It came as a surprise to Dr. James Carey to hear that he isn’t an entomologist, according to Ag. Secretary A.G. Kawamura. Watch the CBS news report featuring this bizarre statement from Kawamura, whose aides must have frantically called CBS to explain that their chief was ‘confused’.

What Else is Kawamura Confused About?

Could it be that he’s been confusing vegetables with human beings and this is why he feels it’s his job to spray us with pesticides?

And, is is just me, or is he looking more and more worn down every time he appears on TV?

Let us hope his conscience is somehow coming to life and eating at him.

I was extremely heartened to see CBS run this report which was very clearly calling CDFA’s whole deceitful game plan into question and am eagerly awaiting news from today’s events in Sacramento.

Please, if anyone was there today, share what happened.

“Let us spray you from airplanes or you’re gonna be sorry,” government officials have begun to threaten the people of California.

From the Santa Cruz Sentinel:

State agriculture leaders issued a warning to the city and county Monday that if plans are delayed to spray pheromone over the county by plane to fight the light brown apple moth, another, more potent insecticide could be dropped instead.

“The risk of greater conventional pesticide is out there,” said Steve Lyle, spokesman for the California Department of Food and Agriculture, elaborating on a position outlined in a legal brief released Monday.

Santa Cruz Councilman Tony Madrigal accused state leaders of employing scare tactics to push their spraying agenda. “They’re proposing a choice to the people between bad and worse,” Madrigal said.

I feel like someone is holding a can of Raid in my face and saying, “if you resist me spraying you now, I’m going to make you drink the contents of this container.”

The most sickening part of the picture is that it is MY public servants threatening me in this way. These are elected officials, but they seem to be under the impression that they are dictators, perhaps living in some other country - not the USA, with our ‘by the people’ mentality when it comes to government.

And, for the record, I want to set it straight. The spraying of carcinogenic chemicals on millions of people isn’t causing ‘worry’ or ‘controversy’ as we keep seeing in the news. It is causing city officials to make public resolutions opposing the spraying on behalf of nearly everyone living in the spray zone. This isn’t ‘a few activists fretting’. This is local governments from one end of the state to the other telling the Governor and his cronies in CDFA ‘no’.

It strikes me that we are in such an unprecedented situation that many of our reporters and news people simply don’t have the language to express what is happening here in California. The state is insisting that it will override the concerted refusal of the majority of city governments and will bombard millions of people with documented carcinogenic chemicals encapsulated in particulate plastic pollution. People are calling this an act of war on the state of California for very good reason.

Who Can Stop the Spray?
Apparently, it is only our governor who can call off this chemical assault on us, and today, we have caught Arnold Schwarzegger on film declaring that carcinogens are harmless to humans. Watch this film clip. If the spraying goes forward, it will doubtless become a famous piece of evidence documenting this misguided public servant lying to his state in a total violation of his oath to protect the people of California:

ABC NEWS VIDEO.

If the planes do fly, if thousands of people do get sickened, if 9-1-1 gets short-circuited with emergency calls for help, if San Francisco Bay and the Bolinas and Rodeo lagoons are piled high with a meringue of carcinogenic foam, if the beaches are covered with dead birds, if the pets fall dead in our yards, if mayhem breaks out in the dark city nights while the spray pours down on panicked masses, Governor Arnold Schwarzengger will be to blame. The blood will be on his hands, and Steve Lyle’s, and A.G. Kawamura’s, and Joan Denton’s, and Stewart Resnick’s, and every single person who is smiling on this never-before-waged crime against the children, men and women of California.

Yes, we are angry. Yes, we want everyone of these people fired and given a mental health examination for daring to suggest that pesticide be sprayed on infants, on people trying to recover from cancer, on elders, on mothers, on fathers. No sane person would suggest doing such a thing.

Yes, we are angry.

And we will harness the power of that anger for a positive, non-violent, but totally unwavering battle against the evil suggestions of the CDFA and USDA.

Civic peace is a valuable thing. Civic disorder makes life miserable for everyone, especially our opponents in this public health crisis. They are trying to frighten us with grotesque threats of coming to get us with even worse pesticides if we don’t sit down and take their spraying like an orderly row of vegetables. And that is because they are afraid. They are afraid of that group of mothers who is going to descend on City Hall in San Francisco demanding that no one spray their babies. They are afraid of the elders who are turning out at all the rallies, waving their ’stop the spray’ signs. They are afraid of the plethora of blog posts and articles that have erupted over the past couple of days as more and more people find out about CDFA’s diseased plan.

Our power is in our voices and we will make ourselves heard. Aerial spraying of human beings without consent violates the Constitution that we will work to uphold, even if our public servants have forgotten their duties. Use the hurt, the outrage you feel to stand up in this crucial hour of history and declare that chemical assaults violate basic human rights and we can stop our planet from going down a disastrous road.

Here’s the little bit of good news you’ve been waiting for today. SF’s Supervisors unanimously voted against the aerial spraying, adopting Mirkarimi’s resolution.

Read Whole Story at CBS.

There are some mistakes in the story and Kawamura continues to be quoted perjuring himself with the ridiculous statement that spraying people protects public health. Other than that, it’s good to hear a little good news.

I am trying to discover what happened with Carol Migden’s moratorium today? I can’t find the results of this. Does anyone have a link to the news on this? Thanks!

Discernment is defined as the ability to judge wisely. Across California, people are being called upon to exercise their discernment to determine whether they are hearing truth or lies in the mouths of government officials like Ag Secretary A.G. Kawamura and his cohorts who have developed a plan to spray pesticides on some 7,000,000 human beings.

Without any testing, Kawamura and his allies have pronounced their pesticide of choice ’safe’. Here is a typical statement from a man who is eager to begin applying pesticides to humans as quickly as possible.

“When will it become obvious to the public that environmental alarmists take whatever position stands in the way of human progress?” asked Dr. Jay Lehr, science director for The Heartland Institute. “The moth is destructive to society, and pheromones are safe and effective. Let’s get on with their use.”

What Evil Sounds Like

When one researches the nuclear testing that was carried out in the 1950s and 60s in the American southwest, one may start to feel that A.G. Kawamura and his associates must have been running things then, too. Here are some quotes that may sound all too familiar to today’s Californians.

“Health and safety authorities have determined that no danger from or as a result of AEC activities may be expected. All necessary precautions, including radiological surveys and patrolling of the surrounding territory, will be undertaken to insure that safety conditions are maintained.”

“Every test detonation in Nevada is carefully evaluated as to your safety before it is included in a schedule. Every phase of the operation is likewise studied from the safety viewpoint…all such findings have confirmed that Nevada test fallout has not caused illness or injured the health of anyone living near the test site.”

It took nearly half a century for government officials to finally acknowledge that the nuclear testing had harmed Americans. By then, it was much too late.

What Do The Victims Of Evil Sound Like?

“We’re not numbers, we’re not statistics, we’re human beings.”

“It’s amazing that there should be so many cancer cases in an area as small as this. It’s to the point now where there’s not a person in town who hasn’t lost at least one relative or knows of several people who have died of cancer.”

“There’s been wrong done. There’s no relief in knowing your son died of negligence. I don’t want to be a rabble-rouser or anything but I don’t want another generation to go through this. Cancer is such a long, painful, drawn-out death.”

“We trusted the government, we figured that it was necessary because, after all, the government does look after us, and they’re over the people and they will take care of anything that needs to be taken care of to see that it’s healthy, or otherwise…so we didn’t worry about it.”

These are quotes from our government’s guinea pigs in the nuclear testing public health crisis. I do not want to hear these words in the mouths of my California neighbors, but when I hear the father of baby Jack Wilcox tell the press that the aerial spraying in 2007 almost killed his son, I know I’m not hearing an echo from the 50s. This is now, but the situations are the same.

We are using our discernment. We are unwilling to overlook the obvious evil in any plan which exposes human beings to chronic doses of carcinogens, mutagens, and particulate plastic pollution.

When we hear Secretary Kawamura say, “I am confident that a thoughtful review of the facts about this pest will show anyone that this program’s success is critical to our economy, our environment, and public health,” we understand that he is pinning his hopes for personal fortune on our stupidity.

Secretary Kawamura would like us to be so undiscerning that we can be fooled into thinking that it is the moth which poses the threat to our environment and public health.

We will not be brainwashed by twisted statements like these.

We are not tricked into believing that spraying pesticides on human beings is important for public health.

We are not quite that dumb.

It is pesticide, it is CDFA and the USDA that pose the threat to our environment and to human health. It is pesticide that is the problem - not a moth.

Patriotism Has Been Undermined By Government Bodies

In the 1950s and 60s, it was possible for the U.S. government to trade on the trust of patriotic Americans who were confident that their safety was in good hands. But since then, actions like those of the CDFA have undermined the basic belief system of Americans who are deeply loyal to the constitutional tenets of freedom and inherent human rights. The U.S. government had a great thing going for themselves, but then we had to deal with the fallout of their nuclear bombs, their DDT, their Agent Orange. We have come to experience a national cringing when yet another government official starts telling us that something is ’safe’.

It is tragically evil that our own governmental agencies have destroyed the American people’s faith in the goodness of government.

This time, A.G. Kawamura, you and your ilk will not play us for fools.

Just a note to say that the Stop the Spray Petition has now amassed more than 20,000 signatures.

And, at comment #20,928, we see:

Fresh air clear of chemicals, pesticides and pheromones intended to deplete a population of insects is our right as humans —- not a privilege. The governor, state legislature, county officials and businessmen do not have a right to drop or spray chemicals into the air we breath.

I couldn’t agree more.

Keep working, keep fighting, everyone!

The main question I have been attempting to find an answer to over the past few weeks is whether the Bay Area’s emergency services are prepared to deal with a potential public health crisis when the pesticide planes start flying over the cities in August, exposing nearly 7 million residents to known toxins.

The SF Chronicle has just published an answer to my question with their article, SFs Emergency Responses Fail to Meet Goal.

Here are the quick facts you need to know:

• The 911 call center, plagued with problems from low morale to a proliferation of calls from people who don’t speak English, is the weakest part of San Francisco’s emergency medical response system
• Since 2004, 439 people have died waiting for emergency services to arrive
• Fifty-seven percent of the time, the 9-1-1 call center has failed to meet the city’s goal of dispatching urgent medical calls within 2 minutes

OEHHA Dismisses Respiratory Damages - 9-1-1 Calls Them Priority Emergencies!

The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment has dismissed, out-of-hand, the hundreds and hundreds of reports of asthma, difficulty breathing, wheezing, coughing and respiratory failure following the 2007 spraying as unimportant without having spoken to a single one of the doctors or patients invovled. This article goes so far as to refer to these health harms as ‘minor self-reported symptoms’.

9-1-1 emphatically disagrees. As the Chronicle article states:

In San Francisco, the most serious emergency medical calls fall into two categories
- Echo and Code 3. Echo-priority calls require immediate resuscitation, such as cases
of stopped breathing, choking, drowning, severe allergic reaction and cardiac arrest. Code 3-priority medical calls, such as severe hemorrhage and difficulty breathing, are also presumed to be life-threatening.

As this quote shows, both difficulty breathing and severe allergic reactions are considered to be life-threatening by emergency responders.

This means that the night the planes start flying over California cities, dumping documented irritants and toxins on millions of people, and those people begin experiencing the same symptoms that were experienced in 2007 including difficulty breathing, heart abnormalities, severe allergic skin rashes and choking, 9-1-1 will classify those symptoms as Echo or Code 3 Priorities and attempt to rush ambulances to the victims.

But Will Help Arrive?
As the SF Chronicle article indicates, emergency services in San Francisco are understaffed and experiencing numerous problems that are causing serious delayed response times.

As we know, no one died in Santa Cruz or Monterey when the residents were sprayed with the 11-chemical pesticide compound. However, symptoms were severe enough for people to seek urgent care. Baby Jack Wilcox became delirious, his eyes rolled back into his head and he went into respiratory failure. Other residents believed they were having heart attacks because of racing or irregular heart beats. Others began to choke as the airborne microscopic capsules lodged in their lungs. Symptoms of this severe, potentially-life-threatening kind merit 9-1-1 calls.

What can we expect in San Francisco, when the spray enters the bodies of residents and they begin to react adversely to it? As our earlier article Health Math of The Moth Spray determined, .1% of the families in Monterey and Santa Cruz were able to report their illnesses. Though this in no way represents the many families who were unable to find a way to report their symptoms or seek medical aid, it is a number we can work with.

San Francisco has a population of some 760,000 people. If .1% of San Franciso households begin to experience symptoms of respiratory failure, heart failure, choking, etc. in one of more family members the night the spraying starts in August, this could potentially generate 760 9-1-1 calls. Is SF’s 9-1-1 ready to handle this?

Statistics indicate a resounding ‘no’.

As the Chronicle article explains, San Francisco’s 9-1-1 handles about 50,000 priority emergency calls annually. This means about 137 calls a night - certainly not 760 of them. And, if on a normal night, 57% of callers experience a delayed response, as indicated by the Chronicle article, what will happen if the lines are suddenly jammed with hundreds of unexpected emergency callers starting in August?

Imagine this scenario: your husband has an actual heart attack on August 1st. You are desperately trying to get through to a 9-1-1 operator, but the operators are all occupied taking calls from hundreds of people who have just felt their throats and lungs close up from pesticide poisoning. The understaffed emergency responders simply can not get to your call fast enough and consider your husband’s heart attack of equal priority to the heart arrhythmias being experienced by all the neighbors who are experiencing pesticide poisoning. Like the people in Monterey and Santa Cruz, the neighbors, hopefully, will not actually die…but your husband may well do so because no one will come to his aid quickly enough in the chaos of the tsunami of calls flooding the 9-1-1 switchboard.

Now, let’s add this to the scenario: it’s the evening of August 2nd. Everyone in San Francisco has been exposed to their first dose of particulate plastic pollution (See American Lung Association) and toxic chemicals. Many of the 9-1-1 operators, ambulance drivers, firemen, doctors and surgeons have called in sick because of their first symptoms of pesticide poisoning. Now every public service in the City is critically understaffed, but the 9-1-1 phones keep on ringing as more and more families fall ill. Imagine that August 2nd is the night your husband has a heart attack. Imagine that your 9-1-1 call receives no response at all because of the critical staff shortage created by CDFA exposing the entire city to known irritants and toxins.

Maybe you try, frantically, to get a hold of someone in Berkeley or Oakland…only to discover that everyone there has been sprayed as well. In fact, you realize you are sitting on a lonely island in the middle of a sea of sprayed cities, each of which is experiencing a critical shortage of public servants in their already-overtaxed emergency services departments.

Does lawless chaos break out over the cities now? Are police, wheezing and coughing, experiencing listlessness and confusion, attempting to get into their squad cars, having to stop to vomit by the roadside as they try to rush to the neighborhoods where panicked, unaided citizens have lost their marbles while their loved ones fall ill and the planes keep passing over, over, over their homes again and again? Are the criminal elements in the cities using this evening of mayhem to begin shooting and looting? Are the bridges blocked as tourists who, moments earlier, were coming out of restaurants and theaters downtown begin to run to their cars to get out of town as the planes pass by and the spray begins falling down on them? What if, God forbid, someone goes really nuts and starts shooting at the planes? Are the police prepared to respond to airplanes crashing into apartment complexes and high rises? Or, are the police all hunched over in their cars, coughing and vomiting uncontrollably?

This worst case scenario presents a ghastly picture of a night of mayhem in the densely populated Bay Area. The trouble is, we’re not talking about a single night of chaos here. We’re talking about up to 5 consecutive nights of toxic aerial pesticide bombardment happening every 30 days, 9 months out of the year for up to ten years or more. We are talking about a chemical assault that is sure to make people sick, sure to make people crazy and sure to change the SF Bay Area into one of the world’s most dangerous places to be.

For all of CDFA’s talk about the wondrous safety of their untested chemicals, we know what happened in Santa Cruz and Monterey, and not one word has been spoken, not one conference has been held, to my knowledge, to address the very real emergency public health crisis that may erupt in San Francisco and all of the cities surrounding it when the spraying begins to make people ill.

Are our police, firemen, paramedics, nurses and doctors being prepared by the state for a region-wide emergency? Every one of us remembers the chaos of the Sept. 11th attacks and the horrific flooding of New Orleans. No one was prepared. Once again, here in the Bay Area, despite the fact that we know trouble is coming, no one seems to be preparing.

And This Is Only The Short-Term
Let’s look 10 years into the future in the Bay Area. Perhaps, by then, after some 450 nights of being sprayed over the decade, people have gotten used to the sounds of pesticide planes in city night skies. Perhaps, after 450 exposures to pesticides, people in the Bay Area consider wheezing, coughing and rash-covered skin a norm of life. What other things may have become a norm in the Bay Area, after 10 years of chronic, daily pesticide exposure?

1) An extraordinary number of our children under the age of 10 live with ever more bizarre birth defects from the documented mutagens in the spray which cause genetic mutation
2) Our women citizens pretty much expect to die of breast cancer after 10 years of exposure to the xenochemical in the spray which is a known cause of breast cancer
3) We haven’t seen a sea bird at Ocean Beach in years now, since the spraying started
4) The last of the frogs in the marshes in Marin disappeared a long time ago
5) Golden Gate Park is called Desert Park now because the honey bees stopped coming to pollinate the rhododendrons, the tulips, and all the other flowers. The honey bees are gone.
6) Organic food is a distant memory now - Whole Foods is likely out of business after all the lawsuits convicting them of selling chemical-laced produce to people as ‘organic’
7) We may be trying to chemically create water, because the San Francisco Bay and all of the rivers in California now consist more of plastic and surfactant foam than H2O.

Are these norms the people of the SF Bay Area, Santa Cruz and Monterey are prepared to embrace? Ag Secretary A.G. Kawamura says we should just learn to tolerate the aerial spraying and its effects on us.

“When will it become obvious to the public that environmental alarmists take whatever position stands in the way of human progress?” asks Dr. Jay Lehr, science director for The Heartland Institute.

Is the worst case scenario picture I have painted the kind of human progress you want to see in San Francisco, in Albany, in Berkeley, in Marin in all of the 9 counties set to be fouled and poisoned with substances bearing warning labels that call it a federal crime to introduce them into water sources and firmly warn that they must be kept away from children, not inhaled by humans, not applied to skin?

And, more immediately, are our public servants - our doctors, paramedics, firemen and police officers prepared for what will happen in the summer of 2008, when CDFA begins spraying human beings in the name of human progress? Will these valued and vital public servants step forward now to defend us from the public health crisis CDFA intends to create?

I want to know who is prepared. I want answers to my questions. We are now only a few weeks away from the first spray date.

THE DAY THE DOCTORS FINALLY READ TOXICOLOGICAL PROFILES OF PESTICIDES

(a dream)

By Maxina Ventura, founder and Chronic Effects Researcher,

East Bay Pesticide Alert, also known as Don’t Spray California

East Bay Pesticide Alert

Prior to reading the OEHHA report concluding that all the people sickened in Monterey and Santa Cruz counties by the spraying of pesticides as part of the Light Brown Apple Moth program were wrong, that the obvious was not so, I gleaned a lot of knowledge of what was to come merely by reading through the list of contributors and reviewers. To wit: Contributors included Dr. Ting from the OEHHA, whom many of us heard in person at the Berkeley City Council meeting 2/24/08 at which CDFA was trying to pass off this newest state pesticides program as necessary, benign and even “environmentally friendly”. First we heard Secretary of Agriculture Kawamura describe the smallest particles of the plastic capsules surrounding the pesticides used in aerial spraying in this program as 10 microns and not inhalable. The EPA would beg to differ (http://es.epa.gov/ncer/science/pm/). So would Robert Lieber, RN, and Mayor of Albany, who was triage nurse at a toxic spill of Chevron’s and has provided emergency care after many toxic releases.

Perhaps Mr. Kawamura has special powers, or a built-in air purifier to keep the stuff out. But no matter! Dr. Ting of OEHHA was there to reassure us all as he said, “If inhaled most of them, if not all, should be trapped or deposited in the upper respiratory region and will be coughed out or through the mucociliary system and then maybe ingested. Particles of this size is (sic) not likely to reach the deep lung region.”

As a woman who developed asthma living in wine country, a toxic pesticide hell overall (though ironically with some of the grooviest, most soil-loving, dedicated organic and biodynamic farmers anywhere, mixed in between the toxics), when I heard Dr. Ting make that statement I was shocked, yet amused. I imagined starting a new trend; instead of laughing yoga for health, we could line up people on the beaches of Santa Cruz and Monterey, and if the spraying is indeed done in the Bay Area, at Ocean Beach and around the Bay, and do coughing yoga exercises, to cough it all out. Would we have to get registered as pesticide applicators?

Then there was Dr. Kreutzer from CDFA, another contributor to this report. When Mayor Bates asked this doctor if he’d want his parents or kids exposed to the stuff, this guy hmm’d and haw’d so the Mayor asked again. More hmm’ing and haw’ing and shifting in his seat, so the mayor demanded a third time saying, “Just a yes or no answer. Would you want your parents or kids exposed to this stuff?” to which Dr. Kreutzer meekly replied that he wouldn’t want it, but he’d accept it. My daughter then responded, “He sure doesn’t care much about his family, does he?”

Yes, my daughter is a rocket scientist, and we have a rocket for sale at a good price this week. Wanna buy it?

But then we come to my personal favorite, Louise Mehler, a staff scientist for DPR, the Dept. of Pesticide Regulation. Oh, many memories of Ms. Mehler from a decade ago when I was working with Sonoma Pesticide Alert and, along with West County Californians for Alternatives to Toxics we did informal health surveying. While we saw rampant cancer, particularly horrifying in the numbers of kids with cancers, living with, and dead of, we also saw other health problem clusters and many chronic health problems consistent with pesticide poisonings. In the Sonoma Valley, for instance, we discovered 3 significant cancer clusters as well as a Lou Gehrig’s and Parkinson’s cluster, at least one thyroid problem cluster, and severe animal and wildlife problems.

We started contacting every agency you’d think might be there to gather such information and you’d hope would be there to help stop whatever action was causing problems. My older son, also a rocket scientist, at 4 suggested that we should be locking the neighbor grower in his barn so that he couldn’t spray us anymore. His alternative idea was that we could fill up the tractor pesticide tank with water so that Dale would think he was spraying pesticides but would only be spraying water. It was a good theory, but I had to break it to my son that, the well water would be contaminated with pesticides Dale had used before so we’d still be getting sprayed with pesticides.

Okay, so he was only a junior rocket scientist at that point. Still, that rocket is for sale…..

Back to those agencies. We’ll let’s see… there was the Agriculture Department; there were hospital administrations; individual doctors such as Oncologists and Dermatologists, ENT doctors and ER doctors and nurses; there was Public Health; Environmental Health; the Air Resources Board; Water agencies; Fish and Game; I’m sure I’m leaving out some, and then there was DPR, the Department of Pesticide Regulation with its stated mission including, “to protect human health and the environment.” So I was on the horn with Louise Mehler, a staff scientist, telling her about what we had found in our surveying and calling for an epidemiological study to be done of Sonoma, or of Sonoma and Napa Counties.

First she said that an epidemiological study could not be done, even of both Sonoma and Napa counties combined, that there wouldn’t be enough people to be considered a good sample, which I knew was wrong and told her so. Only weeks before I had attended a daylong workshop sponsored by Tri-Valley CAREs, watchdog organization around the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Labs, and we were addressed by a professor from the University of North Carolina, at Chapel Hill, from their renowned Department of Epidemiology. This professor had outlined the many ways that sampling can be done in relatively small populations to perform a legitimate epidemiological study. Ms. Mehler in response to that said that she knew that DPR would never come up with the funding for it anyway.

She said they were unaware of any health problems associated with pesticides in wine country. I told her that we were happy to share our findings with DPR and that this, indeed, was why I had contacted DPR when we had found no other agency willing to be involved in such a study. So I asked her how DPR collects information about pesticide poisonings. She said they get their information from OSHA (that would be the Occupational Health and Safety Administration… think an industrial hygienist getting called out to a mill when a hand is cut off, or when someone falls into a vat of pesticides). So I reminded her that every day in my neighborhood I was witnessing undocumented workers in the fields (and by the way, being cropdusted and tractor sprayed while working in the fields, with in fact no form of protection at all, as flimsy as even the white suits, masks and gloves have proven). She sounded a bit meek as she acknowledged that perhaps DPR wouldn’t be getting a heck of a lot of paper action off of undocumented workers. But no matter. There were the rest of us not working in the fields. Were we counted? Apparently not either. Well, at least there was some sort of equality on the ground, as they say.

My experiences were of years trying to get my kids’ and my health problems documented as pesticide-related, as my neighbor, Ben, had tried to do for years before this wonderful man, an artist, home gardener and lover of life died at 47 of a heart attack. We both had heart arrhythmias in Sonoma. Mine stopped when I got out. His took his life soon after he got out.

Doctors could never say what caused the problems, but they were always 100% clear it couldn’t be pesticides. There was the particularly-dedicated young dermatologist who, between appointments had actually read through the articles I had given him about pesticides and childhood cancers; the stack of pesticide use reports I had collected from the Ag. Dept. about my neighbor growers’ usage; and the toxicological profiles to accompany those, with many citings from governmental studies. He said it all was fascinating, and further, he had a good friend who lived right in our neighborhood suffering for years with similar serious rashes and he’d always wondered what caused them. So I said, “Well, there. See? All consistent with what you’ve read. It’s the common denominator for us.” His response? “No, it couldn’t be pesticides.” End of story. For him.

Then there was a later doctor who watched my son a number of times having chemical reactions in toxic Kaiser offices. I would explain to him what was happening; he figured my son was just a brat. So all these kids in schools across the country are being labeled as brats when they are experiencing chemical poisoning because they are sensitized to petrochemically-derived products. They’re near someone wearing clothes dried with fabric softener sheets and they go haywire, or they walk into a classroom whose floors were mopped with a toxic product and they start banging into things, or people. They get sent to detention, they are put on a fast track to academic loss, and they are thrown away by our society.

Does this report by OEHHA tell us anything worthwhile? I’d say yes, in that it further clarifies for what this agency and those contributing to, and reviewing for this agency stand. For whichever reasons, perhaps quite personal to some, these people are supporting chemical companies and not our health. It is interesting to remember that these individuals are at risk, too, but perhaps they think that as they are such friends to the chemical companies, the chemicals will just pass them by, that they are, somehow, immune to the afteraffects of toxic pesticide use by any delivery, whether by permethrins on utility poles and trees, toxic chemical twist ties and traps in trees and on fences, ground spraying of toxics or that aerial spraying that already occurred in Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, which caused so much dishealth that many people have fled the areas for good. One woman took her daughter and fled to Vermont where, she pointed out, it is snowing so much of the year that at least at those times she knows they won’t have to worry about pesticide spraying. Another moved to New Mexico, many have relocated to other counties, two of them to Sonoma County, one of them sickened by what she’s encountered now in Sonoma, and she’s not even right by the vineyards. Many are planning to flee to refugee camps (yes, this is what they are calling them) if more spraying is done.

The group with which I work, East Bay Pesticide Alert, also known as Don’t Spray California (www.dontspraycalifornia.org) has the toxicology of the state’s many methods up on our site on the LBAM page. Read up. Decide for yourself.

People are still sick after all the sprayings in Monterey and Santa Cruz and this is a repeat-spray program.

People are mortified of more, so much so that they are having another Nonviolence Training in Santa Cruz Saturday, April 19th, 11-5, to prepare themselves for the possibility of risking arrest (you can do this, too… go to our site). It’s gotten to that after people have tried every avenue imaginable. But when the governor has been paid $144,600 by the maker of the pesticide, and the people on the state Ag. Committee have been paid thousands by the same maker, is it any wonder that the state has decided, without consulting the doctors who treated people harmed by the spraying that, it’s all one big coincidence? All these ill people were just having a bad day. All that red urine, all the brand new cases of asthma, the post-menopausal women menstruating again, and previously healthy young women bleeding for two weeks straight, the baby who almost died of respiratory arrest. All a coincidence.

Look, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist, but I have three of them living right here with me. You can consult with them if you need more information.

Meanwhile, go to our website and see for yourself. By all means, don’t believe me. I’m just one of those damned environmentalists. So read up on what entomologists and botanists have to say. And listen to the organic farmers who say, “It’s just another bug.” Listen to the nurses who say this could be deadly. Listen to the East Bay Regional Park District union demanding that CDFA and USDA oppose this whole pesticides program, and listen to the Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission recommending that the Berkeley City Council oppose the whole toxics program, not only the aerial spray portion of it.

It will be a happy day when USDA and CDFA (and mosquito abatement and vector control departments) have to do bake sales to come up with money they want to use on pesticides programs. Make them work for it, and see if people support their toxic plans. Hardly a chance!

Maxina Ventura

East Bay Pesticide Alert / Don’t Spray California 4/12/08

Added by Editor:As has been pointed out by super reader BPM, this Monterey Herald Article was a hoax, written as an April Fools Joke. Thank you for pointing this out, BPM. I’m guessing many other people didn’t realize this:

It may be that everyone has already seen this Monterey Herald article, but I only found it today. How is it that the USDA was willing to admit that this small town has plenty of birds and bugs to take care of LBAM, but somehow, no town in California does?

Read this article

As a birder, I can attest that the Bay Area has ABUNDANT bird life. Marin, set to be aerially sprayed monthly beginning this August, is one of the world’s great migratory bird stops. Or at least, it has been. After the spraying, it may become a wild bird cemetery.

As a gardener, I can attest that you can’t turn over a shovelful of ground in the Bay Area without finding a few earwigs and beetles.

Every night, beneficial bats leave their perches underneath freeway overpasses, roof ledges, trees, caves and abandoned structures and circle the night sky, consuming vast quantities of moths.

We have all of the natural predators here in California. They have been keeping LBAM populations balanced for decades.

But if we spray our birds, spray our bats, spray our bugs, we lose, possibly forever, the very beings who keep our planet healthy. This is the crisis of imbalance created by agricultural pesticide use, and it is the negligent and destructive situation CDFA and the USDA is intentionally creating with their actions. The more they spray, the more they get paid. It’s abhorrent.

We must keep fighting to protect our bats, our birds, our helping bugs and ourselves.

I want to post this link to the full, 30 minute film that was created of “True Accounts of the LBAM Aerial Spraying”. I had only seen the 8 minute version, previously, and this longer one has many interesting segments in it you won’t want to miss.

I want to take a moment to thank everyone who participated in the production of this film. It is a chilling, important, gripping documentary of what happened in the Monterey/SC region in 2007, what is going to happen there and what is going to happen here in 2008. I continue to be so impressed with the videos being produced. Thank you so much, everyone, for creating these. I check to see if there are new videos at least twice a day.

April 11, 2008

TO: Joan Denton [OEHHA], Mary-Ann Warmerdam [CDPR], and Mark Horton California Department of Public Health
From: Mike Lynberg, Author of ongoing health complaint reports and articles documenting people’s illnesses related to aerial spraying

Here are some preliminary thoughts on your report. I hope you will take the time to read this message and share it with the rest of your team. First, saying there is “no link” between the aerial spraying and illnesses is dishonest. While you did not make an effort to establish causation, there certainly was a correlation between the spraying and the illnesses and therefore a link. And as Joan acknowledged yesterday, you cannot say with certainty that the spraying did not cause the illnesses.

A more honest headline or statement would be, “Although the spray ingredients, including the microparticles that people breathed deeply into their lungs, could have caused the reported illnesses, we do not believe they did. Our report is therefore inconclusive.” Unfortunately, newspapers have picked up your categorical, misleading and unscientific “no link” headline, which crossed a line of ethics and basically was lying to the public. Plus, you know full well that it can take years to establish causation, as it did with cigarette smoking, asbestos, DDT and so on and their associated illnesses.

Second, to dismiss hundreds of complaints because they did not contain certain information such as time and place demonstrates a remarkable lack of care and diligence. Couldn’t you contact these people to fill in the necessary information as much as possible? Many of us are appalled that you did not take the time to meet with a single person or doctor. Also, in at least 15-20 messages last September, October and November, I pleaded with Mark Horton and then Deputy Director Kevin Reilly to get involved in this situation, all the time sending them complaints of illnesses as they came in. If state agencies, such as CDPH, had cared enough about people’s health, then a better system would have been in place to collect health complaints. Any lack of information, therefore, is the responsibility of state agencies and you have had ample opportunity the past several months to interview people and doctors to get more information so you could do a more than a cursory investigation.

Third, your report is misleading when you say, “Each individual, in each reported incident, is counted as a symptom report.” This is not true. If that were the case, your total number would be about 600 instead of 487. You need to remedy this, and it shows me that the majority of illness complaints were dismissed out of hand. There are scores of them that register complaints for several family members – in some cases as many as six or seven people at a time. Did you read the complaints carefully?

Also, you took great care to whittle down the number of complaints, but you know full well that the illnesses were likely underreported, in part because the state did not have a reliable, well publicized system in place, and doctors were not adequately trained to recognize pesticide-related illnesses. Moreover, people did not associate a variety of adverse reactions with the spraying because they had been told by the CDFA it was safe, and we have no idea how many complaints the governor’s office received. So downplaying the numbers is insincere and misleading, and further confirms an unscientific bias that is unacceptable when people’s health is at stake. You have an agenda. That is clear.

Fourth, I am appalled and dismayed that you continue to put other priorities before public health. You acknowledge in your report that people with respiratory conditions and chemical sensitivities have special concerns, and that you’ll have advice for these people. You also acknowledge you cannot guarantee the spraying is safe. Why in the world then would you want to go through with this and put more people at risk? Why aren’t you erring on the side of caution? What can be more important than the health of California citizens, especially our children?

Fifth, I don’t have asthma, but following the spraying, I’ve met people who do. I understand that it’s like having a wet towel put over your head. You can barely breathe, or in Jack Wilcox’s case, you stop breathing, and your heart stops beating, and, thank God, you’re brought back to life. Why would you ever want to risk inflicting this kind of risk and harm on children and others, especially as the spraying moves to the San Francisco area where so many will be impacted? What could possibly be worth doing that?

I’ve gotten to know the Wilcox family and dozens of others who got sick. Unlike you and the authors of your report, I have talked to many of these people. I’ve had enough respect to trust them to take them at their word, and assumed their complaints of illnesses were true and worthy of a full investigation. Why has the state had a bias to dismiss their complaints from the start, saying they could be psychosomatic or
attributable to other causes? I just don’t understand that. They deserved better. You didn’t even have enough respect, care and diligence to talk with them or their doctors before coming to your conclusions. You prejudged their complaints and then set out to confirm your bias under the guise of “science.”

Sixth, why didn’t you more fully address how people will be chronically exposed to the chemicals in the aerial spray, which are designed to persist in the environment for 30-90 days, and then are sprayed again and again, possibly for years, all the time building up in people’s bodies as well? Don’t you think we need to know the potential health consequences of this ongoing exposure? The spraying is not a one-time event.

Finally, as a Christian, I feel called to share two or three Bible verses with you. I don’t know what your faith orientation is, but I’m not sure how anyone could argue with the social ethic expounded by Jesus in these brief passages. I hope they will make you reflect on the lack of caring and regard you have shown hundreds of thousands of your neighbors on the Central Coast – and millions of your neighbors in the SF area as this misguided and dangerous campaign expands – and I hope these truths make you think twice about spreading falsehoods (“bearing false witness’) as you did yesterday in your press release and a number of interviews.

I expected so much more, especially of you, Joan, and OEHHA. I really hoped that care for people and common sense and objectivity would prevail. It sickens me that I was wrong. Unlike all of you, I was here when the spraying happened, and I’ve been here every week and month since. I know what happened to me and my family. I’ve met with and talked to many friends and neighbors who got sick. There is no doubt in their minds that their illnesses and their children’s illnesses were caused by the spraying. I believe them and start with the assumption that their health and safety should be our priority.

If you had cared enough and been diligent enough to do a more unbiased and complete investigation, I think you would have realized they are most likely right, and that this reckless program should be stopped before more people are harmed.

Sincerely,
Mike Lynberg
Author of ongoing reports and articles documenting people’s illnesses related to aerial spraying

Source: StoptheSpray Forum