North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["kieran or donna" <redherring@tnaccess.com>]

 -- Andrew Bell wrote:

"These kind of anecdotal reports tend to frighten people - perhaps
unnecessarily.  Certainly one should encourage safe practice with
pesticides, but to imply that a woman's cancer was necessarily caused by a
careless exposure is itself careless."

Umm... weren't the organophosphates first used by the Nazis to gas people to
death?                Maybe it was just coincidence.  Maybe the wife was
dead in a year and the husband fine because of differences in their ability
to handle these chemicals.  Maybe the wife was taking a pharmaceutical drug
that used up the same enzymes needed to break down that pesticide.
Personally, I always had slow liver detox and did not do well at around any
kind of chemicals or petrochemical products.  I got so befuddled just
driving downwind of nurseries spraying their trees, that had I ever tried
personally handling the stuff, I might have done something fatally stupid.
Everyone is different in their ability to break down these things, just as
two people exposed to poison ivy will have different reactions.
(Interestingly enough, most of my chemical sensitivities went away when I
went on a gluten free diet about 6 years ago.  It also cured my FMS, my
sleepiness after meals, and my chronic grouchiness.)  Donna