Chris Dobney
A Wilsons Creek resident is still waiting to hear back on a complaint he lodged to Byron Shire Council almost a month ago over its continued use of the herbicide glyphosate, despite it being declared ‘a probable carcinogen’ by the World Health Organisation in March.
The herbicide is most commonly known under its brand name Roundup, which is marketed by the controversial multinational Monsanto.
It is one of the most widely used pesticides in the world including, in our region, by farmers, rainforest regenerators and shire councils.
Byron Shire Council uses glyphosate in spray form to control weeds, especially on roadside verges.
Wilsons Creek resident and organic farmer Eckhard Werner told Echonetdaily he recently noticed the grass along the sides and embankments of Wilsons Creek Road had ‘chemically burnt’ look ‘typical of Roundup being applied in large doses’.
‘Wilsons Creek is a water catchment area, supplying water to Mullumbimby,’ he said.
‘Roundup has just been declared a probable carcinogen by the World Health Organisation.
‘I have requested a Council Investigation and received a confirmation [of my complaint but] there has been no further response by the Council, which is why it seems necessary to bring the issue into the public view,’ Mr Werner said in an email to Echonetdaily dated May 20.
According the council’s record of Mr Werner’s complaint, ‘The spray area is all the way along Wilsons Creek Rd and the contractor has drenched the water ways that are crossing the roads. Resident would like a full and written report on how we have followed protocol, legislation and environmental regulations in the spraying of Wilsons Creek Road and the waterways and how we can prove that. The resident would also appreciate an inspection undertaken in this location on site, by a person who has knowledge and expertise in this area to assess the situation. Especially around the creek crossings.
‘The resident has stated that many residents pull their water from the creek and the roundup is being placed directly into the creek and poisoning people and wildlife,’ the council record concluded.
Glyphosate essential: council
Echonetdaily received a response from Byron Shire Council, more than a week after it was initially requested, but it failed to address Mr Werner’s concern regarding the change in status of the chemical.
Byron Shire Council’s director of infrastructure services, Phil Holloway, said the Wilsons Creek roadside weed control was undertaken by a contractor on behalf of the council.
‘The operator was trained, licensed and was using frog-friendly glyphosate in a manner approved by the Australian Pesticide and Veterinary Medicine Authority,’ Mr Holloway said.
He added that roadside vegetation control was ‘essential to assist with sight lines for travelling vehicles.’
‘Plus, spraying in some areas is a key way in managing weeds. Other methods include slashing and hand weeding.
‘Unfortunately, with many rural roads within the shire and only a limited budget, broad scale hand weeding was not possible. Where we can, we are more than willing to help support local chemical free Landcare groups.’
Mr Holloway also noted that steam weeding had had extra funds allocated in the upcoming 2015/16 budget.
‘We are aiming to use this chemical free method in high use areas such as playgrounds and footpaths,’ he said.
People who are sensitive to chemicals are urged to register on the council’s Register of Chemical Sensitive Residents and Organic Growers.
IARC finds carcinogenicity
On March 20 this year, the 17 experts from 11 countries met at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC; Lyon, France) to assess the carcinogenicity of organophosphate pesticides including glyphosate.
IARC evaluated evidence of human exposures, mostly in agricultural workers, in the US, Canada, and Sweden published since 2001. The agency found ‘limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans for non-Hodgkin lymphoma.’
There is ‘convincing evidence that glyphosate also can cause cancer in laboratory animals,’ IARC reported.
Monsanto is strongly disputing the assessment, which was published in the medical journal Lancet Oncology on March 20.
The company claims that the determination is not supported by scientific data.
Why do they use contractors instead of employing permanent staff?
It seems the prices the contractors charge are way over the odds. How much money did the recent repairs on the land slips cost?
Private scamming of public money..
10years back, I had a micro drop of glysofate pass through protective goggles side mesh into my eye.
The first 6 months were worst with pain and discomfort , I can still feel it now.
This poison is banned in so many countries ,why haven’t we banned it here.
We have work for the dole, what reasons are there that these people can’t be hand weeding.
Steam weeding is Good, Some method of movable fenceing with goat/sheep eating sounds crazy on road sides but for us to survive we need to think outside the box on this and so many other issues.
These herbicides are relatively new to the world. We did ok without them in the past and I’m sure we can survive without them now.
Can we all think of our future survival as a species and all say no.
Write to your member etc.
There is no such thing as “frog-friendly Glysophate”! This stuff is poisoning us all, the rampant spraying by roadsides and creeks is unnecessary and dangerous. The World Health Organisation has linked it to cancer.
Steam weeding is a safe alternative. How many people of this shire have to get sick, or die, before Council does the right thing..
If the councils are not setting out to poison us, there can be no doubt they certainly are doing a good job of poisoning us. Jak is certainly right about that in my opinion. I ended up in the hospital twice from swelling around the throat and lungs area from the herbicide being present there all of the time, from breathing it in, I found out later. The first time the specialist had a production system going. He had a large number of us lined up going through the process of having a general anaesthetic before doing whatever he did in our throats. He was unwilling to discuss it but he must have been making a lot of money out of all of us or the government. The second time I ended up in the heart unit with a racing heart having to undergo the big heart tests which concluded that the heart was being compressed from the swelling caused from the herbicide which was preventing wind escaping.
Incredibly my GP told me not to get stressed about the herbicides because there was nothing I could do about it, and I was prescribed a product called Flixonase to reduce the swelling. A non medical doctor who is one of my alternate doctors explained that the herbicides and other toxins cause the immune system to get the liver to generate extra cholesterol because the natural detox system requires cholesterol to try to get toxins out, but here again the medical and drug industries win the money because they tell us cholesterol is bad and so they give us expensive toxic “statins” to remove the cholesterol that the detox system needs to do its job.
The alternate doctors explain that when we breath the herbicide fumes in they get imbedded in the lung tissue from where they spread to all parts of the body via the tissue, which means the poison ends up in all of the organs etc. including the brain. Medical doctors don’t understand the damage the herbicide does to the brain because they don’t study the subject of Nutrition that the vets study and so have not got any understanding of how the highly toxic and poisonous chemicals damage the incredibly complex and vulnerable chemistries of the brain and also all of the other organs and everything else. Is it any wonder that half of the population will be diagnosed with mental disorders these days? Is it any wonder that we are seeing all of the family violence, drug taking, paramedics being attacked, brain and other cancers becoming ever more numerous in the young who are particularly vulnerable to the herbicides. What about the other half, how much brain and other damage have they sustained?
I have found the Brisbane City Council to be completely merciless when it comes to questioning them about the herbicide they pump into all of the thousands of mulch beds, which like all of the other councils throughout the country do, they have installed throughout the cities in the last 5 years or so. The mulch beds continually give of the vapours so that the cities have a continuous invisible cloud of the poison in and over them all of the time and the people are breathing it in continuously. Until recently when I informed our local state member that the herbicides were damaging his and his families’ health there were no crickets or any other insects in our area, all of the native birds and just about all of the other birds had gone also, now things are a bit better but still far from normal.
Talk about bullying, the council must be the world champions at it because if I ever approach them about the problem I could be sure they will send someone around the next day to inject more herbicide into the mulch beds opposite and adjacent to our home. The Brisbane City Council actually bullies people who complain or ask questions about the herbicide by using the poisonous herbicides as a weapon to poison them and their neighbours which in our case include many young children one of which is less than one year old.
The councils don’t just spray weeds in the mulch beds they also have the workers hold the nozzle still in many places throughout the mulch beds so the small areas gets a soaking so that they can continue giving off fumes for up to months afterwards. I know how much vapour they give off and for how long because when the mulch gardens are up wind of me I can have almost instant strong reactions to the chemical. I believe the people responsible for this behaviour in the councils are criminals. Amazingly they seem to target schools and even kindergartens unbelievable as though it may sound. On several occasions we have seen workers from the Moreton Council pumping herbicide into the mulch gardens which are on the beautiful seafront in front of the Humpybong State School on the Redcliffe Peninsula. The last time we saw it happening was just before school broke up before this Christmas. Incredibly the workers were there spraying and injecting the poison while the parents were dropping the children off before school. The breeze was then blowing the fresh fumes past the children and on towards the school. Similar things I have noticed are happening when it comes to other schools and kindergartens and in a big way I might add by what I would call criminal councils.
When I send letters about this matter to politicians I usually do not even get an acknowledgement of my letter, sometimes there might be something equivalent to an irrelevant reply. Maybe this is because they too are also caught up in some type of disease mongering scheme. When Anna Bligh was introducing Queensland to the fluoridation of the water supplies she would often just bully anyone who would speak out against the scheme. She had a dentist as her main person of support for the scheme even though dentists have no qualifications in the area of nutrition, toxification, or anything else when it comes to understanding how the chemistries of the body operate. There is no scientific proof that fluoride does anything for tooth maintenance. The alternate doctors I found can also show with Blood Chemistry Analysis how the dirty toxic fluoride substance from the alumina industry poisons the blood chemistries and damages health by accumulating in the tissue of the brain, organs etc. The one little shop where I go to for the water filters has sold well over 4000 of the expensive filter systems that are capable of filtering out the fluoride because big numbers of people throughout the country are only too aware of the damage governments are seemingly wilfully doing to their health.
I believe the commonwealth government is selling out on our children now they are forcing them to be vaccinated with WHAT?. Sure vaccinations are good if they are not laced with poison but the government fails to do any investigations of its own to check if the drug companies who are regularly dragged over the coals for their criminal behaviour are doing the right thing and not disease mongering to make children unhealthy so they can increase their multi billion dollar profits. Why is the government not independently investigating whether it is necessary to have very highly toxic and poisonous mercury in the immunisation for instance? Can things be done differently? Some alternate doctors I have found understand how the chemistry system regarding immunisation works. Most of us are probably capable of understanding this if it is explained to us carefully and completely in full detail. It is very complex but not magic. People who rush blindly into backing all and any vaccinations and trusting drug companies are uninformed and reckless
We are all led to believe that Bill and Melinda Gates are good people, but if we listen to Bill Gates on You Tube we can hear him speaking openly in front of a large gathering of people where we see he is using his funds to develop drugs that will harm people and make them sterile without their knowledge, which is POPULATION CONTROL, something the New World Order wants to impose on us, they want to make others sick but not themselves. Are our councils and other governments secretly involved in damaging our health for population control? It certainly looks that way. If we travel to Bill Gates Microsoft Seattle we find the councils there use almost no herbicides I found it good not having to put up with the sore throats and other side effects from the poison while I spent a month living there. There are weeds everywhere and there is no problem with them. Bill Gates obviously is not interested in damaging his own health only he only wants to damage that of others. If we look elsewhere on the net we can see that Bill Gates owns a huge chunk of Monsanto the company that makes the herbicides (POISON) and is in the herbicide and GM business.
We need to urgently follow Europe’s example and get rid of the highly toxic fluoride, and follow Bill Gates example and get rid of the herbicides that the council is poisoning us with at our expense.
We all need to investigate these matters thoroughly and share it with others especially impress it on our politicians and news media who seem afraid to publish the information which leaves us being assured of being safe when we are not.