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October 23, 2001

Terrorists at Home

Some Newspapers are like home of our own, of we readers, for the ideas flowing over, and melting with ours, day after day.  Nevertheless, once in a while, the Newspaper I read more often accommodates one column entitled:  ' As Bio rules '. The column is held by a small taliban, a very dwarf-binladen, a ragged no-global, a terrorist on the whole: a fanatical environmentalist.  Obviously, the respectability of the  Newspaper immediately falls down.  A very sin. Usually, I disregard the infamous column; it demands the stomach.  But occasionally, I fall into the net. It occurred the last October 19.  It was perhaps the charming sight of the pretty author of the column, looking like Giacomo Leopardi under the sun of Rimini’s beach, peeping from the annexed mini-photo, as if it was mocking the reader, with that one heavy pate, slanted on the carefully folded fine hand in support of the well hidden inside knowledge, and trying to preserve it from an imminent fall on the floor.  It was perhaps the charming title:  'Emergency pesticides'; it maybe. 

The phrases of the pretty one are of a hardly withheld rigor:  '..dangerous cocktail of pesticides...... vegetables polluted by more than one poison... foods with more than one toxic residue... presence of dangerous associations of poisons... contemporary assumption of more than one poison... ' .  And all the embroidery of invectives, hardly withheld in the underbrush of the sweetly saucy declarations, is well woven round and in the direction of the final figure, longed for, of the resolute association: pesticides = poisons.  Well knowing the matter of the ‘As Bio rules’ column, there are no doubts: the pretty is flaking against the 'terrifying' pesticides of the synthetic kind only ones. 

Nevertheless, if the pretty one did not had to scorn the source directly, in order to try to collect with the humility – thought a quality peculiarly unusual to ignorant guys -  the " facts ", the reality well known to the specialists, to scientists [in the end, it’s also true that science and only science can be appealed – also from the fanatic-environmentalists - in order to establish if a substance is truly toxic], he would be knowing that the arguments belonging to pesticides are faced very extensively by the greatest expert on the matter, saying the scientist Bruce N. Ames - 'inventor' as well of the method for the evaluation of toxicity of  chemical compounds, employed all over the world – and then, that’s odd, Ames does not share at all the ‘poisonous’ opinions of our pretty dwarf-binladen.

“About 50% of chemicals – whether natural or synthetic – that have been tested in standard, high dose, animal cancer tests are rodent carcinogens… Human exposure to naturally occurring rodent carcinogens is ubiquitous, and dwarfs the general public exposure to synthetic  carcinogens…” [Ames, B.N. & Gold, L.S., Mutation Research (2000), 447, 3-13 ].  Ames & colleagues wrote in 1990 [Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences 87, 7777-7781 ] that "..99.99% of the pesticides in the American diet are chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves against fungi, insects, and animal predators …When plants are stressed or damaged, such as during a pest attack, they may greatly increase their natural pesticide levels, occasionally to levels that can be acutely toxic to humans.”   That is what really “Bio-rules”. The concentrations of NATURAL pesticides are usually measurable in part-per-thousands down to part-per-million. The concentration of the synthetic pesticides, instead, in part-per-billion. The above situation means that the quantity of NATURAL pesticides may be very high, being equivalent to one gram of chemical each kilogram of food, down to one gram per 1 ton of food; while the concentration of SYNTHETIC pesticides will be 1,000 – 1,000,000 times lower, being measurable in nanograms per gram - that is in billionths of a gram per gram of food - equivalent to one gram of synthetic pesticide each 1000 tons of food]. 

In 1992, Food & Drug Administration assayed 19,082 samples of foods for 200 chemicals including synthetic pesticides. No illegal residues were found in 99% of all 8,281 domestic surveillance samples. Indeed, 64% of these had no detectable residues. [FDA Pesticide Monitoring 1992.  JAOAC (1993), 76, 127A-14A]. 

Of  the 71 NATURAL PESTICIDES that have been tested, 37 [ = 52% ] are rodent carcinogens. These 37 NATURAL pesticides that are rodent carcinogens are ubiquitous in fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices, like apples, apricots, bananas, basil, broccoli, cabbages, cauliflower, carrots, chili, chocolate, coffee, eggplants, lemons, garlic, celery, seeds of Soya, tomatoes, potatoes, etc. etc.  [ Ames & Gold, 2000, quoted above].  Ames and Gold estimate that "..on average the Americans ingest roughly 5000 to 10,000 different NATURAL pesticides... equivalents to approximately 1,500 mg of pesticides per person per day; which is about 10,000 times more than the 0.09 mg they consume of synthetic pesticides residues…” [Ames, B.N., Profet, M. & Gold, L.S., Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (1990), 87, 7777-7778].  “..The possible carcinogenic hazard from synthetic pesticides are minimal compared to the background of nature’s pesticides, though neither may be a hazard at the low doses consumed.... many ordinary foods would not pass the regulatory criteria used for synthetic chemicals… many thousands of chlorinated chemicals are produced in nature.…[Gribble, G.W. ‘The diversity of natural organochlorines in living organisms’, Pure Appl. Chemistry (1996), 68, 1699-1712]… Natural pesticides also can bioconcentrate if they are fat-soluble ..” [Ames & Gold, 2000, quoted above].  Phenomena of human adaptation to toxins coming from the nature can not be taken into account, claming that the same protection phenomena do not work against synthetic chemicals, since really those defense mechanisms work equally well against both natural and synthetic chemicals, to our knowledge. In fact ".. various natural toxins, which have been present throughout vertebrate evolutionary history, still cause cancer in vertebrates.” [Ames & Gold, 2000, quoted above]. The aflatoxins, present in products  NATURALLY molded by some widely spread Aspergillus species are actually regarded as the most powerful cancerogenic substances ever known, both to rodents and to humans.

Furthermore, human diet changed very much in the last few thousands years. “Indeed, very few of the plants that human eat today, e.g., coffee, cocoa, tea, potatoes, tomatoes, corn, avocados, mangoes, olives and kiwi fruit, would have been present in the hunter-gatherer’s diet.” And “Natural selection works far too slowly for humans to have evolved specific resistance to the food toxins in this newly introduced plants."[Ames & Gold, 2000, quoted above]. 

Analogous considerations could be made for the estrogenic substances. The above-mentioned Authors still say that “..our normal diet contains natural chemicals that have estrogenic activity millions of times higher than that due to the traces of synthetic estrogenic chemicals.” [Ames & Gold, 2000, quoted above].

Some final considerations follow.  The DDT was lethal to many vectors of diseases such as mosquitoes, tsetse flies, lice, ticks and fleas as well as against many crop pests; though the DDT is of low toxicity to humans. The use of DDT significantly increased the supply and thus lowered the cost of foods, making fresh nutritious foods more accessible to poor people. The National Academy of Sciences conclusion of the Report on DDT was:  << In little more than two decades the DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria, that would otherwise have been inevitable. >>  [Nat. Acad. Sci., USA, 1970, “The Life Sciences: Recent progress and Application to Human Affairs, the World of Biological Research, Requirement for the Future, Committee on Research in the Life Sciences”, Washington D.C.].

Anyway, “..There is no convincing epidemiological evidence, nor is there much toxicological plausibility, that the levels of DDT normally found in the environment or in human tissues are likely to be significant contributor to cancer."[Ames & the Gold, 2000, quoted above].

As the two following tables show well, the toxicity of NATURAL substances is thousands [poisonous mushrooms] to million times [botulinal neurotoxin] higher than that of [man-made] reference potassium cyanide. The cancerogenicity of the not-natural substances, the synthetic ones, is thousands [1,1-dimethylhydrazine] to million times [saccharin] lower than that of the most NATURAL cancerogenic substances [aflatoxins].

If follows, really, that the threat of synthetic poisonous pesticides disappears; it exist only in the pathological waits of ignorant terrorists. On the whole, as it is obvious, the pretty author of the column is spreading infamous ideas, not scientifically supported; that’s pure ideological terrorism; dictated by fanatic ecologist. Thus, ideas devoid of any scientific foundation [I hope that nobody wants to put to comparison the opinions of the pretty author, with those of the scientific maximum expert of the problem] are strengthened, and possibly they lead to the approval of provisions seemingly directed to the protection from situations of no real value for the human health, drawing away engagement and financial support that could be directed with much greater effectiveness in different directions, actually more important to the true human health.  Ames and Colleagues [Ames & Gold, 2000, quoted above] too support this consideration. 

I believe that it may be recognized to everyone the right to express his own opinion, however, whatever it is. While I do not recognize to anyone the right to be communist [remembering the ~ 100 million victims of this ideology], nazis [~ 25 million victims], not-democratic, no-global, cheguevarist, talibans, followers of Bin Laden, anyway terrorists, and so on along such criminal drains.  Nor I can feel that Director of my preferred Newspaper would feed some foolish ambitions of the fanatic-environmentalists type, blind sight in full sun, antiscientific, dogmatic, contraries to the progress and to the western civilization.  That one civilization that he has done such diabolic and infamous errors cited above [communism and Nazism, for instance], but a civilization that has not prevented us from enriching the world of an amount of knowledge, culture and goods, without an end. That one civilization that has not forced us to stop immovable at the time of the crusades, but that carried us to walk just on the moon; and is leading us to organize the world in such a manner as to increase the highest well-being to all the people of the planet earth [ "Sovereignty and wealth" by C. Pelanda and P. Savona, Sperling & Kupfer, 2001].  Here, no one wears a burqa on the head. This western civilization, includes Chinese, Japans, Africans and all peoples together trusting in the unavoidable values of personal freedom and personal dignity [of women too, obviously and primarily], of democracy, of the right to prosperity, to the knowledge, to the education, to the culture and to happiness; this civilization is product and product-maker at the same time of scientific and technical progress, that supplied us certainties, provisional while rational, and incentives and creating power all over the fields of knowable matter, more than any monument or pseudo-civilization. It is behind the eyes of anyone. Safe behind the imploring face of women forced by an ignoble kind of foolish policy to live under a burqa. This it’s a very ignominious, unbearable shame for the entire humanity.

If someone, wherever he’s, he is feeling some propensity towards talibans or khomeini like men, still standing at a bus stop of the middle-age, then we must force him to left the path. We are living elsewhere.

That’s right?

A suggestion for anyone having eyes and ears. The very exciting book:  "The skeptical environmentalist.  Measuring the Real State of the World."  by Bjorn Lomborg, Cambridge University Press, 2001 [Lomborg is Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of Aarhus, Denmark ].  This book is a milestone. 

a.casolari@rsadvnet.it<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">

TOXICITY of Natural and Synthetic
Chemical Compounds

CANCEROGENICITY
of Natural and Synthetic
Chemical Compounds

            CD[50] = approximate Cancerogenic Dose for 50% of subjects.   Relative Potency = Cancerogenic Potency compared to cancerogenic potency of ethanol, taken = 1.

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Antonio Casolari         http://www.vency.com                a.casolari@rsadvnet.it