHL that MAY have been caused by Roundup. The attorneys involved in the class action are different than the core Plaintiff attorneys who originally worked for years on the litigation (Baum Hedlund, Miller Group, etc). The original attorneys could not be pleased with this tag-on settlement term.
So one might wonder, who will decide a verdict on this class action lawsuit? Who will ultimately determine if Roundup causes cancer or not? (A reminder: It is overwhelmingly clear that it does.)
And wow, it gets juicy in the worst of ways. The class action component appears to totally undermine the original work performed in the first three trials. The determination of who wins that class action battle will no longer come from a jury, but rather a “Science Panel”.
On a press release, Bayer writes:
“Both the class and company will be bound by the Science Panel’s determination on this question of general causation, taking this decision out of the jury trial setting and putting it back in the hands of expert scientists. If the Class Science Panel determines that a causal connection between Roundup™ and NHL is not established, class members will be barred from claiming otherwise in any future litigation against the company.”
WHAT?!?
Remember, thanks to the diligent work of the attorneys and plaintiffs in all of the trials leading up to this moment, the general causality was ALREADY SETTLED in court THREE TIMES. (Italicized emphasis added)
And how convenient, too, that everyone’s attention is focused on the Fauci-Lieber-Wuhan-Baal Gates virus-and-“vaccine” scam/plandemic. But wait, there’s more, because it’s not entirely clear how that “independent panel” will be selected:
All class action litigation will be put on pause for several years while the Scientific Panel makes its decision on general causality.
To construct this panel, a mutually decided upon third party will select the members. Because that sounds insanely sketchy, the other option is that both sides will select two scientists, and those four scientists can agree upon a fifth scientist to complete the panel. Apparently, the analysis of the existing public research will take FOUR YEARS to sift through. They also may file an extension if they need more time. At that time, the panel will decide once and for all if Roundup causes cancer.
I’m hearing echoes of Winning Wisner calling out the “independent” Intertek Panel, the hired group of scientists who facilitated Monsanto’s ghostwriting of a research paper in rebuttal to the IARC classification.
My gears are grinding thinking of Monsanto’s perpetual, unfounded rebuttal that no one but them seems to understand the science, and that science is the weakness in the Plaintiff arguments. The juries called foul on that claim three times. It should be game over for that argument based on science.
Now, if you read between the lines a bit, what’s really being said here is that ordinary juries composed of ordinary people are not allowed to have opinions, much less make findings of fact, in trials involving “science.” With that, we have the erection of “authority,” in this case, “science,” and in the case of GMOs, the entire history of the discussion has been between corporate-funded “science,” which of course concluded that there was no problem with glyphosate herbicides and GMOs in general, versus independent scientists and studies that said there were. (Recall for example, that University of Iowa study on GMOS that concluded GMO yields per acre actually fell over time as costs to plant it rose:
We see much the same pattern currently, with the corporate propatainment media (and government) promoting a narrative about the Fauci-Lieber-Wuhan-Baal Gates plan-/scam-demic, versus independent voices questioning the whole narrative regarding masks, the virus itself, the way statistics have been manipulated, and now, the almost complete lack of mention of declining death rates while the media continues to hype rising numbers of diagnoses, the need for a “vaccine” while it trashes the use of hydroxychloroquine (which is, of course, a cheap drug and not an expensive “vaccine”) , the on-and-off-and-on again “reopening” of certain states or localities in response to every little twitch or wiggle on “diagnosed” covid cases.
So what’s going on?
To be succinct, and entirely serious, what’s going on is the death of civilization. Not just western civilization, but civilization itself. Why? Because science, and the free and open discussion of it, is being killed. Only approved authorities are to be considered. We are now in a state of affairs where ideology and narrative drives everything. And remarkably, there are aspects of what is happening that resemble the quackery of the “sciences in socialism”, be it Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany. Imagine, for a moment, that a really big country with a lot of people – say, China, for example – decides that GMOs are “ok” because it needs to feed its people. The chairman of the Socialist Peoples’ Parasite and Piracy Party, Wahn Beeg Rhat (thank you Uncle Scrooge and Karl Barks) and faithful lackeys, Woe Phat (thank you, Hawaii Five-O) and Zhi Ping Pong, having bet on GMOs, silence the voices of scientists raising troublesome and inconvenient “issues.” The result is little different in the socialist paradise than it is in the crony crapitalist paradise world of I.G. Farbensanto, or Baal Gates: dissent, opposing viewpoints or science, is to be suppressed to maintain the narrative and “authorities and experts” promoting it. We suffered no casualties in the border clash with India, and the dam and GMOs are entirely safe because the science is settled, because our scientists have said so. There is no link between vaccines and autism. Hydroxychloroquine is dangerous. We say so. Ignore the people who say or think otherwise.
When civilization reaches this stage, where authority trumps discussion and science, it begins to die. Think of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and the death of the Galactic Empire through incompetence and authority.
Bayer, like the Socialist Peoples’ Parasite and Piracy Party, thinks that it can buy truth, or at least enough voices to shout it down. The convergence of crony crapitalism and the Peoples’ socialism is amazing.
Civilization, on the contrary, requires truth, and truth requires integrity, something that I.G. Farbensanto, Wahn Beeg Raht and Zhi Ping Pong et al do not have.
And I didn’t even talk about the banksters, crypto-currencies, and how they’re not even currencies at all… but that’s for Monday.
In the meantime, not all is gloom and doom, for the judge involved in the case, while not a scientist, is passingly familiar with the law(one may assume, although these days this too is questionable), and may not be buying what Bayer is selling, according to this article shared by G.B.:
It’s almost that time of year again when wildfires rage throughout California with previously unseen ferocity. A multitude of factors have contributed to these extraordinarily large and intense California wildfires lately. The root cause of all these factors is the fallout from the ongoing chemtrail spraying operations. Desiccation, contaminated water, harmful UV radiation, disease, and insect infestations all contribute to these wildfires, and all are the result of chemtrail spray. Not only all that, but the chemtrail spray itself serves as an accelerant.
2018 California wildfires
Providing support for these assertions, the eminent scientist J. Marvin Herndon, PhD and his co-author, the Medical Director of the Monroe County, Florida Department of Health, Dr. Mark Whiteside have written a peer reviewed journal article titled “California Wildfires: Role of Undisclosed Atmospheric Manipulation and Geoengineering.” In this article, the authors note that chemtrails cause increases in combustibility, intensity, severity, and extent of these fires. Herndon and Whiteside write, “Adverse effects include exacerbation of drought, tree and vegetation die-off and desiccation, and unnaturally heating the atmosphere and surface regions of Earth. Forest combustibility is increased by moisture-absorbing aerosolized particles.”
California gets a lot of chemtrail spray because today’s chemtrail spraying operations have a lot to do with controlling precipitation and lots of atmospheric water comes into California from the Pacific Ocean. For more about today’s chemtrail spraying operations, please refer to the author’s new, greatly revised and expanded second edition of Chemtrails Exposed: A New Manhattan Project available now, exclusively at Amazon.
Desiccation
Today’s most common chemtrail spray is an atmospheric desiccant. These dispersed atmospheric particles dry out the air by bonding with tiny, atmospheric water particles. This often prevents atmospheric water particles from coalescing to form water droplets; therefore inhibiting rainfall. Drs. Herndon and Whiteside note that artificial high-pressure zones comprised of chemtrails sprayed along California’s coast also deny the Golden State its rainfall. Chemtrail spray has not only limited the amount of rainfall, and therefore groundwater, in coastal states like California, it has also denied California’s flora of its needed atmospheric moisture. In total, chemtrail spray has made California dry as a bone and wildfires burn better in such conditions.
Poisonous precipitation
Not only is California’s flora being denied its needed moisture, the water it does receive is often poisoned by chemtrail spray. You see, the most common chemtrail spray has been scientifically determined to be a substance known as coal fly ash. Coal fly ash is a toxic waste byproduct of the electrical power industry comprised of many different substances. A major constituent of coal fly ash is often aluminum oxide. Drs. Herndon and Whiteside write that when the aluminum oxide from the coal fly ash is mixed with ambient water, it becomes ‘chemically mobile’ and poisons plant life such as trees.
This contaminated precipitation is also altering soil pH, further weakening California’s flora. Ash is basic and its spraying has caused soils to turn from acid to basic, making it difficult for native plants to grow. This is well documented by career wildlife biologist and master gardener Francis Mangels along with his colleagues from the United States Department of Agriculture Soil Conservation service. Details are in the author’s book.
UV radiation
Marvin Herndon, PhD, Raymond Hoisington, and Dr. Mark Whiteside have co-authored another peer reviewed journal article titled “Deadly Ultraviolet UV-C and UV-B Penetration to Earth’s Surface: Human and Environmental Health Implications.” This article provides the scientific evidence for how today’s ongoing geoengineering activities are allowing harmful UV radiation to reach Earth’s surface. These types of UV radiation (UV-C and UV-B) are generally thought to be almost entirely filtered out by the ozone layer, but the evidence shows otherwise. The evidence shows that ozone depletion resulting from geoengineering activities is the reason why this is happening.
Relevant to the topic of our discussion, exposure to these types of UV radiation is harmful to plants such as trees. The authors of “Deadly Ultraviolet UV-C and UV-B Penetration to Earth’s Surface” provide scientific evidence for this, including a picture of a tree that has been damaged by harmful solar radiation.
Tree damaged by harmful UV radiation exposure
Disease and insect infestations
Once a tree is weakened by desiccation, poisonous water, and harmful UV radiation, it is more susceptible to fungal growth as well as insect infestation. Susceptibility to fungal growth from exposure to harmful UV radiation is noted by Drs. Herndon and Whiteside. In the case of insect infestations, healthy trees can successfully repel the incursions of harmful insects such as the notorious bark beetle, but weakened trees are voraciously consumed. Since 2010, the bark beetle alone has been attributed to the deaths of well over 100 million California trees. The combination of fungal growth and insect infestation has killed untold numbers of trees in California. Dead trees burn more readily than healthy trees and greatly contribute to the California wildfires.
Dead Torrey Pines w/chemtrails
Coal fly ash as an accelerant
In a 2017 interview on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory, Dr. Herndon speculated that settled chemtrail spray dust covering California’s foliage may act as an accelerant. He noted that finely dispersed atmospheric powders, even those that we might not expect, generally tend to combust. He cites the example of grain silos that explode when any type of flame or spark is present. From their paper “California Wildfires: Role of Undisclosed Atmospheric Manipulation and Geoengineering,” Drs. Herndon and Whiteside write, “Although speculative, the possibility should be considered that perhaps the aerosolized particulate matter upon settling on trees and vegetation may under some circumstances become pyrophoric, capable of ignition.” A retired Petaluma, California fire captain by the name of John Lord confirms this claim. In a 2018 corporate media hit piece as well as in a March, 2020 interview, Mr. Lord characterizes settled chemtrail spray as, “highly combustible.”
Fake news = impotent government
It is easy for today’s mainstream media to ignore the real cause of California’s wildfires. Remember – according to them, and contrary to a mountain of evidence, chemtrails do not exist. How could something that does not exist be the cause of it all? So they come forward with myriad other explanations: natural drought, faulty power lines, homeless people, climate change, etc.
The malfeasance of today’s fake news media creates a situation whereby politicians and government bureaucrats can easily attribute the wildfires to these other causes as well. They just go along with what is being reported on television. That’s politically expedient for them, but it ensures that the real root cause is not addressed and therefore nothing officially changes, the status quo remains intact, and these massively destructive wildfires continue.
References
“California Wildfires: Role of Undisclosed Atmospheric Manipulation and Geoengineering” an article by Dr. J. Marvin Herndon and Dr. Mark Whiteside, published by the Journal of Geography, Environment and Earth Science International, October 1, 2018
“Deadly Ultraviolet UV-C and UV-B Penetration to Earth’s Surface: Human and Environmental Health Implications” a paper by Dr. J. Marvin Herndon, Raymond D. Hoisington and Dr. Mark Whiteside, published by the Journal of Geography, Environment and Earth Science, March 28, 2018
“Bark Beetles and Vegetation Management in California” a report by Forest Health Protection, Region 5, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture
“Bark Beetles in California Conifers: Are Your Trees Susceptible?” A report by the U.S. Forest Service, United States Department of Agriculture, February 2015
“When the Well Runs Dry” a report by the U.S. Forest Service, United States Department of Agriculture, March 2018
“Golden State of paranoia: Internet conspiracies link wildfires to takeover schemes” an article by Lisa Krieger, published by the Lake County Record-Bee, December 3, 2018
“Retired Fire Captain John Lord As You Wish Talk Radio” a YouTube video published on the ECETI Stargate Official YouTube Channel, March 7, 2020
Bill Westrate’s home near Cassopolis is surrounded by large farms. (Bridge photo by Brian Allnutt)
CASSOPOLIS — As a young farmer, Bill Westrate would walk outside most nights with a white sheet and black light to lure swarms of insects to the side of his barn in Cass County. “It would scare most people,” he said. But he didn’t much mind the bugs that would land in his hair and crawl down his shirt.
“It was just an absolute cloud of life.”
Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Westrate would fill specimen cases with insects on his land, where he farmed corn, soy and Christmas trees. Sometimes, he would try other methods — putting ladders up to collect insects from porch lights, or using malaise traps, tents made of fine mesh that collect a variety of arthropods.
Then, a couple of years ago — while watching a local television show where someone was using a similar trap — it occurred to him: The insects that once blanketed his land were mostly gone. And he wondered what happened to them.
He began to survey his southwest Michigan farm with a closer eye. He noticed that common insects like leafcutter bees, mud dauber wasps and orb weaver spiders were vanishing. And his holly bushes and wisteria vines no longer bore fruit, suggesting a lack of pollinators.
Of course, Westrate is just one farmer. But he’s also the former president of the Michigan Entomological Society; a “citizen-scientist extraordinaire,” in the words of Jennifer Tank, a biologist at the University of Notre Dame.
And what he saw as he walked his land was in line with insect declines observed across much of the United States and Europe.
A sphinx moth from Bill Westrate’s collection. (Bridge photo by Brian Allnutt)
In one oft-cited study in Germany, for instance, total biomass of flying insects studied in preserves fell as much as 82 percent over 27 years. It wasn’t just a loss in the diversity of insect populations, but in total numbers, imperiling organisms at the base of the food web.
It’s unclear exactly what’s causing the declines. Scientists say they’re likely a result of a host of variables including habitat loss, climate change, pests, disease and new classes of pesticides such as glyphosate (the primary ingredient in the popular weedkiller Roundup) and neonicotinoids.
Together, these factors could help dramatically reorder the landscape in Michigan, affecting insects and in turn “every aspect of ecosystem function,” according to ecologist Nick Haddad of Michigan State University’s W.K. Kellogg Biological Station.
Audrey Sebold, a horticulture specialist at the Michigan Farm Bureau, notes that “most of Michigan’s fruits and many of our vegetables” require pollination from insects. Honeybees and native pollinators like bumblebees are important to fruit crops that thrive in Michigan, including tart cherries and blueberries, and vegetables such as tomatoes and squash.
Beyond the impact on agriculture and wildlife, continued declines in insect populations could lead — eventually — to “a tipping point,” said Haddad, “where we go from a habitable earth to basically uninhabitable.”
That may sound extreme, but scientists such as Francisco Sánchez-Bayo from the University of Sydney point out that with studies showing a rate of insect decline of 2.5 percent per year, “in 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none.”
Alas, not all scientists view the future as so bleak, citing both the resilience of a million-plus species of insects and a shortage of comprehensive research around the globe.
“Not going to happen,” Elsa Youngsteadt of North Carolina State University told The Atlantic of insects’ demise. “They’re the most diverse group of organisms on the planet. Some of them will make it.”
Insects are certainly diverse and adaptable, lending credence to the they-will-survive chorus. However, as a study in the journal Science showed, wildflowers have been declining in correlation with their pollinators, raising “the possibility of community-level cascades of decline and extinction.” In other words, it’s more than just bugs we have to worry about losing.
“But that’s in the future,” Haddad said. “We’re not at the extreme yet and we’ve got to head things off now…”
Preventing a worst-case scenario means getting a better picture of what’s driving the decline of insect populations.
A much-noted 2018 report in the New York Times titled, “The Insect Apocalypse Is Here,” was based on studies in Europe, which were geographically limited.
Clearly, more research is needed and likely much of it will come from “citizen scientists” like Bill Westrate, volunteers who can record insect data where they live to paint a detailed picture of what’s happening to insects in Michigan.
Butterflies and bumblebees
Haddad, the MSU ecologist, studies butterflies.
He says they provide an historically important record for documenting insect declines. “If we go back 150 years, the way people knew about the natural world is what they knew about butterflies,” he said.
Butterfly collecting has helped create a wider record of insect numbers and diversity, especially in Europe where several of the most significant studies on insect declines have taken place.
Michigan’s butterfly numbers seem only to go reliably back about seven years. But to our south, Ohio has extensive data across the state, showing losses of two percent a year, and 33 percent over 20 years, results comparable to those from the United Kingdom and northern Europe.
“Butterflies are just indicators for the rest of insects that we don’t have the ability to monitor,” Haddad said. The factors driving down butterfly numbers also could be reducing those of other invertebrates like tiger beetles and stoneflies, and probably don’t stop at the Ohio-Michigan border.
Ecologist and butterfly expert Nick Haddad of Michigan State University’s W.K. Kellogg Biological Station. (Photo courtesy of Michigan State University)
Bumblebees — the large and fuzzy cousins of honeybees — offer a better barometer of insect numbers in Michigan, but here too the news is not good. The decline of domesticated honey bees has received plenty of attention, but bumblebees are important and efficient pollinators for many crops and wild plants.
A study of bumblebees based on specimens from all Michigan counties going back to 1887 found about half of 12 species once common in Michigan were in decline by 50 percent or more. One, the rusty-patched bumblebee, is effectively extinct in the state, while American bumblebees declined 98 percent.
Tearing out fencerows, eliminating weeds
Westrate, who is now mostly retired, said he’s noticed that farms are getting bigger and growers are tearing out fencerows and woodlots that once served as wildlife corridors to make more room for crops.
He also noted increased reliance on various sprays, genetically modified crops and seed treatments that have become ubiquitous in farming communities.
These wasps are part of a collection that fills much of Bill Westrate’s dining room. (Bridge photo by Brian Allnutt)
Such crops could withstand being sprayed with Roundup, but surrounding weeds — which provided insects with food and habitat — were eradicated. The chemical has been implicated in the huge loss of monarch butterflies as milkweed plants — where monarchs lay eggs, then feed on them as caterpillars — nearly vanished from fields.
Another class of insecticides called neonicotinoids, or “neonics,” have flooded Michigan farms as a seed treatment since 2000, typically for corn and soybeans. As the name implies, neonicotinoids are chemically similar to nicotine and can work systematically through a plant, even showing up in pollen and nectar.
Farms relying heavily on neonicotinoids and glyphosate cut a wide band across southern Michigan and into the state’s thumb region.
“It’s uncanny the decline [of insects] that happens concurrent with the arrival of those two pesticides,” Haddad said. He adds, however: “I don’t think there is one smoking gun, so it’s not fair to say that, but…there’s good reason for concern.”
Some Michigan growers — including blueberry producers — may suffer pollinator declines while spraying neonicotinoids. Rufus Isaacs, an MSU entomologist specializing in pollinators, said roughly 80 percent of blueberries are pollinated by honeybees, which often are trucked in from out of state. Despite dramatic die-offs, beekeepers can usually regenerate colonies. So far, pollinator declines don’t seem to have affected blueberry production as much as unpredictable weather during flowering.
Sebolt, of the Farm Bureau, said fruit growers have good incentive to spray responsibly, so as not to hurt honeybees or other pollinators. Growers who rent honeybee hives “try as best they can, and they do a pretty good job of not spraying when the honeybees are out,” she said.
Kevin Robson, executive director at the Michigan Blueberry Commission, has been involved in efforts to protect pollinators in the state. He defends the use of neonicotinoids, citing the Environmental Protection Agency’s continued approval of most neonics as evidence of their safety and said they’re an important part of integrated pest management, which requires a range of strategies.
In Europe, some growers have argued that banning neonics could make farmers resort to even more dangerous chemicals. And, as Robson noted, neonics are “normally cheaper,” for blueberry growers, who are also dealing with labor shortages and a competitive global market for their crop.
“If they’re not able to sell their blueberries for a profit, they’re not going to be in business, anyway,” Robson said.
European bans on neonicotinoids (and glyphosate in Germany and Austria) may help Michigan farmers get a better view of what might happen if these chemicals “are removed from the landscape,” Haddad said.
A way forward
Studies in Germany and the Netherlands also show how citizen scientists can play a crucial role in monitoring insect populations. The data at the core of the New York Times story was collected by a network of volunteer entomologists in the German city of Krefeld, whose entomological society keeps records dating from the 1860s.
Technology can help as well. Isaacs, of MSU, recommends a smartphone app called Bumble Bee Watch, which allows anyone to gather photos or data and submit them to taxonomic experts for a database that tracks bumblebee numbers across the country.
The Michigan Butterfly Network organizes volunteers to conduct field counts of butterflies, similar to the Audubon Society’s “Christmas Bird Count,” one of the oldest and most successful examples of volunteer-led research.
“The best data coming out about why monarchs are declining come from these citizen science efforts,” Haddad said. It’s also a productive way for people who might be concerned about climate change to manage anxiety.
Land conservation programs might be an easier sell in farm country.
In Michigan, the Department of Natural Resources’ Large Grasslands project was created to preserve and restore prairie ecosystems. The project mostly focuses on creating habitat for birds like the Henslow’s sparrow and ring-necked pheasant. But Isaacs said such efforts are also likely to benefit insect species.
Nationally, the USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program is set to see modest increases in funding that would pay farmers to set aside environmentally sensitive land for wildlife and create corridors for the migration and dispersal of species, while helping farmers with pollination and erosion control.
This aligns with another Haddad project: creating wildlife corridors, which can be connected parkland or land along waterways to help preserve insect habitats and increase breeding populations threatened by urbanization or large farms.
Westrate, meanwhile, said he’s on board with efforts to find more folks like him — amateur entomologists happy to gather data to study insect declines, losses he still can’t seem to wrap his mind around.
He said he recalls back in the 1980s when he first noticed five-lined skinks (slinky lizards) and leopard frogs disappearing from his farm, another dramatic change that’s never been fully explained.
“But who could have imagined the insects?” Westrate said. “Who could have imagined that?”
The corona effect: spiky, crown-like cells develop and eventually become pathogenic.
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