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 -- Visit www.honeybeeworld.com/bee-l for rules, FAQ and other info ---