The Royal Horticultural Society recommends glyphosate for “treatment” (poisoning) of Japanese Knotweed. Personally I’d rather breathe in the oxygen produced by carbon dioxide given off by the knotweed than have any of the “known” effects of glyphosate.
I was fascinated to learn among its many side effects, glyphosate (the primary ingredient in the weed killer Roundup) can give you goosebumps (it damned well should) and can also leave you drooling.
Other symptoms of glyphosate poisoning include:
Abdominal cramps; Anxiety; Breathing difficulty; Blue lips or fingernails (rare, but I had both when I lived in poisonous rural Bulloch County in the state of Georgia, USA); Diarrhea; Dizziness; Drowsiness; Reduced urination; Cough; Difficulty swallowing; Nausea; Vomiting; Esophageal inflammation; Blood in vomit; Stomach inflammation; Blood in urine; fluctuating blood pressure levels; Increased blood potassium level; Leukocytosis; Metabolic acidosis; Nystagmus; Mouth ulcers; Goosebumps; Salivation; Destruction of red blood cells; Respiratory failure; Kidney damage; Coma, and more …
I already knew a lot of bad shit about glyphosate before my move back to England a year ago, a move I made with a certain amount of naivety in not expecting to find it here at all. I have since learned, while it is completely banned in Belgium and its use severely restricted in many other European countries, it is just one of many poisons sprayed enthusiastically across the United Kingdom. Its most supportive partner in this poisoning of Mother Earth is none other than those United States of America.
But why am I thinking about pesticides, fungicides, rodenticides, insecticides and other poisonous topics on a bright and sunny October day in beautiful rural North Yorkshire, England? That would be because I have just been poisoned - again - as they’ve been spraying the nearby farm fields this past week.
Since I react strongly to poisonous “agricultural drift,” I didn’t need to see the trucks or planes out there to know I’d been poisoned - again. But my knowing was confirmed when a friend happened to mention she’d been riding her horse over the weekend and her “allergies” had been acting up ever since. She also said she’d seen farmers spraying in a nearby field, but - like most of us - until our conversation she hadn’t connected the dots suggesting her “allergies” were perhaps a bit more sinister.
Last week I was energetic and even a bit frisky for a woman of my years. Today I’m sitting here with a headache, constricted forehead (as I recall those very important pineal and pituitary glands are near there), nausea, a gut that wishes it didn’t have these sharp stabbing pains, itchy running eyes and itching gritty ears, plus occasional explosive bouts of dry sneezing from time along with severe fatigue and some depression.
I remind myself that bad as all this is, I’ve only suffered from glyphosate poisoning five or six times during the year I’ve now been back in England. In Georgia and Florida it was practically daily. I was bedridden much of the time during my last year there, but I used my down time wisely. I read a lot about glyphosate.
I learned that some 880 million pounds plus of Roundup is used annually in the Land of the Free alone, for broadcast weed control across general-rights-of-way, in ditches, home gardens, on lawns, in crop production, fallow fields, understory weed control in groves, vineyards, orchards, parks, and for aquatic weed control in ponds and lakes.
The newest research has shown the glyphosate in Roundup products (along with all neonicotinoid pesticides) pose unsuspected dangers to humans, especially children.
There is scientific documentation of human fetus damage from some of these poisons. And science in the states has confirmed the epidemic numbers of autistic children throughout America is a likely byproduct of chemical spraying. Research has shown a sixfold increase in risk factor for autism spectrum disorders for children of women who were exposed to organochlorine pesticides during their pregnancies.
A Harvard University released study found that exposure to pesticide residues may double a child’s risk of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Similar results hold true for the increase in asthma and allergies.
There is so much information available on this subject can anyone really no longer see that big agriculture, pharmaceutical companies, the medical industry and bought-and-paid-for politicians are merrily poisoning all of us with regard only for their own profit?
Take good old heart-attack-preventing Bayer Aspirin for example. Bayer, a pharmaceutical company founded in 1863, is a trusted corporate name to most Americans. It’s current motto is “Science Today for a Better Life,” but it is marching hand in hand with the Monsanto Company, producers of Roundup among similar products, into a future poisonous for us all.
(Don’t know what the Monsanto Company is? It’s time you did! Your life and your family’s life is at stake).
Don’t expect full disclosure when you go poking into Bayer or Monsanto’s business practices, however, as they are very clear on what is legally required for them to tell you. And that is absolutely all they will tell you, using language like “Bayer and Monsanto assume no obligation to update the information in this communication, except as otherwise required by law.”
(I expect next to hear that Bayer and Monsanto have merged with fracking concerns as they share the same kind of corporate morality.)
How can you and I and everyone around us be subjected to active poisoning without any input from us ‘poisonees’? We didn’t choose this. But we’re not kept informed about it, either. The media, fake or otherwise, just isn’t keeping environmental concerns out there front and center as hot topics. Instead it focuses on economic issues, political struggles, educational concerns, and the like. Not that these aren’t worthy of our attention. They are. But so, too, is the poisoning of our planet - and of our species!!!
And, oh yes, there’s also this: human sperm counts have plunged by nearly 60 percent in just 40 years among men and of those men who eat diets high in pesticide residue show dramatically lower sperm counts. I’ve heard one item here on the evening news about this in 2017. I’d wager I’ve heard 365 reports on the economic concerns over Brexit in that same time period.
Meanwhile, right here in North Yorkshire a “weak solution of glyphosate” (per the local council) is used to kill weeds in ditches, school grounds, playgrounds, along the base of terrace houses, on footpaths, around bus stops - in fact anywhere weeds grow. It is sprayed throughout the borough several times a year to make healthy green plants become nicely dead and brown.
Gardeners and homeowners, persuaded by advertising and unaware of the dangers, use Roundup liberally around their homes, in their gardens and their allotments, and all manner of places where their children and pets play.
Roundup today is “the most indiscriminately and extensively used chemical in agriculture and the environment,” According to Dr. Don D. Huber, professor emeritus of plant pathology at Purdue University in America. While the latest studies “show glyphosate worldwide as the most biologically disruptive chemical in our environment.”
Studies are ongoing, and have not gone unnoticed by retailers. In 2015, Lowe’s, one of America’s largest home and garden suppliers, quietly announced its intentions to pull Roundup product from its shelves in 2017. To my knowledge it hasn’t yet happened and given America’s current political climate I wonder if it will?
But the lawyers in the United States are now getting on board with television advertisements asking people who have been harmed by glyphosate to come forward and join class action lawsuits against those who produce and market it. Since it was legal action of that kind that turned the use of tobacco products around in America, many environmental activists there are hoping the same will be true with the abuse of agricultural chemicals.
People in the USA currently have ten times more glyphosate in their bloodstreams than do the people of Britain and no amount of it tucked away in our cells is good for any of us. Getting away from being poisoned was one of my main reasons for moving back to the United Kingdom because, while some folks have a high tolerance for being poisoned, I am not one of them.
Many people like me become sensitized over time to certain pesticides. Exposed once (or even a few times) without effect, we later develop a severe allergy-like response after suffering repeated exposures.
I did my own check list on these allergic responses which include: asthma (check) life threatening shock, skin irritations such as rash (check), blisters (check), open sores (check), eye, ear and nose irritation including itchy, watery eyes, grainy and itchy ears and dry sneezing (check, check and check). The only box left unchecked was that one about life-threatening shock. I can’t help but wonder when that toxic shock might show up?
Unfortunately there is no way to tell which people may develop allergies to which deadly chemicals amidst the many different kinds being haphazardly sprayed around out there. But don’t expect your doctor to pick up on you being poisoned when you present your symptoms. Most physicians have not been trained to recognize and treat pesticide poisonings or injury. Your doctor will usually see your symptoms as indicative of other illnesses, from flu to having a bad hangover.
So it’s back to you to search out the clues that only a person who has been poisoned can notice, such as nausea or headache. Vomiting or fainting can be noticed by others, however, so your condition may be taken more seriously if you manage to develop those symptoms. Given enough ongoing exposure I’m sure you’ll be able to manage it.
But if you’re over the age of 70 you’ll quite possibly be viewed as irrational when you suggest you are being poisoned. (Having a wee touch of dementia perhaps? I’m sure there’s a pill for that.) After all, elderly folks often go to their doctor with stomach complaints, dizziness, fatigue, weakness, confusion, chills or excessive sweating, chest pains or tightness, difficulty breathing, muscle cramps or aches all over the body and itchy skin.
All the above can be caused by many common complaints of the aging process - from osteoarthritis to heart problems - but they can also be caused by “agricultural drift” poisonings. And I suspect they often are, given that spray drift is one of the main sources of pesticide contamination (according to science.gov).
Since pharmaceutical companies and producers of pest killers are now sometimes one and the same, and since I know each of those industries has powerful lobbies at least in Washington, D.C., one cynically has to consider who actually benefits from all this? And there’s a lot of shape changing apparently going on around this issue at the moment.
For instance, the European Parliament just voted to re-authorise glyphosate, but with significant restrictions on its use. France, among many EU members, remains opposed to any relicensing for glyphosate’s use. Others, like the UK, are all for using it. Meanwhile, while nations struggle to find a compromise, our health is steadily being compromised.
The European Parliament has called for glyphosate “restrictions on use in agricultural fields shortly before harvesting,” noting this currently allowed practice of spraying gyphosate on wheat and other crops before harvest is “unacceptable.”
Glyphosate is often sprayed over nearly-ripened food crops to hurry along the production of grain heads. The poisoned plant puts forth a burst of energy to produce its next generation before dying. Just writing this makes me sad for those plants and their premature deaths.
The ‘Not In My Bread’ campaign has called for that ban on the use of glyphosate as a pre-harvest weed-killer in the UK, pointing out spraying wheat with a known carcinogen immediately before it heads for milling into flour is perhaps not in the best interests of the public. You think?
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has called for “full disclosure of the scientific evidence behind an assessment of glyphosate.” If approved this action will open the pesticide industry to political and public scrutiny, exposing more than a half century of unpublished, industry-funded studies and secret documents used to get pesticides authorized in the USA and other countries, including the UK.
Such full disclosure of almost all (note “almost”) scientific evidence is already a requirement for medicines, but it is not for pesticides or for genetically modified crops. If the European Pariament’s recommendation is implemented it will for the first time open up to political and public scrutiny the secret, industry-dominated and controlled process under which we’re being poisoned unaware.
You can ask your physician or poison control center to obtain the latest edition of "Recognition and Management of Pesticide Poisonings" by Donald P. Morgan, M.D., Ph.D. It is apparently available to members of the medical profession through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency or from the U.S. Government Printing Office.
Maybe they’ll send you a copy, too, but you don’t actually need it. There are vast amounts of information on this subject for those seeking it in books and online. Warning - reading these kinds of materials may cause headaches, heart pain and stomach ache.
Chronic health effects may occur years after even minimal exposure to pesticides in the environment, or can result from the pesticide residues which we ingest through our food and water. This is especially true if you happen to be a bee. The broad spectrum exposure of Roundup has already created high levels of the poison in the environment throughout the year, with especially high concentrations in plants, air, water and soil during primary bee foraging times. Even honey, perhaps nature’s most perfect food, now shows traces of glyphosate residue.
Roundup has long been linked with the unprecedented die-offs of pollinators like bees and butterflies and for causing death to amphibians like frogs, toads and newts. But it’s the latest findings linking it to disruption of the neural patterns and respiratory problems in humans that is triggering the most alarm.
The use of poisons to maintain ditches, control insects and weed growth is easy and cheap and approved of by government environmental protection agencies wherever it is used. But some communities are now taking a hard look at that practice and a few have even returned to the time-honored safe practices of mowing and ditching. To allay mowing costs using expensive equipment they let landscaping companies bid for those jobs.
Some places are even spraying, but instead of chemicals they are using salt water or vinegar, which they say are every bit as effective as chemical controls - without the dangers.
In the short term spraying poison for weed control is more cost effective than mowing. What’s not yet fully known are the long term costs these chemicals offer regarding human and environmental health. Scientists say it will be tragic should those costs prove to be more than we can bear.
Pesticides, fungicides, rodenticides and herbicides are designed to interfere with biological or chemical pathways critical to the survival of the pest for which it is targeted. When the pesticide interrupts these pathways, the target organism dies.
It’s starting to feel like we are viewed as just another “designated pest” by the chemical industry, for when you try and find out how to avoid toxic chemical damage you are advised to “avoid and reduce harmful effects from pesticides … “
My question is - given that we are regularly showered in poisons without any say in the matter - just how exactly are we supposed to be able to do that?
