[All] Baking soda & Salt bath

Tue Sep 4 22:28:33 EDT 2012

Hi Ginny

Traditionally in my family we used salt baths to remove toxins to help prevent muscle aches and pains and to gargle with in order to draw out toxins. We also used baking soda for chicken pox, poison ivy, rashes or sunburns because it worked well to remedy inflammation and itch.  This is the first time I've heard of the two being used together but it makes sense.

Radiation exposure tends to acidifies things from the surface exposure level inwards but baking soda is an alkaline and salt is neutral so it by bumping up the alkaline fluids around the body, it neutralize the adverse effect of the acidic damages of radiation. Any related skin irritation is also remedied in the process. 

Neat stuff! 

Lulu :0)

________________________________
 From: Ginny Quinn <ginny at kw.igs.net>
To: 'Louisette Lanteigne' <butterflybluelu at rogers.com>; 'Michael Frind' <mefrind at uwaterloo.ca> 
Cc: 'gren' <all at gren.ca> 
Sent: Tuesday, September 4, 2012 9:21:17 PM
Subject: RE: [All] Wondering about the links of dust and uranium re: Alberta tar sands -- Human health and ecosystem health are intertwined...

Lulu  and Michael...your writings and information are fascinating .   Since being involved with  Cancer  and the medical field...I have learned that if you have been exposed to radiation....as in CT scans (for diagnosis)   and Radiation for many cancers   and on and on. (and as your writings indicate , living in an area of RADIATION exposure)...one should take action to ‘release  or reduce    or eliminate’  the effects of such radiation....by  buying a pound of Baking Soda  and a pound of non-iodised salt  ( probably (cheap) sea salt)  (  Bulk Food Store for purchase) and putting them in the bath tub and filling the tub with hot/warm water....and soaking in it for at least  25 to 30 minutes  .....right up to your nostrils   ....While trying NOT to drown ...... will decontaminate  (somewhat), and reduce the lasting effects of  radiation exposure.....check it out for yourselves....with a nutritionist...Health food
 specialist...Naturopath....etc.....not in the general  field of  medicine  and pharmaceuticals  as we know them today.   You are both impressive with   your research.   Ginny

From:all-bounces at gren.ca [mailto:all-bounces at gren.ca] On Behalf Of Louisette Lanteigne
Sent: August-27-12 1:50 AM
To: Michael Frind
Cc: gren
Subject: Re: [All] Wondering about the links of dust and uranium re: Alberta tar sands -- Human health and ecosystem health are intertwined...

Thanks for your response Michael. 

The statements made re: reserves are very much true. At Fort Chip, cereal costs $14 a box, milk costs $12, a head of lettuce costs $6. Cheapest foods are Kraft dinners and chips. Most folks have a choice, eat the highly contaminated local foods or get a job at the tar sands so they can afford to feed their family safer foods. It's a catch 22. Suicide rates are high, everybody has lost family to cancers, women suffered multiple miscarriages and it's getting worse. It's chemical genocide. 

Harper has increased the sale of raw lumber and raw fish to china which resulted in the closure of processing jobs on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Most fishermen and lumberjacks from the Maritimes are Aboriginal or Metis like my family. I've  got cousins working at the tar sands right now because there are no more jobs back home for them. As a truck driver you can make around $100,000 a year at the Tar Sands without any diploma or degree. The oil companies are actively recruiting kids right in the high schools with promises of jobs and big money and nothing is said about the potential health consequences they face. 

When they arrive, they are shown how to do the job but they are not told of the risks. Some are told to wear mask to stay safe but others working around them have no mask. I know of a fella who was insulating pipes. He was told if ever he saw a plumb of white smoke he was to run like hell but they didn't tell him why. That afternoon on his first day of work, a the big white smoke came and he was in it. He witnessed many unmasked workers around him fully exposed to it. To this day nobody has told him what chemical he was exposed to. 

Many of these guys are kids right out of high school. They are scared, they are isolated and untrained. Alberta ranks highest incidents of drug abuse, suicide and domestic violence.  You can get cocaine faster than a pizza. There is no place to run for help when your home is the camp. It's a culture of shut up and do your damn job.  It's that messed up. 

Lulu

________________________________

From:Michael Frind <mefrind at uwaterloo.ca>
To: Louisette Lanteigne <butterflybluelu at rogers.com> 
Cc: gren <all at gren.ca> 
Sent: Saturday, August 25, 2012 10:16:05 PM
Subject: Wondering about the links of dust and uranium re: Alberta tar sands -- Human health and ecosystem health are intertwined...

Hi Lulu,

You made a lot of excellent points.  Superbly articulated, as well.

Interesting ideas -- and certainly a lot of potential research avenues that would be fascinating to pursue.  The only problem with such research is the funding -- Harper has given lots of money to the Tar Sands (Oil Sands), both in terms of subsidies, and in terms of corporate tax cuts (and allows them to harm the environment without paying the true cost) -- but there is very little money for environmental research into the harm done.  As an aside: if Harper were to cut the Military budget by 1%, that would be enough to do most of the environmental research needed in the Oil Sands.

A few points come to mind:

1. A mutant whitefish is sad to see, and it may be a harbinger of further horrors.  But keep in mind that odd mutations can arise naturally too.  A single malformed fish doesn't tell a whole story: there should be a defect rate that is statistically significantly higher than the defect rate in a watercourse further away from.  More field research would be needed.  (As you noted, the chemical soup of the bitumen-rich Fort McMurray area makes things complicated.)

2. Keep in mind that many First Nations communities have high rates of diabetes, kidney problems, and other such issues because of poor diet and poor lifestyle.  I have seen this first-hand (my previous work as a field geologist, plus my environmental fieldwork also, took me to a number of First Nations communities), and it has been documented heavily.  Because of the staggeringly high cost of shipping fresh produce to these communities, costs of fresh foods are high, selection is limited, and most Aboriginals end up eating starchy, sugar-salt-fat-rich overprocessed packaged foods.  No wonder they have a serious epidemic of obesity, diabetes, kidney failure, and other problems.

3. Many First Nations reserves happen to be located quite close to forests and mining areas, which brings a double-edged sword: yes, it means potential job opportunities for them (until the resource is depleted), but it also means that the natural forest, wetlands, and lakes are lost (or seriously degraded).  And, that natural forest and lakes and rivers could have provided local food opportunities for them.  So, instead of the First Nations people being able to go out and find blueberries, hunt moose and caribou, eat fish anywhere on the food chain, and in general eat a healthy local diet, instead they are stuck at home, living on bad diets and being inactive -- all recipes for health disasters.  

4. First Nations communities also seem to have a rather high smoking rate.  I know this from experience too.  

5. Sadly, alcohol and substance abuse can also be a serious problem in First Nations communities.  These factors can also impact kidney function, general health, etc.  Nearly every part of the human body interacts with other parts.  So, liver problems due to alcoholism, combined with obesity, could impact the kidneys far more than the sum of each factor if it occurred in isolation.  (This is synergism: each factor can worsen, or potentiate, the others.)

In order to tie the health issues of First Nations people to uranium releases (from mining to eventually provide fuel for nuclear reactors) or other emissions from the Tar Sands (including from the processing of the bitumen), it would be necessary to account for (and correct for) the poor-diet-poor-lifestyle problem.  

Again, this would make for fascinating research.  I would love to be a part of it...the only issue is funding -- the fieldwork would be expensive to do!  It would be multidisciplinary: it would require people from the health sciences, along with people who specialize in groundwater-surface-water interactions as well as in airborne contaminants, plus ecologists and aquatic biologists, plus other specialties as well.  Ideally, it would involve rigorous health tracking not only of the First Nations people (across a cross-section of communities, not just those near the Tar Sands), but also of the aquatic ecosystems (fish, benthic invertebrates, aquatic mammals) as well as terrestrial ecosystems (land mammals, some of whom eat fish; also local vegetation and so on).  Basically, such a study would entail ecosystem-wide monitoring.  This could occupy an army of graduate students at various institutions.  There would be a huge amount of data to
 analyze...and the study should be done over a long period of time (starting now, and going forward far into the future...ideally for the life of the Oil Sands projects).  

Looking at uranium in urine samples would be one potential route of analysis (it would be interesting to ask that UW prof who studied the Gulf War veterans), but I'm not sure how to rule out the confounding effect of poor diet and poor lifestyle.  For example, is a diabetic with kidney problems who is exposed to uranium more or less likely to excrete it through their urine?  Remember, too, that cigarette smoke contains polonium (radioactive and toxic) and cadmium (highly toxic), plus other substances -- all of which can affect the kidneys, and thus which affect uranium accumulation and excretion.  And, a diet lacking in essential nutrients (including antioxidants, necessary trace elements such as zinc, and omega-3 essential fatty acids [which the Aboriginals once obtained from fish that were formerly clean and uncontaminated, but which are now rich in organohalogens, including the flame retardants and PFOA that are carried atmospherically from urban
 factories far away]) could also make uranium more harmful.  

As you noted, radionuclide particles can travel by air, and can be deposited quite some distance from their point of origin.  Heavy metals (and uranium is one of these) can bioaccumulate and biomagnify up food chains.  (Mercury, lead, and cadmium also do this.)  So, the inhalation hazard (everyone breathes 24 hours a day) is added to the contaminants picked up in foods, and also in drinking water.  That can add up to quite a contaminant loading over time, particularly if the person's ability to excrete toxins is impaired by some of the aforementioned factors.

Sadly, studies entailing a suitable level of rigor and depth would probably not be palatable to Stephen Harper.  I still remember the time (I think it was 2010) when he tore up a scientific study that was critical of the Tar Sands.  As we all know, since then, the environmental regulations have gone out the window with Bill C-38.  But if there were some way of squeezing in environmental monitoring as a "piggyback" onto health monitoring of First Nations peoples (and maybe also other people, including those living and working in the Tar Sands projects), maybe it might get funded.  (Sadly, even CIHR, i.e. the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, has been cut back to a shoestring.)

By the way, the lack of a centralized database to track ecosystem-wide environmental (and health) issues is to be expected.  Firstly, government departments and ministries are siloed: each one deals with its own little area, and there is far too little interchange of information.  Secondly, politicians rarely have the ability to see in the long term, and the idea of a large long-term study on ecosystem health (including the health of humans living in that ecosystem) is foreign to them.  (One of the very few federal politicians who have the ability to take the long-term view is Elizabeth May, of the Green Party.)  Thirdly, Harper doesn't want to support anything that could show the harm of the Tar Sands and related developments.  (Harper's real goal is economic wealth for the big corporations.)

Keep up the good work, Lulu!  Your determination and diligence in digging up the details on serious environmental issues are truly impressive!

Michael Frind.

On Sat, Aug 25, 2012 at 7:48 PM, Louisette Lanteigne <butterflybluelu at rogers.com> wrote:

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Louisette Lanteigne <butterflybluelu at rogers.com>
To: "Elizabeth.May at parl.gc.ca" <Elizabeth.May at parl.gc.ca>; "info at forestethicssolutions.org" <info at forestethicssolutions.org>; "info at 350.org" <info at 350.org>; "mckibben.bill at gmail.com" <mckibben.bill at gmail.com>; "info at climateactionnetwork.ca" <info at climateactionnetwork.ca>; "info at coastforest.org" <info at coastforest.org>; "info at tarsandsaction.org" <info at tarsandsaction.org> 
Sent: Saturday, August 25, 2012 7:46:46 PM
Subject: Wondering about the links of dust and uranium re: Alberta tar sands

Hello everyone 

At the conference at UW on August 24,  there were reps from Fort Chipewyan Alberta.  They said the tar sands are set to run out of Natural Gas in 25 years, that operations will be replaced by planned nuclear power from 13 nuke plants. I asked the residents if there is Uranium in the soil up that way and they confirmed it. They said there is actually a massive quarry planned to extract Uranium 19km away from Fort Chipewyan to supply the proposed nuke plants. 

They also showed a photo taken by Ron Plain of an area whitefish caught during his visit up to Fort Chip. The fish had two jaws, the lower one with huge eyeteeth. Whitefish don't have eye teeth. Photo in the attachments.

They are removing enough sediment to fill the Skydome each and every day. I have no encountered any info regarding the impacts of the dust particulates associated with the sediment removal at all. Everyone's focused on the oil not the sediment but I have found online reports by the Alberta Government which speak of the prospects of Uranium Mining. Here is one example:  http://www.ags.gov.ab.ca/minerals/uranium/index.html

Like Ontario, the Alberta MNR has no regard at all for potential cumiliative impacts of environmental discharge or emissions. There is no centralized database on it. Generally discharge permits are kept by corporations in hand. Particulate concerns may or may not be part of the permit process but I'm not sure. Generally in Ontario, Aggregates are not required to have EA processes on the believe it's not releasing anything into the environment. There is no regard for what toxins they might actually be digging up or the impacts of the dust they stir up. 

Gravelwatch has information about how gravel dust can kill people at the following website: 
http://www.gravelwatch.org/dust.htm

Currently there is a high rate of kidney failure and diabetes among the aboriginal communities in Alberta and I'm wondering if it might be linked to toxicity of inhaling the uranium dust being dug up at the Tar Sands. The way to detect low dose radiation is to measure the urine and check the kidneys. We have a doctor at UW who measured the urine of Gulf War vets in Canada. 10 years after exposure they still had radiation in their urine. 

Uranium particulates and dust in general, contributes to high blood pressure and other ailments but of course it's a virtual chemical soup down that way so that complicates things a bit in terms of proving causes but the interesting thing about the concept of radioactive particulate is that it could travel down wind places like Edmonton and Calgary on the wind.  If a link like that could be proven, it might give leverage to the movement to reduce tarsands expansions.

Louisette Lanteigne
700 Star Flower Ave.
Waterloo ON
N2V 2L2

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======================================================================
Michael Frind, BSc
MSc Candidate (Thermal Geophysics, Modelling of Groundwater-Surface-Water Interactions)
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Waterloo, 
Office: PHY 230B, 519-885-1211x36869, 200 University Ave W, Waterloo Ontario N2L 3G1
Home: 346 Marlowe Drive, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 5A4 519-885-4415
frind at execulink.com, michael.e.frind at gmail.com, mefrind at uwaterloo.ca
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