The most popular herbicide in the world doesn’t kill frogs–it just makes them, er, unable to reproduce. That’s the word from a paper published in the April 16 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Atrazine, the herbicide in question, doesn’t accumulate in the environment or in the food chain and so has long been thought safe. But as little as one part of atrazine in ten billion parts water has now been found to have disquieting effects on African clawed frogs: “Up to 20% of the animals (16-20%) had multiple gonads (up to 6 in a single animal) or were hermaphrodites (with multiple testes and ovaries).” For comparison, the allowable level of atrazine in drinking water is 30 parts per ten billion, and rain can contain 10 parts atrazine per ten billion parts water (up to 400 parts per ten billion in midwestern farm country). And since the stuff is applied at spring plowing, it hits frogs at “critical developmental stages.”
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Wanted: CHA residents who can eat promises. “The city would need to spend at least $1.8 million more to hire the staff needed to adequately serve the 12,218 families still in public housing, according to a 2001 study by the Mid-America Institute on Poverty,” a division of the Heartland Alliance, writes Brian J. Rogal in the Chicago Reporter (April). “In what it terms a conservative estimate, the institute said 96 case managers were needed citywide to help residents with severe problems like extreme poverty or substance abuse. A city report shows 29 were hired.”
