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Animals Dying Across Ohio State Parks After East Palestine Train Derailment
Animals Dying Across Ohio State Parks After East Palestine Train Derailment
After a catastrophic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, early last month, President Biden, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, corporate media outlets, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, Environmental Protection Agency, and some local officials have ensured air monitoring and water sample tests show everything is under control.
But is it? Well, not according to the local newspaper Ohio Star. Reporter Hannah Poling said a confidential source told her that a wildlife biologist and consultant for the federal forestry received hundreds of reports over the last several days from forestry workers discovering “hundreds of dead animals in Ohio’s parks.”
Several labs across the country have received specimens of whole minks, deer, elk, worms and livers of such animals, and they are finding toxicities that are off the charts, the source said.
“These highly toxic levels are the exact chemicals that were released from East Palestine. Wayne National Forest and Shawnee State Forest in Ohio, are downriver from East Palestine and are two parks where samples are from,” the source continued.
Meanwhile, the BBC reported:
Nearly 45,000 animals have died as a result of a toxic train crash this month in an Ohio town, environmental officials have said.
The figure from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources updates the initial estimate of 3,500 animals dead after the 3 February derailment.
The source also told the Ohio Star that Governor DeWine attempted to block scientists from entering state parks:
The governor and the railroad were blocking scientists from getting soil samples in East Palestine, but they were able to still grab some for testing. Likewise, the soils are highly contaminated,” the source said.
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Life Expectancy Falters in the UK: Slow Death but Fast Profits for the Agrochemical Sector
Life Expectancy Falters in the UK: Slow Death but Fast Profits for the Agrochemical Sector
A special report in the Observer newspaper in the UK on 23 June 2019 asked the question: Why is life expectancy faltering? The piece noted that for the first time in 100 years, Britons are dying earlier. The UK now has the worst health trends in Western Europe.
Aside from the figures for the elderly and the deprived, there has also been a worrying change in infant mortality rates. Since 2014, the rate has increased every year: the figure for 2017 is significantly higher than the one in 2014. To explain this increase in infant mortality, certain experts blame it on ‘austerity’, fewer midwives, an overstrained ambulance service, general deterioration of hospitals, greater poverty among pregnant women and cuts that mean there are fewer health visitors for patients in need.
While all these explanations may be valid, according to environmental campaigner Dr Rosemary Mason, there is something the mainstream narrative is avoiding. She says:
“We are being poisoned by weedkiller and other pesticides in our food and weedkiller sprayed indiscriminately on our communities. The media remain silent.”
The poisoning of the UK public by the agrochemical industry is the focus of her new report – Why is life expectancy faltering: The British Government has worked with Monsanto and Bayer since 1949.
What follows are edited highlights of the text in which she cites many official sources and reports as well as numerous peer-reviewed studies in support of her arguments. Readers can access the report here.
Toxic history of Monsanto in the UK
Mason begins by offering a brief history of Monsanto in the UK. In 1949, that company set up a chemical factory in Newport, Wales, where it manufactured PCBs until 1977 and a number of other dangerous chemicals.
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The Teflon Toxin: Dupont and the Chemistry of Deception
The Teflon Toxin: Dupont and the Chemistry of Deception
KEN WAMSLEY SOMETIMES DREAMS that he’s playing softball again. He’ll be at center field, just like when he played slow pitch back in his teens, or pounding the ball over the fence as the crowd goes wild. Other times, he’s somehow inexplicably back at work in the lab. Wamsley calls them nightmares, these stories that play out in his sleep, but really the only scary part is the end, when “I wake up and I have no rectum anymore.”
Wamsley is 73. After developing rectal cancer and having surgery to treat it in 2002, he walks slowly and gets up from the bench in his small backyard slowly. His voice, which has a gentle Appalachian lilt, is still animated, though, especially when he talks about his happier days. There were many. While Wamsley knew plenty of people in Parkersburg, West Virginia, who struggled to stay employed, he made an enviable wage for almost four decades at the DuPont plant here. The company was generous, helping him pay for college courses and training him to become a lab analyst in the Teflon division.
He enjoyed the work, particularly the precision and care it required. For years, he measured levels of a chemical called C8 in various products. The chemical “was everywhere,” as Wamsley remembers it, bubbling out of the glass flasks he used to transport it, wafting into a smelly vapor that formed when he heated it. A fine powder, possibly C8, dusted the laboratory drawers and floated in the hazy lab air.
At the time, Wamsley and his coworkers weren’t particularly concerned about the strange stuff. “We never thought about it, never worried about it,” he said recently. His believed it was harmless, “like a soap. Wash your hands [with it], your face, take a bath.”
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