Natural Pest Control

A few weeks back we had an issue with Japanese beetles in our garden.  They came in swarms it seemed.  So I did a little research, we are growing everything organically so we did not want to use any pesticides.  I read an article about using a garlic spray, which proved to be effective if you sprayed daily.  All you do is crush several cloves of garlic and let them soak in some water for a few hours, then stain out the garlic pieces and add the water to a spray bottle.  You have to make sure that you spray the plant completely, even under the leaves for it to work.  
Another option is to make a spray with castor oil and water, you probably should not use this on vegetables that you are going to be harvesting soon due to the diuretic effect of castor oil.
The last method we used was just to pic them off by hand.  The tended to clump together on the leaves and you could grab a whole handful of them at one time.  We then threw them into a bucket of water with some dish soap in it.  We used just water at first, but they just swam to the top and flew off.  The dish soap prevented them from doing this.  So those are a few things that we did and they worked really well, especially on the Japenese beetles.

Bhopal Disaster

Overview

In 1984, the accidental release of 40 metric tons of methyl isocyanate from a Union Carbide pesticideplant in the heart of Bhopal, India killed thousands of people and injured hundreds of thousands.

Toxicological Perspective

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The methyl isocyanate poisoning of Bhopal, India had many disastrous consequences. Hundreds of thousands of people were injured and around 15,000 died. The toxicological and environmental problems are ongoing. Due to a lack of political willpower, the toxic waste from the disaster has still not been cleaned up. Higher rates of Cancer and diseases affecting the central nervous system, liver, and kidneys were witnessed. Also, water analysis is poor due to continued contamination from benzene hexachloride and Mercury that persists to this day.

Background

The Union Carbide plant was established in Bhopal in 1969 and it began to produce the insecticide Carbaryl. methyl isocanyte is an ingredient of carbaryl, and on the morning of December 3, 1984, a holding tank containing 43 tons of methyl isocyanate overheated and released the toxic gas. Because methyl isocyanate is heavier than air, it traveled over the ground through the Bhopal city center. The transportation system collapsed, and many people were trampled to death in a mad rush to flee the visible gases. In total, 15,000 people died and 150,000-600,000 people were injured.

The contamination and deaths were a result of numerous factors:

• Recent documents obtained through discovery in the course of a lawsuit against Union Carbide for environmental contamination (before a New York Federal District Court) revealed that Carbide had exported "untested, unproven technology" to the Indian plant. Unlike Union Carbide plants in the USA, its Indian subsidiary plants were not prepared for problems. No action plans had been established to cope with incidents of this magnitude. This included not informing local authorities of the dangers of chemicals used and manufactured at Bhopal.

• Reports issued months before the incident by scientists within the Union Carbide corporation warned of the possibility of an accident almost identical to that which occurred in Bhopal. The reports were ignored outright and never made it to senior staff. Due to falling sales, staff had been laid off and safety checks became less and less frequent.

• Slip-blind plates that would have prevented water from pipes being cleaned from leaking into the MIC tanks via faulty valves were not installed. Their installation had been omitted from the cleaning checklist.

• At the time of the event, the MIC tank refrigeration unit was disabled to save money, and some of its coolant was being used elsewhere. A simple press of a button in the control room would have activated it to at least use the remaining coolant, but this was overlooked by staff.

• The gas scrubber was placed on standby, and therefore did not attempt to clean escaping gases with sodium hydroxide (caustic soda), which may have brought the concentration down to a safe level.

• The water curtain that may have reduced the concentration of the gas was only set to ~13 m and did not reach the gas; it was not designed to contain a leak of such magnitude. Though the audible external alarm was activated to warn the residents of Bhopal, it was quickly silenced to avoid causing panic among the residents. Thus, many continued to sleep, unaware of the unfolding drama, and those that had woken assumed any problem had been sorted out.

• The flare tower used to burn off gases before they are allowed to escape into the air was inoperational pending repairs.

• Doctors and hospitals were not informed of proper treatment methods for MIC gas inhalation. They were told to simply give cough medicine and eyedrops to their patients.

Union Carbide agreed to pay $470 million to the residents of Bhopal. That amount is lower than in the lawsuit and substantially lower than similar Asbestos cases Union Carbide was settling concurrently in the United States. By the end of October 2003, according to the Bhopal Gas Tragedy Relief and Rehabilitation Department, compensation had been awarded to 554,895 people for injuries received and 15,310 survivors of those killed. The average amount to families of the dead was $2,200. Union Carbide also attempted to distance itself from the tragedy by blaming its subsidiary in India and even fabricated stories about a Sikh extremist group and disgruntled former employees bent on sabotaging the plant.

Health Effects Summary for MIC

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Immediate Health Effects  (0-6 months)

• Ocular: Chemosis, redness, watering, ulcers, photophobia
• Respiratory: Distress, pulmonary edema, pneumonitis, pneumothorax
• Gastrointestinal: Persistent diarrhea, anorexia, persistent abdominal pain
• Genetic: Increased chromosomal abnormalities
• Psychological: Neuroses, anxiety states, adjustment reactions
• Neurobehavioral: Impaired audio and visual memory, impaired vigilance attention and response time, Impaired reasoning and spatial ability, impaired psychomotor coordination

Long-term Health Effects

• Ocular: Persistent watering, corneal opacities, chronic conjunctivitis
• Respiratory: Obstructive and restrictive airway disease, decreased lung function
• Reproductive: Increased pregnancy loss, increased infant mortality, decreased placental/fetal weight
• Genetic: Increased chromosomal abnormalities
• Neurobehavioral: Impaired associate learning, motor speed, and precision

External Links

• Bhopal gas disaster's legacy lives on 25 years later (Telegraph.co.uk)

1970s' Manitoba poverty experiment called a success

A controversial government experiment in the 1970s in which some households in a Manitoba town were given a minimum level of income improved the community's overall health, a professor at the University of Manitoba says.

From 1974 through 1978, about 30 per cent of the population of Dauphin was provided with a "mincome," as the guaranteed level of income came to be called.

"We found that, overall, hospitalizations in Dauphin declined relative to the control group," said Evelyn Forget, professor of community health science at the University of Manitoba. "We also looked at accidents and injuries, and they also declined. You can argue that accident and injury hospitalizations are strongly related to poverty."

The goal of the program, which cost $17 million, was to find out whether a guaranteed income would improve health and community life. If a household's income dropped below a certain amount, the program would top it up to an income equivalent to the welfare rates at the time.

'Hospitalizations for mental health issues were down significantly,'— Evelyn Forget, researcher

The participants who worked had their supplement reduced 50 cents for every dollar they earned in an attempt to encourage people in the program to look for work.

Forget has spent three years comparing the administrative health care records of Dauphin's citizens between 1974 and 1978 with those of a control group of people living in similar Manitoba communities at that time.

She said her research suggests that people appear to live healthier lives when they don't have to worry about poverty.

"Hospitalizations for mental health issues were down significantly," she said, adding that teenagers stayed in school longer as a result of the initiative.

The initiative, which started in 1974, was terminated in 1978 as political support for the experiment faded.

"Politically, there was a concern that if you began a guaranteed annual income, people would stop working and start having large families," Forget said.

Ron Hikel, the executive director of the Mincome project, is delighted Forget is taking a fresh look at the project's impact.

'Politically, there was a concern that if you began a guaranteed annual income, people would stop working and start having large families.'— Evelyn Forget, researcher

"As somebody who devoted three or four years of his life to making this happen, I was disappointed that the data were warehoused," Hikel said.

Forget has not yet been given access to the 2,000 boxes of data collected by the original Mincome researchers, which contain copies of questionnaires participants filled out and, she believes, transcripts of interviews with the families who took part.

Hikel, who is now legislative director for U.S. Rep. Eric Massa, said Forget's research is immensely relevant in Canada and the United States. He said he intends to use her analysis as part of the current health-care debate.

"It has to do with the impact that larger social conditions have on one's health condition and the need for health care," Hikel said.

References: 

A GUARANTEED ANNUAL INCOME? FROM MINCOME TO THE MILLENNIUM 

Goar: Anti-poverty success airbrushed out 

Dolly Parton sends books to Rotherham

A reading scheme developed by the US country singer Dolly Parton is a proving a big hit in the UK

Elizabeth Smith was in hospital having had her first child when she learned about the free books. The nurses gave her the form as part of an information pack and six weeks later a book – a Peter Rabbit story – addressed to her son, Aaron, slipped through the letterbox of her Rotherham home. The following month, another book arrived for Aaron and another the next month, until the little boy became used to the sight of the postman delivering a fresh title every month.

"He calls it 'Aaron post' and he knows the books are for him," says his mother. "When the postman comes Aaron runs to check, and if there is a book he wants me to open it straight away. The books have been a wonderful way to bond, and reading the stories before bedtime has become part of his routine." Aaron is now 22 months and he will go on receiving a new book a month until his fifth birthday. He is one of 13,000 children in Rotherham, aged under five, who are sent a book every month because of a woman the children refer to as 'The Book Lady', but who is better known as Dolly Parton.

Parton is one of the all-time great country singer–songwriters, but for the past 15 years she has also been spearheading a campaign to get children reading. Her Imagination Library started in her home town of Sevier County in Tennessee where she had grown up in a two-room wooden shack with her 11 siblings. When I met Parton in Dollywood, the theme park she co-owns in eastern Tennessee, she explained why she started the library. "Many of my own relatives didn't get a chance to go to school or get an education," she told me, "and my dad didn't learn to read and write because he was born into a very large family and they had to go out and work in the fields to make money. My dad felt crippled by that – so I thought this book scheme would be a wonderful tribute to him."

Parents at the Coleridge children’s centre in Rotherham said the Imagination Library scheme had inspired them to read more, as well as enthusing their children. Photograph:

From those modest beginnings the Imagination Library has grown. "In 1999, the library was mailing books to 2,300 children every month", says David Dotson, president of the Dollywood Foundation, which looks after the administration of the scheme. "Today, it is mailing to just under 700,000 children every month in the US, Canada and, since 2008, Britain. The scheme was launched with a visit by Parton to Rotherham in December 2007."

I met some of those children, along with their mothers, at the Coleridge children's centre, which offers family learning programmes that look at the benefit of sharing books and the importance of reading out loud to children. One woman told me that reading to her baby had inspired her to start reading more herself, to set a good example; while an Asian woman said that the books were helping illiterate parents to learn to read English – the children were reading to their parents."Rotherham borough council was the first to sign up and we started registering children at the start of 2008", explains Alison Lilburn, project manager for the scheme in the town, "and since then we have registered over 18,000 children and we are sending out books to just over 13,000 children each month – which is 85% of the population under five years old."

Rotherham's council leader, Roger Stone, heard about the Imagination Library while on a visit to the US. Convinced the book scheme could raise literacy standards in Rotherham, he set about trying to bring it to the UK. Following Rotherham's lead, Sheffield, Luton, Sheerness, Nottingham, Wigan and two communities in London have joined in, and recently the Scottish Book Trust announced that it would be adopting the scheme for "looked after" children across the whole of Scotland, funded by the Scottish government.

There are, of course, other book schemes operating in Britain – Bookstart, for example, offers free books to children before they start school and the NationalLiteracy Trust has many reading schemes. "The Imagination Library complements other book-gifting programmes", says Natalie Turnbull, the UK director of the scheme, "simply by the volume of the books we send – one a month – and also the fact that the books are being delivered by post to the home, so there is a guarantee that the book is going to reach that child."

The fact that the scheme carries Parton's name has led some to think that Parton herself funds the library; in fact, while her Dollywood Foundation pays for all the administration costs in maintaining the database, it does not pay for the actual books. It is, however, able to ensure that the books are bought at a hugely discounted rate: Penguin, which supplies all the books, sells them to the scheme for an average price of £2, which is up to a quarter of their usual cost.

In Rotherham the cost of the scheme is met through donations from the Chamber of Commerce, the NHS and, this year, the local authority. In Luton, the scheme is being paid for by the Wates group and it is anticipated that around 24,000 books will be sent out each year.

While the scheme is undoubtedly laudable, is there any need to spend money giving families free books when they can easily visit their local library? "Not everybody is that way inclined", says Lilburn. "The difference with this scheme is that the book is addressed to the child and, based on all the parental feedback we get, the children are really excited when that book comes through the door."

Rotherham is now trying to measure the impact of the Imagination Library. "Because we have other initiatives to assist reading, it isn't easy to measure how much the Imagination Library has helped," says Lilburn. "But we do know that year on year Rotherham has improved in terms of its education, language and literacy development and we are now the same level nationally, when in previous years we have been way below the national average."

By the time children start school they are coming to the end of their eligibility for the Imagination Library, but schools in Rotherham are, Lilburn says, increasingly recognising the part that the book-gifting scheme can play in developing reading. "What we are getting back from teachers is that where they use Imagination Library books, the response from children is really positive," she says. "There is a commonality among kids because they know each other has had the book, and they are familiar with the books."

Aaron has not yet started school, but he has already started putting sentences together from books he has read with his mother. She believes the Imagination Library should be expanded so that every child has the opportunity that her son has. "I don't think it is just schools' job to encourage reading," she says. "What is so great about the Imagination Library is that it is not means-tested. When things are means-tested it means that there can be a stigma to being part of the scheme, but with the Imagination Library every child has the opportunity to allow their imagination to grow."

Sources:

Dolly foundation : from wikipedia

Country Music Legend Dolly Parton’s New Role: ‘Book Lady’

Pheromones in Male Perspiration Reduce Women's Tension, Alter Hormone Response that Regulates Menstrual Cycle

Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia have found that exposure to male perspiration has marked psychological and physiological effects on women: It can brighten women's moods, reducing tension and increasing relaxation, and also has a direct effect on the release of luteinizing hormone, which affects the length and timing of the menstrual cycle.

The results will be published in June in the journal Biology of Reproduction and currently appear on the journal's Web site.

"It has long been recognized that female pheromones can affect the menstrual cycles of other women," said George Preti, a member of the Monell Center and adjunct professor of dermatology in Penn's School of Medicine. "These findings are the first to document mood and neuroendocrine effects of male pheromones on females."

In a study led by Preti and colleague Charles J. Wysocki, extracts from the underarms of male volunteers were applied to the upper lip of 18 women ages 25 to 45. During the six hours of exposure to the compound, the women were asked to rate their mood using a fixed scale.

"Much to our surprise, the women reported feeling less tense and more relaxed during exposure to the male extract," said Wysocki, a member of the Monell Center and adjunct professor of animal biology in Penn's School of Veterinary Medicine. "This suggests that there may be much more going on in social settings like singles bars than meets the eye."

After the women's exposure to the underarm extract, further testing revealed a shift in blood levels of luteinizing hormone. Levels of this reproductive hormone, produced in pulses by the pituitary gland, typically surge right before ovulation but also experience hundreds of smaller peaks throughout the menstrual cycle.

Preti and Wysocki found that application of male underarm secretions hastened onset of these smaller pulses. Duration to the next pulse of luteinizing hormone was shortened by an average 20 percent, from 59 to 47 minutes.

Preti and Wysocki are now looking at the several dozen individual compounds that make up male perspiration to determine which may be responsible for the effects they observed. They also plan to study whether female pheromones can affect men's moods or physiological functions.

"This may open the door to pharmacological approaches to manage onset of ovulation or the effects of premenstrual syndrome or even natural products to aid relaxation," Wysocki said. "By determining how pheromones impact mood and endocrine response, we might be able to build a better male odor: molecules that more effectively manipulate the effects we observed."

The underarm extracts used in the study came from men who bathed with fragrance-free soap and refrained from deodorant use for four weeks. The extracts were blended to avoid reactions to individual men's odors. None of the women involved in the study discerned that male sweat had been applied right under their noses; some believed they were involved in a study of alcohol, perfume or even lemon floor wax.

Half the women received three applications of the male secretions during a six-hour period, followed three controlled exposures to ethanol, used as a control substance, over a six-hour period. For the other half, the regimen was reversed. The women did not report feeling any more or less energetic, sensuous, tired, calm, sexy, anxious, fatigued or active after exposure to male perspiration.

Preti and Wysocki are joined in the Biology of Reproduction paper by co-authors Kurt T. Barnhart and Steven J. Sondheimer of Penn's Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and James J. Leyden of Penn's Department of Dermatology. Their work is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

SOURCE: 
Biology of Reproduction, June 2003. News release, University of Pennsylvania.
           
Carter, C. Sue. "Hormonal Influences on Human Sexual Behavior," Behavioral Endocrinology (MIT, 1992, 0-262-02342-3), p. 134
Nelson, Randy J. An Introduction to Behavioral Endocrinology, Second Edition (Sinauer Associates, 2000, ISBN 0878936165), p. 250
Kary, Tiffany. "Crying Over Spilled Semen," Psychology Today, September/October 2002, p. 24.
Moir, A. Jessel, D. Brain Sex: The Real Difference Between Men & Women (Delta, 1989, ISBN 0-385-31183-4), p. 44.