SAN FRANCISCO, U.S.A.- A Chicago Tribune investigation reveals that corporations making halogenated flame retardant chemicals spent tens of millions of dollars on public relations firms, lobbyists, and front groups to deceive the American people and legislators into believing their toxic chemicals are both necessary and safe.

“We have flame retardant chemicals similar to banned pesticides like DDT in our furniture that end up in our bodies, our pets, and wildlife,” said Arlene Blum, PhD,  UC Berkeley chemist, and Green Science Policy Institute founder. “This investigation should help stop new flammability standards  that are designed to sell chemicals rather than to increase fire safety.”

“Studies on halogenated flame retardants find they can cause lowered IQ, learning disabilities, infertility, other reproductive problems, and endocrine system irregularities,” says Sharyle Patton from Commonweal Biomonitoring Resource Center.

“Scientific evidence is exhaustive, yet the flame retardant industry continues to deceive the public and policymakers,” says Martha Dina Arguello of Physicians for Social Responsibility-LA. ”It’s time we stop exposing ourselves to unnecessary toxics that can impede children’s ability to learn, can cause cancer, and are linked to many health problems low-income and communities of color face.”

“Firefighters have elevated rates of multiple myeloma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, prostate, testicular cancer, malignant melanoma, brain cancer; many linked to halogenated flame retardants,” says Tony Stefani, cancer survivor, founder, San Francisco Firefighters Cancer Prevention Foundation, and retired SF Fire Department Captain. “Lawmakers should stop listening to chemical industry representatives who misrepresent the facts.”

Judy Levin  with Center for Environmental Health comments, ”It is time that devious tactics used by the chemical industry are exposed to the public. Their drive for corporate profit trumps ethics, honesty, or concern for human health or the environment.”

“California leaders should be moved to stop the use of these dangerous chemicals,” says Janette Robinson Flint of Black Women for Wellness. ”Our community already has staggering health inequalities, and is overburdened with chemical exposure in our personal care and cleaning products, food, and now even furniture in our homes…enough is enough.”

“An obsolete CA. regulation (Technical Bulletin 117) de facto forces companies to use toxic chemicals in their products. Both business owners and consumers lose with this industry influenced scenario,” comments Richard Holober of Consumer Federation of California.

Info: http://toxicfreefiresafety.net/CaliforniansForToxicFreeFireSafety.php

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Bumblebee and honeybee populations have been declining quickly over the past couple of decades. This event has been dubbed the Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD. Beekeepers and researchers have been baffled, unable to determine what causes this sudden declination.

But just last week, researchers at the University of Stirling, UK and the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) conducted two separate studies that point to the culprit: commonly used pesticides, which have been proven to damage the bees’ central nervous systems and homing abilities (learning and memory skills for remember the paths to the plants) and affects the birth of queens for colony growth.

The decline is believed to have been caused specifically by neonitinoid insecticides (which is a class of chemicals), which have been used since the early 90s. The bees pick up the pesticide along with the pollen and transfer it to other plants and bring it home to their hives, making other bees susceptible to the poison.

“Some bumblebee species have declined hugely,” Dave Goulson of the University of Stirling in Stirling, U.K. says in the  AAAS news release. “For example in North America, several bumblebee species which used to be common have more or less disappeared from the entire continent. In the U.K., three species have gone extinct.”

The study at Stirling University worked with bumblebees, a couple colonies of which were exposed to low levels (low enough to not be fatal) of the chemical imidacloprid – which is found in many brands such as Gaucho, Conguard, and Xytect – while a couple more were not. The researchers weighed all of the hives separately to determine how much each would grow by the end of the experiment.

They placed the bumblebees in an enclosed space outdoors for six weeks so they could go about their business in natural conditions. It turned out the exposed colonies gained less weight. The hives were 8-12% smaller. The population decreased as wells the amount of honey/nectar. Also, these hives contained 85% fewer queens (2 queens compared to 14 produced by unexposed colonies) in comparison to the unexposed hives.

The researchers in Avignon, France worked with honeybees. They gave one colony nonlethal doses of thiamethoxam, another chemical found in pesticides. Next, they tagged honeybees with radio-frequency identification microchips to track them. Following the experiment, the researchers found out that the colonies with the infected bees were 2 to 3 times more likely to die than nonexposed colonies. The pesticides were believed to have greatly damaged the bees’ homing systems, reducing the amount of nectar brought the colonies.

The INRA researchers conducted a second study in which they produced a mathematical model of the dynamics of honeybee populations. When the failure of the homing abilities was incorporated, the model predicted honeybee colonies would be impossible to recover at a certain point.

In addition to the honeybees and bumblebees, all other kinds of bees pollinate major vegetable and fruit crops as well as flowers. Because of their waning populations, farms would face dilemmas for the lack of pollination, which would instigate a decrease in the development of crops.

“There are obviously big question marks as to whether the safety testing that was done on these was really adequate,” Goulson adds.

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