Chemical Farm

[nosmokes]

i promise you one thing, if you invest in some genuine free range organicpoultry, it'll spoil ya for the flavorless, cruelly raised, bad karma inducing corporately farmed chemically fed type.
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original

Chemical Farm

By John Feffer, AlterNet
Posted on November 22, 2005,

Imagine having to go to a doctor for a prescription to buy the ingredients for dinner. It's not such a farfetched scenario. From testosterone and tetracycline to zeranol and genetically engineered bovine growth hormone, enough chemicals circulate in our animal products to stock a medicine cabinet. Because our meat and dairy are still over the counter, though, Americans remain largely oblivious to the intrusions of the pharmaceutical industry into our kitchens.

Consider the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving feast, the hybrid turkey raised in a factory farm in conditions of pain and squalor on a diet of chemical-infused feed. Close confinement requires the use of a long list of antibiotics to control such diseases as rhinotracheitis and colibacillosis. And let's not talk about what the bird picks up during processing. One of the last stages at the slaughterhouse is a dip in chlorine to wash off pathogens.

But conventional turkeys are practically a health food compared to some of the other dinner options, such as roast beef. Turkeys, unlike cows, don't get pumped full of growth hormones. Hormone residues in milk and meat likely play havoc with our endocrine systems.

Meanwhile, the routine use of antibiotics potentially builds up our resistance to drugs and encourages the spread of super resistant bacteria. "Eighty percent all antibiotics in the United States are given not to people to cure disease but to animals to make them fatten up and enable them to survive unhygienic confinement in factory farms," according to Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association. If one of those little bugs survives the onslaught of antibiotics at the factory farm, it's going to give you one hell of a bad case of food poisoning.

So what, you might ask. Food is cheap in America, and if that means that little Anna hits puberty at age nine or both Mom and Dad contract breast cancer or a new strain of E. Coli resists drug treatment, it's a small price to pay. Life in modern industrial society comes with risks. If you don't like it, then you're welcome to go to the chemical-free hinterlands of Greenland or the Gobi Dessert.

Or, conversely, you could hop a flight to Europe.
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[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. Or, conversely, you could hop a flight to Europe.

again.

http://www.corporateknights.ca/content/page.asp?name=water_rx
Feminized and intersexual fish were first identified in ponds downstream from sewage treatment plants in England in the early 1990s. Since then, wildlife biologists in that country have found very high numbers of intersexual fish throughout the UK. “In some rivers , 100 per cent of the male fish have some degree of feminization,” says Dr. John Sumpter, an environmental scientist at Brunel University in London, England. Although not quite as common, feminized fish are also found in Canada, such as in the Great Lakes.

Even though many non-pharmaceuticals, such as PCBs, heavy metals, and pesticides (including the infamous DDT) can mimic estrogen, ethinyl estradiol, a synthetic form of estrogen and the most commonly prescribed oral contraceptive in particular has been the focus of a great deal of research.

Ethinyl estradiol is one of the most potent “female” hormones in the world—after all, that is exactly what it was designed for. As Dr. Dana Kolpin, an environmental chemist with the US Geological Survey puts it: “It’s one thing to mimic a hormone, it’s quite another to actually be a hormone.” Many researchers have found that at the part per trillion level—a level deemed inconsequential for most chemicals—ethinyl estradiol can feminize male fish.