A little moth: What’s the uproar?

Posted on Jul 03, 2008 by Susie Collins in Blog, Environment, Media/Videos, Susie Collins

I wrote last week about Stop the Spray, a successful grass roots environmental movement in California that stopped aerial spraying meant to eradicate the light brown apple moth. Here’s a great video about the movement:

It’s a battle won. But Dr. Ann Haiden, D.O., an integrative physician and breast cancer survivor, says we need to look beyond the aerial spraying to the Big Picture of our toxic environment.

So it’s now, urban spraying out. Sterile moth release in.

So everything is better now. Right?

Not exactly.

I’d like to present the broader view here. To put it simply, we are living in a world full of toxins and they are making us sick. We don’t need any more of them. We can’t even tolerate the ones we have! That includes all sorts of pesticides and chemicals. Ahem… the ones you put on your lawns and gardens too.

Our bodies have ways of dealing with toxins…to an extent…and some people do better than others. It’s partly a matter of genetics. The bottom line is that folks that happen to be less adept at dealing with toxins can bear the brunt of more illness (especially infants, kids, the elderly and people who are already sick). Things like asthma, heart disease, chemical sensitivity, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, Parkinsons disease…and the list seems to be growing by the day. You get the picture.

The amount of toxicity we are exposed to everyday exceeds what many of us can cope with. And it’s not just a person here or there. Some of the enzymes we all use to help detoxify chemicals of all sorts are less efficient in up to half of us. So we can’t really say it’s just a few weak outliers.

Link

Link to Dr. Haiden’s website for her osteopathic practice. By the way, I am a strong advocate of osteopathic medicine. Osteopaths, who are integrative in their approach to health and healing, undergo the same academic discipline as their MD colleagues and receive an additional 300 to 500 hours in the study of the body’s musculoskeletal system.

7/4 UPDATE: Public pressure has forced the California Dept. of Food & Agriculture to back down from spraying over urban areas, but agricultural communities are still at risk. Read the press release and visit stopthespray.org for more information.