Bunny Snow wrote:
> I know that no one here uses herbicides or other pesticides on this
> list, but I thought this may be of interest to those of you who want to
> see the world with your eyes wide opened.
>
> I wonder if this could be a reason why certain cancers are increasing in
> certain areas of the U.S. more than other areas. I wonder if those
> areas where the increases are occurring are receiving their drinking
> water from surface waters or shallow aquifers, which may be more likely
> to be contaminated with weed killers. Example, studies on laboratory
> animals show an increase of breast tumors with the hormone disrupting
> herbicide atrazine. Atrazine is widely used in the U.S. and some areas
> of the country, such as Burlington, Vermont drinking water comes from
> Lake Champlain. Could that be the reason breast cancer is so high
> there? I realize that atrazine is also found in groundwater when that
> water is tested for contamination.
>
> I urge you to read the full article at the URL listed below.
>
> ~Bunny Snow
> _____________________________________________________________________________
>
> http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990403/newsstory12.html
> [Archive: 3 April 1999]
> The New Scientist
>
> It's raining pesticides
>
> Fred Pearce and Debora Mackenzie
>
> **RAIN IS NOT what it used to be. A new study reveals that much of the
> precipitation in Europe contains such high levels of dissolved
> pesticides that it would be illegal to supply it as drinking water.
>
> Studies in Switzerland have found that rain is laced with toxic levels
> of atrazine, alachlor and
> other commonly used crop sprays. "Drinking water standards are regularly
> exceeded in rain," says Stephan Müller, a chemist at the Swiss Federal
> Institute for Environmental Science and Technology in Dübendorf. The
> chemicals appear to have evaporated from fields and become part of the
> clouds.
>
> Both the European Union and Switzerland have set a limit of 100
> nanograms for any particular pesticide in a litre of drinking water.
> But, especially in the first minutes of a heavy storm, rain can contain
> much more than that.
>
> In a study to be published by Müller and his colleague Thomas Bucheli in
> Analytical Chemistry this summer, one sample of rainwater contained
> almost 4000 nanograms per litre of 2,4-dinitrophenol, a widely used
> pesticide. Previously, the authors had shown that in rain samples taken
> from 41 storms, nine contained more than 100 nanograms of atrazine per
> litre, one of them around 900 nanograms...
>
> Müller warns that the growing practice of using rainwater that falls
> onto roofs to recharge underground water may be adding to the danger.
> This water often contains dissolved herbicides that had been added to
> roofing materials, such as bitumen sheets, to prevent vegetation
> growing. He suggests that the first flush of rains should be diverted
> into sewers to minimise the pollution of drinking water,
> which is not usually treated to remove these herbicides and pesticides.
>
> Meanwhile, Swedish researchers have linked pesticides to one of the most
> rapidly increasing cancers in the Western world. Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma,
> which has risen by 73 per cent in the US since 1973, is probably caused
> by several commonly used crop sprays, say the scientists...**
>
> <Go to the above URL for the full article.>
>
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