Stop CDFA's Entire Toxic LBAM Program

One of the great ironies to me in the midst of California’s greatest-ever public health crisis is hearing officials from the California Department of Food and Agriculture and the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment grudgingly admit that people with pre-existing health conditions may be harmed by the toxic chemicals being employed in the LBAM ‘program’.

The implication is that healthy adults will be just fine. But how, pray tell, do CDFA and OEHHA think we sick folks got to be this way?

In the course of blogging about the LBAM chemical assault, I have met neighbor after neighbor who is suffering from Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, cancers, thyroid conditions, or auto immune diseases. For most of us, the reason given to us by physicians for the wreckage of our body systems has been something in the environment that caused our organs, our cells, our ability to detoxify to go haywire.

And what, exactly, do agencies like CDFA and USDA and OEHHA expect to happen to the healthy adults after they are subjected to something for days, weeks, months, and years? The endocrine disrupters, mutagens, carcinogens, and particulate pollution, the irritants and synthetic chemicals in CDFA’s aerial spray, twist ties, traps, and other devices are exactly the somethings that cause people to contract the health conditions that can turn a happy life into a miserable existence literally overnight.

Some of the effects and diseases will take longer to show up, of course. Residents all over California will find their health slowly slipping away. They’ll go to a doctor, or five doctors, or ten doctors, and will be told that something has robbed them of the health they once had, and that they must now shoulder the burden of chronic or fatal illness and accept their new limited life. They may never connect CDFA’s LBAM program with the loss of their health.

Why Saying ‘No’ To Aerial Spray Isn’t Enough
A visit to www.dontspraycalifornia.org will quickly apprise you of the incredible toxicity of all of the methods that CDFA intends to use in their ludicrous pursuit of the harmless light brown apple moth. Of course, no one wants aerial spray. But, danger will also be all over your neighborhood if it is strewn with toxic twist ties or lined with chemical-coated telephone poles. Daily exposure to any of these substances increases your risk for becoming ill. These are not substances you should be around, ever.

It’s because of this that I especially applaud what Don’t Spray California is offering to readers – a chance to become fully informed about the toxicology of the whole LBAM program. CASSonline.org has also taken an adamant stance for zero tolerance of toxins, whether aerial or ground-based.

CDFA has been so quick to dismiss the tremendous portion of California’s population already suffering from a variety of illnesses caused by our bodies’ reactions to toxins in our environment. Sick people are being treated like second-class citizens – an expendable element in society.

What I want you to understand is that even if you are not sick right now, you could so easily become one of the sick people tomorrow if CDFA’s entire toxic program isn’t halted. Whose body can honestly come unscathed through 450 aerial sprays over the course of ten years and a neighborhood festooned with fuming and leaching traps and twist ties? Who can take such risks? Unless CDFA’s agents are being given some sort of secret antidote to protect them from the effects that California’s doctors have explained will occur from exposure to these poisonous chemicals, even they will begin to fall ill. Even they will suffer the fate they are so flippantly doling out to some 7 million innocent human beings.

The Challenge Of Living With Chronic Illness
When you’re sick, sleep doesn’t seem to rest you much. Many mornings, you wake up feeling that you must have been somebody’s punching bag in your dreams. Dressing and grooming yourself may be a Herculean challenge today. Maybe you stay in your pyjamas all day, feeling depressed. Maybe you can’t cook for yourself today, or for your family. If you have a job, losing it is a constant fear because of all the sick days you’ve taken. Or, maybe you’ve been sick for a while and have structured some unconventional life for yourself where you’re working from home, sitting at your PC fifteen hours a day trying to make ends meet, handling all your business over the phone because you can’t be counted on for meetings. You can’t count on your body anymore. You never know if today will be one of the bad days. You pray for the good days to come – the days you can take a walk, visit a friend, feel the sun on your face.

If you have your health, it may be hard to envision the narrow confines that chronic illness imposes on daily life. People with MCS and auto immune conditions and other disorders live valiant lives, struggling to survive in tiny ways that may never occur to you.

I don’t want you to ever have to know what it’s like to fight for your life.

And this is why Vegan Reader so strongly supports opposition to every measure CDFA is intending to employ in their immoral LBAM program. It is unforgivable to discount the value of sick people. It is criminal to risk the health of millions who are healthy today, but who will not be after a chronic biochemical assault.

For your precious and irreplaceable health, I urge you to absorb all of the knowledge you can about the whole LBAM program, and then share that knowledge with your loved ones, lawmakers, media, and anyone you meet who thinks that the aerial spray is the only threat. Unfortunately, it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

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As always, permission is granted to use the above image. I hereby release it into the creative commons for the purpose of educating the public.