permaculture

["Emily A. Noble" <guinep@theriver.com>]

Title: Organophosphates

Here might be an Opportunity for permaculture people to offer alternatives to organophosphate pesticides, and herbicides....to their neighbors, friends, relatives, doctor, dentist, lawyer, barber, neighborhood gardening shop owner, etc. You decide, but another recent (6 May 2000, pages 46-7) NEW SCIENTIST (www.newscientist.com) has article on "Getting your idea across is simpler than you think--whether it's a fashion statement, a social reform or, maybe, a scientific paper. Paul Marsden finds a manual for changing minds entertaining but faintly sinister." in a book titled THE TIPPING POINT by Malcolm Gladwell, Little Brown, ISBN 0316648523. Reviewer Marsden reports that the book recommends: "do not waste time marketing your idea to the masses: focus your energies on the trendsetters, the socially promiscuous and those with the power to influence. Place your idea or product with these people and, by the force of word of mouth added to an innate human tendency to keep up with the Joneses, your epidemic will snowball through society. Tweaking your idea or product to make it more infectious or "sticky" (Gladwell's preference) is the second step. This does not mean major surgery to transform a mediocre idea into a brilliant idea--a cosmetic makeover will work wonders, so just "tweak and test" with a view to involving your target audience, telling a story, somehow make it relevant to them." And, of course, if you have the health of the planet backing your effort, that makes it a whole lot less sinister than if you are trying to sell candy or pesticides!
"Identifying victims of pesticide poisoning" in NEW SCIENTIST www.newscientist.com 29 April 2000 page 13 (hard-copy at Science library at University of Arizona
A Simple way to diagnose organophosphate poisoning in Gulf War veterans and farmers may be just around the corner, claims a US scientist. Mohamed Abou-Donia of Duke University Medical Center in Durham has found antibodies to nerve proteins in the blood of a 5-year-old boy exposed to the OP pesticide chlorpyrifos. The antibodies indicate damage to the nervous system consistent with OP poisoning. Groups campaigning for the British and US authorities to acknowledge the illness caused by OPs have seized on the development as a possible way of identifying affected people. "This is a significant breakthrough," says Elizabeth Sigmund of Britain's OP Information Network. Abou-Donia told NEW SCIENTIST: "If these biomarkers are validated...they would have very useful applications for identifying OP-exposed individuals both in the developed & developing world."
Abou-Donia has several other controlled studies ready for publication which also suggest that exposed people make antibodies against nerve proteins. He's going to need this extra evidence, says OP researcher David Ray of Leicester University, who advises the British government's Veterinary Products Committee. Ray says the child's symptoms, initially diarrhea and rashes, followed by spasticity, also fits illnesses other than OP poisoning, and he doubts whether the child was exposed to enough chlorpyrifos to cause such serious symptoms. But if current tests on sick Gulf veterans by Abou-Donia again reveal these biomarkers, Ray concedes, antibodies could in theory be a "pretty good system" for identifying OP illness. Michael Day.
Source: ENVIRONMENTAL EPIDEMIOLOGY AND TOXICOLOGY (vol. 2, p.37)