[From the Los Angeles Times, Mar. 30, 1969] NITRATES IN WATER CALLED CANCER CAUSE (By Harry Nelson, Times Medical Writer) NEW ORLEANS-Californians should show a greater concern over the possible effects of nitrate contaminated drinking water in agricultural communities, a Boston toxicologist said here Saturday. Dr. Samuel S. Epstein said there was theoretical reason to believe that nitrates in drinking water might sometimes cause cancer. "I view the concentration of nitrates in water in California with great concern," the scientist told writers at an American Cancer Society seminar. Until Dr. Epstein raised the possibility of cancer, the chief health victims of nitrates in water had been believed to be infants. Nitrate-laden water sometimes causes death by inactivating the ability of red blood cells to carry oxygen. Adults do not experience this effect. About 1963 the State Health Department sampled water from 800 wells in Southern California (including Los Angeles) and found that 88 exceeded the 45 parts per million maximum nitrate level set by the Public Health Service. Another 632 reached one-half the maximum level. The level in one well as 330 ppm. HIGH LEVELS The communities of Delano and MacFarland in Kern County and Garden Grove in Orange County have high levels of nitrates, especially during the summer. In December, 1966, residents of the first two cities were warned not to allow small children to drink the water because of its effects on red blood cells. In a telephone interview, Gerald Minford, city manager of Delano, said there is now no problem with nitrate contamination. When the level rises, the water is diluted with nitrate-free water, he said. Dudley Lapham, city manager of Garden Grove, said the problem has been solved thereby mixing the well water with Metropolitan Water District water which contains little or no nitrates. However, a report issued in August, 1968, by the State Water Resources Board said nitrates in groundwater around Delano are currently in excess of the Public Health Service limit. According to an article in the January-February, 1969, issue of Environment, a journal about environmental pollution, a State Health Depat. memo had instructed health officers not to notify the public of high nitrate levels. DON'T TELL PUBLIC The memo states that when the level passes 90 ppm, local physicians should be advised, but not the general public, according to the journal. The chief sources of the nitrates are fertilizers used in commercial farming. The nitrates are leached out of the soil by irrigation water which is pumped up and drunk as well water. Dr. Epstein, who is an authority on cancer-causing compounds, is senior research associate at Children's Cancer Research Foundation in Boston. He said his concern is based on knowledge that nitrates can undergo chemical changes in the intestinal tract which produce compounds called nitrosamines. FISH A CAUSE Nitrosamines cause cancer. Dr. Epstein said the large amount of stomach cancer in Japan, Iceland and Chile may be due to nitrosamine contaminated fish which people in those countries eat in great abundance. He suggested that studies be made in this country to determine the relationship between certain kinds of cancer and water with high nitrate levels. EXHIBITS N AND O ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION LOGICALLY REQUIRES PUBLIC ENCOURAGEMENT OF USE OF SUPERTHRIVE, CUTSTART, AND SEEDYIELD SINCE THEY EACH AID THE ENVIRONMENT IN THEIR WAYS A. Only SUPERthrive so helps the environment chemically in these ways: 1. Reduced poison-danger from nitrates now found by U.S. PHS to be above acceptable levels in 88 community drinking waters of Southern California, mainly or all agricultural areas. U.S. reports infant deaths from water and poisoning from milk of mothers drinking nitrate-water. Also cancer-causing effects of nitrates in drinking water, according to L.A. Times research reports. The L.A. Times expects nitrates in water supplies to replace DDT as the top environmental issue. 2. Reduced risk from blood pressure-raising cadmium in sewage sludge fertilizer (47.0 p.p.m. cadmium reported in one commercial brand). 3. Reduced occasion for poisoning fluoride emissions in environs of phosphorus mining-processing locations, for fertilizers. 4. Sooner enables provisions, through trees, of more oxygen; less braindamaging carbon monoxide, now officially recognized to be at high levels on and near freeways much of the time. 5. Enables stronger, healthier growth to aid, in the belief of some, in resisting and discouraging certain insects, thereby helping to reduce pesticide pollution of plant material and persons and animals. (And also insect pollution.) B. Only SUPERthrive so helps the environment in these additional ways: Alone so: 1. Encourages planting, by making easier and more successful planting, transplanting, growing. 2. Beautifies flowering, foliage. 3. Enables planting of marginal places, or times, or skills, or equipment. 4. Enables better tree-shrubbery masking of sight pollution locations. 5. Enables better and quicker sound-pollution tree barriers. 6. Enables quicker prevention of flooding from mountains, or water-erosion of freeway hillsides. 7. Enables quicker use of marginal land swept by wind and dust-storms. 8. Enables better, more efficiently satisfactory control of new gardening occupation, as taught to young men in correctional institutions, to encourage them successfully in seeking legal occupations, improving the social environment and reducing crime pollution. 9. Enables leisure time use in more satisfactorily, more easily perfecting achievements in plants and flowers for competition-winning, garden clubs and other fun, providing satisfactions for the psychological environment, less loneliness, depression, friction, resort to psychologically unconstructive behavior pollution. 10. Enables resuits in gardening or commercial growing, even in the short Alaskan summer, or the dry American deserts; which aid to attract to exercise. a. helping the health environment and b. to widen the range of food available to families, and c. to self-support contribution, again helping the psychological environment, as well as local welfare and pay-check-stretching pressures. d. to create jobs and local supply of foods, ornamentals, plants, etc. helping the economic environment. e. to create jobs and local great exhibits and enjoyment (like Disneyland one year earlier, Havasu City in the summer, Arboreta, flower shows, etc.) 11. Enables growing under adverse conditions of light, temperature, humidity, watering-care and physical buffeting in residence and commercial interiors, again helping psychologically and economically with environment, aiding in making bare buildings more acceptable for day-long work, shopping, living, visits, etc. 12. Enables growing certain marginal plant material successfully with adverse, polluted water, polluted air and polluted soil, aiding commercial and amateur production of plant material and crops, maintenance and growth of trees under difficult or impossible conditions. Regular killers of plants, untreated Colorado River water, high-boron Borax soil, and smog are chemical pollution examples which SUPERthrive aids the whole environment by overcoming, where these are plant-poisoning problems. 13. Aids to enable close wound-trimming of turf with least damage, saving work or improving turf and environment. 14. Provides so effective a plant-feeding adjunct formula of balanced complex chemicals uphill in the fact of (not publicly known) rather uniform laws against state and county farm advisors' recommending any brands other than for their content of known chemical composition (said to be adopted soon after 1900, in which certain advisors were believed to have accepted under-the-counter money for recommendations before these men were as reliable as today). 15. Enables improving agriculture environment by reviving and recovery from damage to plants by pesticides, over-fertilization, frost, storm, tramping, other abuse and pollution. C. CUTstart and SEEDyield help in their own allied ways with nearly all the same. D. CUTstart-treated cuttings create a new plant originally with root systems that also should be expected to go deeper, and reach farther soil food, with similar aid to environment, for a long time afterward. E. SEEDyield, especially in dry farming, may aid in saving a crop by getting germination and root depth down to moisture and food before too late, to save crop. EXHIBITS P AND Q WHY REGISTRATION-DISCLOSURE AND WHY DISCLOSURE IS INCONCEIVABLE FOR THE WORLD'S TOP HORTICULTURAL FORMULAS 1. Repeated news accounts report court-orded disclosure of formulas of pesticide or poison formulas. 2. Mere Official Classification through registration makes a product officially a pesticide/poison even though not so in fact. 3. Endless other avenues exist by statute for disclosure of pesticide/economic poison formulas. 4. Registration personnel inadvertently disclose new chemical uses and "harmless" facts about competitiors' formulas, when personnel are in conversations in the discharge of their duties. 5. All public and commercial observer-users of SUPERthrive, CUTstart. &c., say whenever the subject arises that they would never tell anyone what is in them, if they were I. 6. They have had a combined offer totaling $7,000, in seven sections, to the first person who can beat them in each of seven categories for an extremely long time and although this offer has been clearly displayed over the years in all kinds of shows and conventions' trade shows connected with horticulture-still no challenges. 7. The maker's estate mainly consists of the privy knowledge of these formulas, the result of a lifetime of fortunate, assiduous and intelligent research and development, which have always been far ahead of their times. 8. The formulas are complex. Into one goes over 60 substances, into another over 50, etc., etc. Who knows what ends up? The point is, they work. 9. An example: When the U.S. War Department was growing camouflage vines, trees and other plant material all over and around the southwest's defense establishments, with SUPERthrive, CUTstart, SEEDyield and other possibly centuries-ahead scientific products of the same laboratories, an advising Cal Tech department head, whose name has been identified from the beginning with plant growth hormone discoveries of a basic sort, is said to have asked the regional agronomist in charge of the operations, to try to learn from the maker what was in SUPERthrive (HORMS #4 had an alternate name, TRANSall, at that time.) The War Department man reported having replied "If you knew how to make something that would do what you have seen this stuff do-would you tell anyone how to make it?" He said that this closed off any further reference to the subject, permanently! 10. The maker burned his fingers enough on this subject, when he was talked into disclosing one hormone, for a state law here, very many years ago. That hormone and the only disclosed vitamin were each dollars per gram, early in their use in the SUPERthrive, and for a long time I had to make my own, actually, to get it pure enough. After this disclosure, when each of these ingredients had dropped later to few enough pennies per gram, most firms with long lines of bottled fertilizers or insecticides started to create the impression that they had something "equivalent" to SUPERthrive. Today, with the hormone mentioned and the vitamin each about 2¢ a gram, their ingredients tend to cost them less than the cost of the glass or the delivery cost, cheaply delivered with other bulky items by company truck, and moved off the shelves with aid of the large jug or bottle of unbalancing product. Meanwhile, the public and I lose out on sales of the enriched, balanced SUPERthrive into which over 50 helpful substances were put, with proven results, at a price giving far more value, which combined results and value are sufficient in thousands of plant-selling places to overcome partly the described competition, which is standardly combined with regular sales-calls and ads of which we have neither, having no salesmen at all and almost no ads. 11. Patterns of buying and making vitamins for humans exemplify how easily the public may be misled to buy the cheapest-made products on the market-even though the rare fully-informed person could discriminate enough to recognize the priceless life-protections from additional few cents price, as shown in the very properly disclosed ingredient lists of multiple vitamin products, for human use. Whereas it might be imagined that many persons could tell the difference, it turns out that only a few persons, professional or not, in the country can do so. Even physicians, according to a recently reported survey, number fewer than 200 in the nation who have had nutrition education other than one semester hour in hospital dietetics. Standardly, again, the cheaper formulas tend to run the better ones off the market. Virtually no M.D. or other user can recognize that a long list has omitted or included only token amounts of the vitamins that are more expensive, newer harder to get, harder to work with, bulkier or less known. In fact, the writer has had to make for his own family, two complete generations of offspring, the only complete, only balanced only universally assimilable, only "junk-free" multiple vitamin preparation available. Vitamin Facts, in case it may be believed, as is popular, that vitamins for any purpose are valueless: a. Fewer than 1% of families reported in the national 15,000-person USDA surveys obtain even as high as the USDA's "excellent" levels of intake of nutrients (which are still not claimed to be as high as "optimum" or ideal-but are higher than "good", "fair," or "poor"). These are the seven longest-educated nutrients, including vitamins A, B1, B2, and C. 50% obtain "good" levels. b. The Vitamin Institute has offered $1,000 for over twenty years, without a request, to the first person to write out for us a practical dietary that American families would be ready, willing and able to eat, which would provide safely high enough levels of all known vitamins, so that each individual would surely obtain optimal or ideal intakes of them all-without supplements. EXHIBIT R [From the Los Angeles Times, Aug. 18, 1971] SOUTHLAND-PESTICIDE RECORDS MUST BE MADE PUBLIC The District Court of Appeal in San Bernardino ruled that the Riverside County agricultural commissioner must make pesticide records public so farm workers can judge whether they need medical attention. The ruling if it is not reversed in the higher courts, is expected to have broad application throughout the state where pesticide use on agricultural fields has been kept secret. EXHIBIT T EMERGENCY-CLARIFYING LEGISLATION IS NEEDED! I. (IL) LEGAL CONFUSION A. We don't treat all atoms as Atom Bombs! B. We no longer treat heretical discovery as a capital offense, like murder! C. But suddenly every compound helping plants is "edict-ed” to be a pesticide! (Only exception: plain commercial fertilizer.) II. NO REASON-ANTI-PUBLIC ANTI-YOU-AND-ME A. The U.S. EPA LAWYERS ARE MIS-EXTENDING PESTICIDE LAW TO MIS-NAME AND MIS-TREAT ALL horticultural NUTRIMENTS, gentle hormones and vitamins-indiscriminately-AS PESTICIDES! 1. Because some sprays may be HARSH, SAFETY-PROBLEM "plant regulators." (Examples: Weed-killers, desiccants, defoliants, growth-stops.) 2. Failing to distinguish the life-savers from the killers. 3. "Throwing out the baby with the bath water." B. Then they and courts would publish how to make mis-named non"pesticides". C. My health- and life-makers are the OPPOSITE of killers, as you know. D. Each is even TEST-LAB CERTIFIED to be NON-TOXIC-UNDILUTED! E. Now the EPA lawyers reverse long-standing USDA rulings, claim a 1959 pesticide amendment forces them to order me to choose between: 1. quitting or 2. publishing my 60-, 50-, and 40-ingredient proprietary formulas! III. WHAT TO DO? A. Every user has felt I would be crazy to give away my lifetime of highest level research. B. In any case, I will not do so. C. Pesticide law revision is just now going through Congress, and there may be time-if the Senate considers amendments at all-to catch it with one to spell out what it meant, in 1959, and means now. . . . You can start by quickly filling out a petition. PLANT REGULATOR CLARIFICATION AMENDMENT "Also, the term 'plant regulator' shall not be required to include at all any of such of those nutriment mixtures or soil amendments as are commonly known as vitamin-hormone horticultural products, intended for improvement, maintenance, survival, health and propagation of plants, and as are not for pest destruction and are non-toxic, non-poisonous in the undiluted packaged concentration." Or-more briefly: "but shall not include at all any harmless compound for healthful physiological action and not for pest destruction, and" Please tell me that you want to help . . . JOHN A. THOMSON. NAMES OF SIGNERS OF PETITIONS-HORTICULTURISTS, Park and NURSERY MEN Jannice Dannehl J. D. English William O. Evans Lamon E. Farris Harold D. Fife Dewey M. Fisher, Jr. Melba M. Fisher Arthur W. Freshman Charles Garzanelli Wm. A. Gee Ruth Gee Adam H. Gutbrod Rubin Gutierrez George T. Goto Frank C. Hendricks Joe Herrera A. H. Hollister Charles G. Hopper Don H. Pritchett Frank W. Read |