Energy Efficiency

Many years ago after A Silent Spring, DDT was banned but the USA still makes this toxic chemical to sell overseas to poorer nation; but lax standards, a fast buck and a total dis-interest in fellow being’s good health has seen a weedkiller that causes sex change in frogs also impact on American males.

Movies made in America purport a rough, tough fighting machine, yet more and more males in Amercia are well … showing distinct female traits, so this over-compensation of making war on other people, killing, raping and torture are suppose to imply ‘masulinity?

Atrazine is one of the most commonly used weedkillers and its been proven to turn male frogs into females researchers in the US have found; experiments show the complete effects of atrazine, which disrupt hormones and is one of the chief suspects in the decline of amphibians around the world.

Atrazine-exposed males were both demasculinised (chemically castrated) and completely feminised as adults,” researchers from the University of California Berkeley wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The chemical had been shown to disrupt development and make frogs develop both male and female features – termed hermaphroditism.

Tyrone Hayes from the University of California Berkeley says the study of 40 male frogs shows the process can go even further; ‘before we knew we got fewer males than we should have, and we got hermaphrodites; clearly shown that many of these animals are sex-reversed males; Atrazine has caused a hormonal imbalance that has made them develop into the wrong sex, in terms of their genetic constitution’.

The European Union banned Atrazine in 2004 but Australia still uses the toxic chemical widely in agriculture. The report shows that approximately 36,287 tonnes are applied annually in the United States alone and atrazine is the most common pesticide contaminant of ground and surface water. Atrazine can be transported more than 1,000 kilometres from the point of application via rainfall and – as a result – contaminates otherwise pristine habitats, even in remote areas where it is not used. Even more scary is the fact that more than 227 tonnes of Atrazine is precipitated in rainfall each year in the United States. The largely toothless US Environmental Protection Agency said (in October 2009) that it was reviewing the health impacts of atrazine.

Funny its not, but funnily enough Syngenta AG – one of several companies that makes atrazine – has long defended its safety, citing it as one of the best-studied herbicides available and pointed to safety reviews from the EPA and World Health Organisation, among others.  Hayes and colleagues studied 40 African clawed frogs, keeping them in water contaminated with 2.5 parts per billion (ppb) of atrazine. The EPA’s current drinking water standard is 3ppb. The study said in part ’10% of the exposed genetic males developed into functional females that copulated with unexposed males and produced viable eggs; so regardless of the mechanism, the impacts of atrazine on amphibians and on wildlife in general are potentially devastating’.

The negative impacts on wild amphibians is especially concerning given that the dose examined - 2.5ppb – is in the range that animals experience year-round in areas where atrazine is used as well within levels found in rainfall, in which levels can exceed 100ppb in the midwestern United States. Perhaps a simple human survey would reveal a higher concentration in sexually ‘confused’ males in that region.