Greetings

Lest I be accused of being a booster of chemicals, I offer these highlights
from Rachel's News:

SOME CHEMICALS ARE MORE HARMFUL THAN ANYONE EVER SUSPECTED

New evidence is flooding in to suggest that many industrial chemicals
are more dangerous than previously understood. During the 1990s, it
came as a surprise that many industrial chemicals can interfere with
the hormone systems of many species, including humans. Hormones are
chemicals that circulate in the blood stream at very low levels (parts
per billion, and in some cases parts per trillion), acting like
switches, turning on and off bodily processes. From the moment of
conception throughout the remainder of life, our growth, development
and even many kinds of behavior are controlled by hormones.

Now new evidence is piling up to show that some of these
hormone-related changes can be passed from one generation to the next
by a mechanism that remains poorly understood, called epigenetics.

* * *

SCIENTISTS FIND FARM LINK TO BREAST CANCER

A team of researchers who studied the occupations of nearly all the
Windsor, Ontario women who developed breast cancer in a period from
2000 to 2002 found they were about three times more likely to have
worked on farms than women who didn't have the disease.

"If you were going to hypothesize about the No. 1 most likely cause of
this elevated risk, I think you'd have to look at the whole chemical
exposure that exists on farms," said Jim Brophy, head of the
Occupational Health Clinics for Ontario Workers in Sarnia, and lead
author of the paper.

from 
Rachel's Democracy & Health News #876
"Environment, health, jobs and justice--Who gets to decide?"
Thursday, October 12, 2006
www.rachel.org 

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