{"id":140669,"date":"2014-10-11T16:42:18","date_gmt":"2014-10-11T16:42:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=140669"},"modified":"2014-10-11T16:42:18","modified_gmt":"2014-10-11T16:42:18","slug":"ghost-gmo-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/ghost-gmo-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ghost in the GMO Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Paul Koberstein<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The bodies and minds of children living on the Hawaiian island of Kaua\u2018i are being threatened by exposure to chlorpyrifos, a synthetic insecticide that is heavily sprayed on fields located near their homes and schools.<\/p>\n<p>For decades, researchers have been publishing reports about children who died or were maimed after exposure to chlorpyrifos, either in the womb or after birth. While chlorpyrifos can no longer legally be used around the house or in the garden, it is still legal to use on the farm. But researchers are finding that children aren\u2019t safe when the insecticide is applied to nearby fields.<\/p>\n<p>Like a ghost drifting through a child\u2019s bedroom window, the airborne insecticide can settle on children\u2019s skin, clothes, toys, rugs, and furnishings.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, it\u2019s likely that the only people who needn\u2019t worry about exposure to chlorpyrifos are adults living far from the fields in which it is sprayed. That includes civil servants who work for the Environmental Protection Agency (<span class=\"caps\">EPA<\/span>), which regulates the stuff, and executives with Dow Chemical, the company that manufactures it.<\/p>\n<p>In a regulatory process known as re-registration, the <span class=\"caps\">EPA<\/span> will decide in 2015 whether it still agrees that chlorpyrifos is safe for farming, or whether it will order a complete ban, as Earthjustice, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Pesticide Action Network have demanded in lawsuits filed in 2007 and in\u00a02014.<\/p>\n<p>Dow has long insisted that its chlorpyrifos products are safe, despite tens of thousands of reports of acute poisoning and multiple studies linking low-level exposures to children with lower <span class=\"caps\">IQ<\/span>. The company also has a long history\u2013going back decades\u2013of concealing from the public the many health problems it knew were linked to chlorpyrifos.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/times.org\/2014\/10\/07\/ghost-gmo-machine\/\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Paul Koberstein The bodies and minds of children living on the Hawaiian island of Kaua\u2018i are being threatened by exposure to chlorpyrifos, a synthetic insecticide that is heavily sprayed on fields located near their homes and schools. For decades, researchers have been publishing reports about children who died or were maimed after exposure to chlorpyrifos, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":140427,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,955],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-140669","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-health"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140669\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}