What’s warping the faces of monkeys in Uganda?
NOTE: A fish hatchery farm in Queensland Australia is now seeing deformities in their fingerlings. They are surrounded by macadamia plantations where the farmers spray similar chemicals to the ones mentioned below. In Tasmania concerns have been raised about Atrazine, a carcinogen being widely used by the forestry commission and a possible connection with the mysterious facial tumour disease decimating the threatened Tasmanian Devil.
The most disgusting revelation in the below article is the response from Trump’s new EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. Read on…
Don
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From The Verge, by
What”s warping the faces of monkeys in Uganda? A plague of concave faces, missing nostrils, and cleft lips
Excerpts
In 2014, researchers with the National Museum of Natural History in Paris working in the northern part of Uganda”s Kibale National Park, noticed something very wrong with the chimpanzees and baboons in the area: their noses were flattened, with nostrils that were abnormally small, or sometimes absent altogether. Their faces were concave in the middle. At the time, researchers estimated that around 10 percent of the chimpanzee population in that part of the park had these facial deformities, otherwise known as dysplasia. Two years later, that estimate jumped up to 25 percent.
Kibale National Park, known as the Sebitoli region, is a protected area about 300 square miles in size and one of the most biodiverse regions in Africa. With wet tropical forests in the north and woodlands and savannahs in the south, the park”s range of ecosystems can play host to hundreds of different species of trees and birds.
There are more than a dozen different species of primates living in the park, ranging from the black-and-white colobus to the L’Hoest”s monkey, and they”ve been studied for over 25 years. Some are observed daily. Until recently, primates with facial deformities were a rarity, spotted only twice before 2014. But by 2016, researchers working in Sebitoli had calculated that 25 percent of the chimpanzees in that area had severe physical deformities, as did 17 percent of the baboons. It was a striking anomaly: just 9 miles away, primates were perfectly healthy.
Along with flat noses and abnormally small nostrils, a number of primates were also missing fingers. Some had patchy, light-colored fur. One female had a cleft lip and some baboons had extra openings near their nostrils. A few of the females appeared to have reproductive problems, not having produced any offspring well into adulthood and not displaying sexual activity or the genital swelling that indicates ovulation. All of the observed primates and their deformities were described in a recent study published in Science of the Total Environment.
SNIP
Researchers began to wonder if pesticides in the farmland that surrounds the Sebitoli area were a culprit. “That was one possibility,” says Colin Chapman, an author of the study and a professor in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University, “And it was a possibility we could look into.”
SNIP
Along with chlorpyrifos, the researchers also found DDT and its traces in and around the farms. Chlorpyrifos, a DDT byproduct, and another insecticide “” imidacloprid “” were also detected in fish near the farms. Fish living deeper in the park didn”t have any detectable levels of pesticides.
SNIP
Researchers have spent decades telling the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that the chemical is dangerous and should be uniformly banned, citing evidence linking chlorpyrifos to neurodevelopmental problems in children, who are more vulnerable to the chemical than adults. A recent EPA report showed the agency had accepted the findings about the chemical”s dangerous impact and appeared to be on track to ban it, but in March, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt took a meeting with the largest US producer of chlorpyrifos, Dow Chemical, and has since denied the proposed ban.
SNIP
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