The poisoning of New Zealand

This is very personal as my illness is almost certainly caused by exposure to nasty pesticides.

This very good doco has been disappeared and nothing like this can be made now.

There is no current affairs left in NZ. It was killed off.

At least in the US it's all there if you go looking.

New Zealanders are totally starved of facts about things that really matter.

CENSORED FROM NZ TELEVISION – IVON WATKINS DOW’S RELEASE OF DEADLY 245T FROM 1962-81 IN NEW PLYMOUTH

“Also disturbing are the birth defects documented by a local midwife, and the fact that Ivon Watkins Dow continued to manufacture 2-4-5-T in New Zealand until 1987, making us the last country in the world to manufacture the dangerous substance.”

The Green Party NZ

The TV 3 Exposé, initially broadcast then censored from NZ TV. A must see for any member of the public, this doco covers the exposure of the Paritutu and New Zealand community at large to the chemical 2-4-5-T, manufactured at Ivon Watkins Dow in New Plymouth between 1962-1981, and the disastrous effects it had on those exposed.

Further coverage was made by the Investigate magazine:

THE POISONING OF NEW ZEALAND

From Investigate

THE ‘ERIN BROKOVICH’-STYLE SCANDAL IN NEW ZEALAND’S BACKYARD

Outbreaks of rare diseases and tumours are appearing in clusters around New Zealand, close to chemical factories. Why doesn’t the Government want to investigate? Simon Jones discovers what the authorities don’t want you to know:

Walk down any street in New Plymouth and you will probably hear a mixture of coughing and spluttering. Look inside any school and there appears to be more special needs children than is the norm for a city the size of New Plymouth. It’s often been said that everyone knows someone with a serious disease, whether it be cancer or multiple sclerosis.

Bad luck? Possibly, but for the last 15 years a group of residents have turned scientists to uncover what they say is a national health scandal – and one which, despite the government and media’s persistent attempts to ignore, won’t go away.

They may sound like conspiracy theorists in overdrive – and there is little in the way of official evidence and health statistics to back up what they say. But here is the frightening thing: If, in this real-life game of Fact or Fiction?, only 10 percent of what the residents say is true, we have a huge health scandal on our hands – the magnitude and implications of which are unimaginable.

The story centres around one of the city’s major employers, the Ivon Watkins Dow Plant.

Since the early 1960s, and up until 1987, it manufactured the 2,4,5T herbicide – which contains the deadly dioxin also used to form Agent Orange – a weapon of huge destruction in the Vietnam War.

In New Zealand and around the world 2,4,5T is used to kill scrub, gorse and blackberry. In Vietnam, with concentrations of dioxin much higher, it had the same effect – to the extent where it devastated the country’s crops and caused major health problems amongst veterans, including cancer, multiple sclerosis, while creating learning difficulties amongst the vets’ children.

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Paritutu Original Dioxin Study. Peer reviews show the original study to be valid. 26 January, 2007   [Image credit at link]

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MORE ON IVON WATKINS DOW:

MP’s Agent Orange claim triggers inquiry 10/01/05
Officials will investigate a Government minister’s reported claim that Ivon Watkins Dow exported the components of the defoliant Agent Orange for use in the Vietnam War.

READ MORE

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From the Green Party NZ:

DIOXIN DISASTER

OCTOBER 24, 2006 NZ GREEN PARTY

TV3’s Melanie Reid has spent the last year investigating dioxin contamination from the herbicide 2-4-5-T, especially in the New Plymouth suburb of Paritutu, where Ivon Watkins Dow manufactured the chemical for more than 20 years. The result, a 90-min documentary called Let us Spraywent to air last night. If you missed it, you can watch it online here. (Video displayed above).

The documentary is extremely disturbing. Most notably, a forensic accountant hired by TV3 went through an earlier Ministry of Health report into dioxin contamination in New Plymouth and found that ill-defined parameters, muddled reporting of facts and inconsistencies in drawing conclusions masked the true extent of the dioxin contamination problem.  

READ MORE

Read more on chemicals and how they poison us on our‘chemicals’ pages.

West Virginia chemical spill

West Virginia official says residents are breathing cancer-causing agent after chemical spill

A West Virginia state official told legislators on Wednesday that he “can guarantee” some residents are breathing in a cancer-causing substance due to the chemical spill that occurred earlier in January.

RT,

29 January, 2013

In a recent meeting with a state legislative committee on water resources, Scott Simonton of the West Virginia Environmental Quality Board said that his tests have detected formaldehyde in water samples contaminated by the recent Elk River chemical spill.

"I can guarantee that citizens in this valley are, at least in some instances, breathing formaldehyde," Simonton said, according to the Associated Press. "They're taking a hot shower. This stuff is breaking down into formaldehyde in the shower or in the water system, and they're inhaling it."

As Simonton noted, the chemical mixture that leaked into the Kanawha Valley’s water supply – a combination of seven substances used to wash coal that’s called “Crude MCHM” – is partly composed of methanol. When this chemical breaks down, it turns into formaldehyde, a carcinogen linked to diseases such as respiratory cancer.

"It's frightening, it really is frightening," the Charleston Gazette quoted Simonton telling state lawmakers. "What we know scares us, and we know there's a lot more we don't know."

The news also comes just a few days after it was revealed that a second, previously undisclosed chemical known as PPH also leaked into the Kanawha Valley’s water supply.

Despite the fact that state officials lifted local “do not use” orders on January 18, Simonton added that the potential presence of other chemicals means it’s too soon to declare the water supply safe.

"We know that (crude MCHM) turns into other things, and these other things are bad," Simonton told reporters Wednesday. "And we haven't been looking for those other things. So we can't say the water is safe yet. We just absolutely cannot."

As RT reported previously, the safety standards set by the Centers for Disease Control are based off of a pure form of MCHM, not the multi-chemical cocktail that is Crude MCHM. As a result, the tests declaring West Virginia’s water safe may not properly account for the other chemicals in the mixture.

In the week after the “do not use” orders were lifted, hospital admissions related to the chemical spill doubled, as did calls to West Virginia’s Poison Control Center.

About 300,000 West Virginians across nine counties were affected by the January 9 spill, which dumped about 10,000 gallons of chemicals into the Elk River. The company responsible for maintaining the storage tanks, Freedom Industries, has been hit with at least 20 lawsuits related to the spill and has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Second chemical spilled into Elk River

Previously Unreported Second Chemical Spilled into West Virginia River

Russell Mokhiber: Privately-owned water company failed to conduct proper water tests in Elk River, leading to sickness among WV Residents

Another Greenhouse gas discovered

Study says another greenhouse gas is far more dangerous than CO2

Scientists at the University of Toronto warn that PFTBA, a commonly used chemical, could become a major threat

al Jazeera,

26 January, 2013

Scientists in Canada say they have found that a seldom-mentioned greenhouse gas, which has been present in the atmosphere for decades, has far more potential than CO2 to warm the Earth.

The substance – called perfluorotributylamine, or PFTBA – "is the most radiatively efficient chemical found to date, breaking all other chemical records for its potential to impact climate," scientists at the University of Toronto said in a news release about their recent study.

Radiative efficiency, the report notes, is a term that describes how effectively a molecule can affect climate. This value is then multiplied by its atmospheric concentration to determine the total potential impact.

The man-made chemical has been used in electrical equipment since the middle of the 20th century, and is currently often used for electronic testing and as a heat transfer agent, the scientists involved in the study said.

They said there is no known process for destroying or removing the chemical from the lower atmosphere.

"So it has a very long lifetime, possibly hundreds of years," said Cora Young, one of the researchers.

"Calculated over a 100-year timeframe, a single molecule of PFTBA has the equivalent climate impact as 7,100 molecules of carbon dioxide (CO2)," added her colleague, Angela Hong.

CO2 is used as the baseline for comparison since it is widely believed to be the most important greenhouse gas potentially responsible for human-induced climate change.

Fortunately, concentrations of PFTBA in the atmosphere are believed to be relatively low – for now. In the Toronto area, there are just 0.18 parts per trillion of PFTBA in the atmosphere, compared to 400 parts per million of CO2. But some scientists see the presence of the chemical as a big wake-up call.

"This is a warning to us that this gas could have a very, very large impact on climate change – if there were a lot of it,” Drew Shindell, a NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies climatologist, told U.K. newspaper The Guardian. “Since there is not a lot of it now, we don't have to worry about it at present, but we have to make sure it doesn't grow and become a very large contributor to global warming."

PFTBA molecules can stay in the atmosphere for 500 years, the researchers said, adding that there are no known natural systems on Earth that can absorb it, as forests and oceans do for carbon.

Shindell also told The Guardian that the Toronto research is just the latest in a number of studies putting a spotlight on other greenhouse gases like PFTBA that are not very prevalent in the atmosphere but have enormous potential to warm the Earth.

The Toronto scientists’ findings, announced to media last week, were initially published in the online edition of Geophysical Research Letters on Nov. 27.

Fracking chemicals

ANOTHER generation of hormone-disrupting chemicals

Hormone-Disrupting Chemicals Found At Fracking Sites Linked To Cancer, Infertility: Study

Huffington Post,

20 December, 2013

Hormone-disrupting chemicals linked to cancer, infertility and a slew of other health problems have been found in water samples collected at and near hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," sites in Colorado, according to a new study published in the journal Endocrinology this week.

Researchers say they found elevated levels of these chemicals -- known as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) -- in surface water and groundwater samples collected in the state's Garfield County, a fracking hotspot with more than 10,000 natural gas wells.

Water samples taken from the Colorado River, a drainage basin for the region, were also found to have significantly higher-than-normal levels of EDCs, the researchers said.

EDCs, which have the ability to interfere with normal hormone action, have been linked to a number of health issues. Last year, the World Health Organization issued a report highlighting the health risks associated with the chemicals, including cancer, infertility and impaired neural and immune function. Previous studies have also suggested that EDCs may have adverse effects on the reproductive system in both women and men.

"With fracking on the rise, populations may face greater health risks from increased endocrine-disrupting chemical exposure," Susan Nagel, a veteran endocrinologist at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, told the Los Angeles Times. Nagel was the lead author of the recent study on fracking and EDCs.

In 2010 and again in 2012, Nagel and a team of researchers collected several water samples at five natural gas sites in Garfield County, where fracking wastewater spills are known to have occurred in the last few years. The researchers then tested the samples for four different classes of EDCs. "Of the 39 unique water samples, 89 percent, 41 percent, 12 percent, and 46 percent exhibited estrogenic, anti-estrogenic, androgenic, and anti-androgenic activities, respectively," the report says. The team also gathered water samples from the Colorado river, as well as from areas in Garfield County that are located a significant distance away from natural gas wells. Other samples came from an area in Missouri where there is no fracking.

The researchers said water samples collected from the spill sites and the Colorado river had significantly higher levels of EDCs than those gathered from the control sites in Garden County and Missouri.

Water can contain small amounts of estrogenic substances naturally. However, "Nagel said that although estrogenic substances can be found naturally occurring in water, she did not know of similar sources of anti-estrogenic or anti-androgenic chemicals," the Times reports.

Troublingly, Nagel told The Huffington Post that the people living in the areas of Garfield County where the samples were taken all primarily get their water from local wells. This means that some residents in the area may very well be consuming water laden with these higher levels of EDCs.

"This is a canary in a coal mine that we need to pay attention to," Nagel told the HuffPost of the findings. "And it is absolutely a cause for concern."

Nagel added, however, that more research needs to be conducted to confirm the link between the EDCs found in the samples and fracking.

In their study, the researchers did not test their samples for specific fracking chemicals. Nagel said that a similar study should be conducted again, but with a larger sample size.

Fracking is a process in which millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals are blasted underground to break apart rock and release oil and gas. "The process is exempt from some regulations that are part of the Safe Drinking Water Act, and energy companies do not have to disclose the chemicals they use if they consider that information a trade secret," the Times writes.

In 2011, however, a Congressional report revealed a list of some 750 chemicals and compounds that are used for fracking. A ProPublica report said at the time that the list includes "29 chemicals that are either known or possible carcinogens or are regulated by the federal government because of other risks to human health."

Nagel told the HuffPost that researchers have since found more than 100 known or suspected EDCs in this list, as well.

With billions of dollars on the line, fracking -- and its impact on the environment and public health -- has been a contentious and controversial issue for years. Gas and oil lobbyists maintain that the practice is environmentally sound and perfectly safe (an industry lobbyist told the Times that Nagel's study was "inflammatory"), while environmental groups including Food and Water Watch and the Sierra Club have continued to sound the alarm on fracking's possible effects on our health and that of our planet.

Part of the problem is that studies looking into fracking's effects on public health remain inconclusive and preliminary. Still, there has been no shortage of anecdotal evidence of fracking's impact.

Earlier this year, for instance, it was reported that residents in Bokoshe, Okla., had filed a class-action suit against gas companies that had been fracking in the area. Oklahoma's News 6 reported at the time that "hundreds of millions of gallons" of fracking wastewater had been discharged at Bokoshe. Residents say this activity has triggered a spate of health issues, including cancer, in the town.