Woodford Files: On Bee-Killing Pesticides & Carcinogenic Parabens

With today’s ‘news’ agenda sometimes driven by the interests of media shareholders, we don’t always get the unbiased reporting that tells us what’s really going on in the world. So it occurred to me that if I were the news director in one of those big TV newsrooms, there’s some headlines that I would be giving top priority right now.

Julia’s Priority Headlines

1) Chemicals That Kill Birds and Bees For Sale In Our Own Back Yard: “Scientists studying the global bee die-off have unearthed evidence on the devastation across the food chain caused by the most widely-used pesticide on Earth, neonicotinoids.” Once they enter the water supply, neonicotinoids wipe out dragonflies, snails, bees, and more. The few hardy species that survive are left so toxic that they’re killing birds. With up to a third of all honeybees vanishing each winter, beekeepers are saying that we are “on the brink” of not being able to pollinate all our crops.

Lowe’s and Home Depot still stock their shelves with neonicotinoid pesticides, spreading the ecosystem-destroying toxin to homes and gardens across Canada. As consumers, we need to demand that these retailers pull the devastating pesticides from the shelves.”

2) In response to Angelina Jolie’s announcement of her double mastectomy to prevent breast cancer because she carries the BRCA1 gene, actress Fran Drescher reminded the world in an interview that only 5% of cancers are genetic. A stunning 95% are caused by environmental influences like toxic chemicals, which is why Women’s Voices for the Earth posted Drescher’s comments on their site, and we have linked to that video on our Facebook page. Further on the subject of toxins, in one study 99% of tissue samples from 40 women who underwent mastectomies between 2005 and 2008 were found to contain at least one paraben and 60% of samples were positive for five of the most common parabens. Do parabens cause cancer? Maybe when you combine them with formaldehyde, fluoride, and heavy metals, you’ve got a recipe for tumour growth. This is what the well-funded cancer research community should be looking at, not the next miracle drug.

3) Multinational Companies Siphon Off Ontario’s Fresh Water, Almost Free – All around the world bottled water companies like Nestlé are depleting freshwater sources to make money. Nestlé has been withdrawing water from a deep aquifer well near Guelph, Ont. since 2000, paying $3.71 for every million litres that it removes from the watershed. Last September, the Ministry of Environment renewed Nestlé’s permit for another five years, but the permit set out a restriction requiring Nestlé to reduce its maximum allowable water taking by 20 per cent during times of moderate drought. Nestlé is now fighting that restriction. Question: why is our government selling off dwindling reserves of fresh water at a time when residents and farmers in the Guelph area experienced drought conditions last year?

Julia Woodford, Editor ~ Vitality Magazine