[Pharmwaste] NAFTA and the Unmanning of North America - article

[Tenace, Laurie]

http://www.miller-mccune.com/science_environment/nafta-and-the-unmanning-of-n
orth-america-1008
more at the web site - Laurie

NAFTA and the Unmanning of North America
A trade case with Canada highlights the evidence linking everyday products to
the feminization and outright disappearance of males from every species -
including ours.

By: Chris Wood  
.
The longnose dace is a kind of silver minnow that lives in rivers on the
eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. To humans, a boy dace looks pretty much
like a girl dace. So it wasn't till long after they collected the little fish
from several stretches of Alberta's Oldman and Bow rivers that biologists
noticed something odd. During dissection, their random catch revealed itself
to be overwhelmingly of only one sex. In some stretches of the Oldman River,
female dace outnumbered males by more than 9 to 1.

Water sampled in stretches of the river with the fewest males revealed spikes
in a new class of pollutant, endocrine disruptors, which are found in
everything from pesticides to nail polish, flame retardants to
contraceptives, and in human and animal pharmaceuticals. Often mimicking
estrogen, endocrine disruptors scramble the chemical signals used by
vertebrates from reptiles to humans to regulate a wide range of functions,
including sexual development. The Canadian data were only the latest to
implicate endocrine disruption in genital abnormalities and the disappearance
of males.

For researcher Leland Jackson, whose tap water comes from the Bow River, the
data were "alarming. The water I use to make my kids' orange juice is the
same water those fish are living in."

The scientists reported their findings as other Canadian events were grabbing
headlines and generating heat among environmentalists. Dow AgroSciences LLC,
a subsidiary of U.S.-based Dow Chemical, one of the world's five largest
chemical companies, confirmed it would sue Canada under NAFTA, the North
American Free Trade Agreement. Canada's trade crime? One Canadian province,
Quebec, had placed 2,4-D - a widely used, nonproprietary herbicide and proven
endocrine disruptor -on a list of garden pesticides prohibited for cosmetic
use in urban areas. The measure was overwhelmingly popular with Quebecers.

Dow claims the ban lacks scientific support and amounts to an "expropriation"
of its business in the province (several Dow products contain 2,4-D). It has
demanded more than $2 million (Canadian) in damages. Environmental groups
that had welcomed Quebec's urban pesticide ban - the first by a state or
province in North America - denounced Dow as the latest corporation to use
NAFTA's dispute-settlement provisions to undermine public health measures.

The truth, as usual, is somewhat more complicated than either adversary
claims. And with the Obama administration committed by its campaign rhetoric
to reopen NAFTA to bolster environmental protection, it provides a foretaste
of the entrenched prejudices, often-overlooked facts and sobering
implications for our chemical-saturated society that await any effort to
redraft the 16-year-old trade pact.

Jackson and his associates call longnose dace a "sentinel species" that
reveals environmental exposures and consequences that other creatures,
including humans, may be experiencing. The bodies of male dace captured up to
70 miles downstream from city waste treatment outfalls and intensely farmed
areas contained vitellogenin, a protein precursor to the production of eggs
normally found only in female dace. Male dace produce the protein only when
they have been exposed to feminizing chemicals. In combination with their
extremely low numbers, feminized males "suggest severe endocrine disruption
from the combined impacts of municipal wastewater, agriculture and large
cattle operations," the scientists concluded in a 2008 article in the journal
Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.

Other reports have associated endocrine disruptors with gender-bending
effects from China to Scandinavia. Sentinel species sounding an alarm run
from feminized cane toads in Florida and frogs in Connecticut to Alaskan deer
with undescended testicles and hermaphrodite polar bears with penises and
vaginas. Lab experiments and field studies have linked endocrine-disrupting
chemicals with delayed pregnancy and spontaneous abortions among rats and
humans. The faux hormones are lead suspects in a decades-long worldwide
decline in human sperm counts, more frequent male genital birth defects and
local instances of a sharp human sex-ratio imbalance. By one estimate, a
quarter of a million boys may be "missing" globally: the difference between
historic sex ratios and the plummeting male birth rates of the last 30 years.

Though there is clear evidence of widespread impacts, precise knowledge about
which endocrine disruptors are doing the damage - alone or in combination
with other chemicals - is lacking. Likewise, the exact biochemical mechanisms
by which endocrine disruptors work are in many cases not documented. Still,
the Quebec regulation was explicitly adopted as a precaution, and the
situation would seem precisely the kind for which the precautionary principle
was invented. As one phrasing states: "When an activity raises threats of
harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be
taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully understood."

Yet Dow's claim that "numerous assessments ... by national and international
agencies ... have found that 2,4-D does not pose an unacceptable health risk"
is also true. To the chagrin of lawyers who must now defend Quebec's ban
(thanks to long-standing international law practice, any dispute under NAFTA
Chapter 11, even one with a village, must be defended by the national
government), those assessments include one by Canada's own pesticide
regulator, which earlier in 2008 concluded that "2,4-D ... can be used safely
by homeowners, provided label directions are followed." According to Dow's
legal filing, even Quebec's own internal documents recognized before the ban
took effect that "certain herbicides" including 2,4-D "cannot be prohibited
on a scientific basis" and that "this is also the opinion of (the National
Public Health Institute of Quebec)." All of the parties - the governments of
Canada and Quebec and Dow - declined to comment for this article.

Laurie Tenace
Environmental Specialist
Waste Reduction Section
Florida Department of Environmental Protection
2600 Blair Stone Rd., MS 4555
Tallahassee FL 32399-2400
P: 850.245.8759
F: 850.245.8811
Laurie.Tenace at dep.state.fl.us 

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