Musings: Calling All "Victims"

In a strange reversal of events, anti-GMO activists are trying to drum up supposed victims of westside Kauai “pesticide pollution” to satisfy a news team.

In a Facebook post yesterday, anti-GMO activist Laurie Cicotello wrote:

NBC is planning to come to Kauai to do a piece re west side pesticide pollution. It will be on Nightly News and Dateline or Frontline.

We need exposed/affected residents/fieldworkers.

This is a great opportunity for nationally and possibly internationally getting the word out.

Please PM Marghee Maupin if you would be able to be interviewed or if you have any suggestions. Thank you.

Now, if people actually had been the victims of westside "pesticide pollution," wouldn't you have them in place before you pitch a national news team on the story, rather than try to find some victims to satisfy the spin you've already created?

Wouldn't those supposed victims of westside pesticide pollution already be well-known to the anti-GMO groups — especially Marghee, who presents herself as the health care advocate for westsiders? I mean, wouldn't she have the health records of folks, and thus be able to easily identify them — and document her claims — without having to do a call-out on Facebook?

Come to think of it, why hasn't Marghee or anyone else from the anti-GMO movement — including its Kauai leader, Gary Hooser — been able to provide any documentation of anyone affected by "pesticide pollution?” Surely, if people are suffering from “pesticide pollution” Marghee and the others would be able to provide blood and/or urine tests showing elevated levels of pesticides.

Especially since none of the environmental tests done on the westside have documented any pesticide pollution whatsoever.

Yet the complete lack of documentation didn't prevent Marghee from writing a letter to the editor recently in which she tried to make a case that Kekaha students have low achievement scores because of pesticide exposure. She wrote:

Kekaha Elementary School children are chronically exposed to up to 90 pesticides on a regular basis. A very dangerous pesticide, Chlorpyrifos (originally manufactured by Dow), was found in air samples four separate times at Waimea Canyon Middle School. It is likely that air samples at Kekaha Elementary School would show similar exposures, given that Chlorpyrifos is the most heavily sprayed restricted use insecticide on Kauai.

This is the kind of flawed thought process that characterizes Marghee — who, as a health “professional,” should know better — and too many others in the “red shirt” brigade.

First, just because ag chemicals are applied on the westside does not mean that Kekaha students are “chronically exposed.” And just because chlorpyrifos was found in air samples at Waimea Canyon Middle School doesn't make it at all “likely” that the air around Kekaha school would have the same results.

And what Marghee, Hooser and the others who like to fear-monger always and intentionally fail to note is that the pesticide levels detected were well below federal accepted limits.

The state Department of Health report on the air samples notes, emphasis added:

Five pesticides were detected in the indoor and outdoor passive air samples and the high volume outdoor air samples collected at Waimea Canyon Middle School. Those pesticides were chlorpyrifos, metolachlor, bifenthrin, benzene hexachlorides (BHCs) and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethanes (DDTs). BHCs and DDTs, likely from past uses and ubiquitous throughout the world, were detected in all air samples collected from Kauai. Concentrations of the pesticides and MITC were well below health concern exposure limits or applicable screening levels.

The same air samples that found chlorpyrifos also identified 29 chemicals associated with stinkweed, which DOH determined to be the cause of the school kids getting sick. But though Marghee will accept the report's pesticide findings, she refuses to accept the stinkweed finding.

You just can't have it both ways — unless you really have no interest in facts, the truth or public health, and instead are just trying to hammer an anti-GMO ideology. Which is why there's so much misiformation floating around.

Meanwhile, Hooser's HAPA group is moaning on Facebook about the “collapse of journalistic standards” because some reporters writing about GMOs supposedly failed to identify scientists who supposedly had ties to industry.

No, the collapse of journalistic standards occurs when HAPA sends The Garden Island a press release, which the newspaper prints verbatim, and when the anti-GMO movement pays reporters like Chris Pala and Paul Koberstein to write anti-GMO stories peppered with fake “facts” — like the supposed pesticide sickening of Waimea school kids — and then uses those inaccurate articles to keep promoting its bullshit.

And it happens when groups like HAPA and Center for Food Safety make up problems and then try to drum up media coverage of undocumented harms.

If NBC does come to Kauai, let's hope it comes without a preconceived bias and actually does some digging to document whether pesticide pollution is indeed occurring, and if so, the culprit. We've seen so many inaccuracies perpetuated about the situation on Kauai. And let's really hope NBC does its own source scouting, rather than accepting victims presented by someone like Marghee, who has zero qualms about lying and thus zero credibility.