Part 1: Is Your Lawn Care Poisoning Your Family?

Volume 4 Issue 42

May 2005

In 1985 a married couple in Sarasota, Florida, felt pressured by their neighbors to get their lawn treated. They hired a company, never thinking their 2-year-old daughter would be jeopardized. The company declared the yard would be safe about an hour after the chemicals were applied. However, soon after playing barefoot on the grass, the couple's daughter developed a rash all over her body, her urine turned dark brown, and she ran a high fever. Her doctor prescribed antibiotics, but her condition grew steadily worse. Her hands and feet swelled to twice normal size, blistered, and peeled. Her lips turned black and bled. Years later she is still permanently prone to headaches and has 40% hearing loss in her right ear.

Are you employing a chemical service to have a green and pest and weed free lawn?

Are you using chemicals on your own to have good looking pest and weed free grass? 

If so, you may be endangering yourself, your friends and neighbors, your children, your pets and even the environment. Contrary to what the distributors and manufacturers of the chemicals used to create green lawns and wipe out lawn pests and weeds tell you, the chemicals are not safe.  The pesticides alone in most chemical lawn care treatments can be real killers.

Pesticides are poisons designed to kill a variety of plants and animals such as insects (insecticides), weeds (herbicides), and mold or fungus (fungicides). Pesticides include active ingredients (chemical compounds designed to kill the target organisms) and inert ingredients which may be carcinogens or toxic substances. They also include rodenticides and wood preservatives. Humans absorb pesticides through the skin, swallow them or inhale them which is the most toxic. Also during application pesticides drift and settle on ponds, laundry, toys, pools and furniture. And, people and pets track pesticide residue into the house. One way or another we and our children and pets – as well as friends, neighbors and the environment around our homes – are exposed to these chemicals once they are used.

Also, some of the companies testing pesticides have been charged and convicted of falsifying residue and environmental studies that were used to support pesticide registration.

And, some pesticides become even more toxic as they break down. These chemicals are so unsafe that it is a violation of federal law to state that the use of pesticides is safe.

But the government would not allow such unsafe products on the market. Well using these products creates strong possibility that you can get cancer and even die. About 16 million Americans have compromised immune functioning as a result of pesticide exposure.

For adults, specifically, the dangers of exposure to pesticides include increased risk of leukemia cancers (lung, brain, testicular, lymphoma), increase in spontaneous abortions, greater genetic damage, decreased fertility, liver and pancreatic damage, neuropathy, disturbances to immune systems (asthma/ allergies), increases in stillbirths and decreased sperm counts.

For children, the dangers of exposure include cancer: leukemia and brain cancer, 
asthma and allergies, polyneuritis with numbness and pain in lower limbs, altered neurological functioning and long-lasting neuro-behavioral impairments, birth defects and
gangrene (tissue death) of the extremities.

Worse, the younger a child is, the more susceptible he is to the effects of pesticides because children have more rapid breathing and metabolic rates, greater surface to body mass ratios, thinner skins, spend more time in contact with the ground, more frequently place their fingers in their mouths, and are less likely to be able to read hazard signs.

And, pesticides can kill your family pets as well as harm wildlife in your area. Your pets can get abnormal thyroid function and cancer from pesticides. Area wildlife can suffer decreased fertility, decreased hatching success and demasculinization and feminization of males. Both pets and wildlife can also suffer alteration of the immune function such as what AIDS causes in humans. Real killers as your can see. But you and your family can avoid exposure to these killer chemicals in lawn treatments and still have a great lawn.

Safety Issues will tell you how in the next article.

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