'Pesticides are what is killing our kids' - Globe & Mail

[applegrove]

'Pesticides are what is killing our kids'

Rural PEI is an unlikely hotbed of rare cancers, and one doctor has made it his mission to raise awareness about the potential health hazard posed by pesticides used on the region's potato farms. It's a controversial viewpoint, reports MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT, but it has spurred the province to launch a probe

MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

KENSINGTON, PEI — The countryside surrounding this small community near the centre of Prince Edward Island is picture-postcard perfect. Neatly tended farm fields devoted to the island's famed potatoes are interspersed with clapboard homes, imagery seemingly taken straight from the pages of Anne of Green Gables.

It is perhaps because of the province's appearance as a bucolic rural idyll that Ron Matsusaki had the biggest shock of his professional career when he moved to the island three years ago. The affable 57-year-old doctor was taken aback by all the rare cancers he began noticing. The illnesses seemed more like what might be expected near a hazardous waste site.

"Nowhere, nowhere did I see cancer that in any way resembles the cancers that I saw when I came to PEI," Dr. Matsusaki said. "I was totally dumbfounded."

In short order after his arrival, he came across an osteosarcoma that led to the heart-wrenching death of a young girl, several lymphomas, an Ewing's sarcoma, and a number of myeloid leukemia cases, all among children. Brain cancers weren't sparing young and middle-aged adults either, with three of them last year.

..............SNIP"

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061206.wxcancerenviro06/BNStory/cancer/?cid=al_gam_nletter_newsUp

[applegrove]

1. PEI has mono-culture (potatoes). And they fight potato blights like no

tomorrow. I think the same may be true of other potato growing areas.

[TygrBright]

2. The more I learn, the more I believe monocropping...

...is the single most destructive agricultural practice, EVER.

Remote ancestors figure this out fairly quickly and adapted via slash-and-burn "rotation" or planned rotation or regular fallowing, leaving large areas out of production to recover fertility and exhaust disease organisms.

Chemicals allowed us to ignore what our ancestors learned and now we're buttfucked both ways: monocropping consequences on steriods (what with resistant disease organisms, etc.,) and chemical residues and poisons accumulating in our water, food, and air. All so that we could make the profits that monocropping yields in its initial flush of "efficiency."

We are a DUMB species. Who said we have the power to learn? You couldn't tell it by modern agriculture.

disgustedly,
Bright

[Odin2005]

3. It has nothing to do with ourselves, but withour economic system.

Capitalism ephasizes short-term profit over long-term payoff. We have all the things we need to have a ecologically sustanible economy with a very high standard of living, the problem is that such an economy is not profitable to investors who only care about the next quarter of the fiscal year, hence unsustainable farming practices.

[applegrove]

4. Slash and burn was in the soil poor regions of tropical areas. Soil rich

areas can do much more with less. But if we kill our farmers and their families with huge amounts of pesticides we have become an under and over-class society.