----- Original Message -----
> Toxins are stored in fat tissue.

Yep.

In spring 1986 (March, I think it was) I was breastfeeding my
then-14-month-old son when it was found that heptachlor had contaminated the
dairy industry here in Arkansas.  It wasn't known how long this
contamination had been going on because of poor record-keeping, but it was
believed to have been going on for probably a year before it was discovered.
A submitted sample of my breast milk tested positive for heptachlor.  At the
time and prior, I used quite a bit of butter myself, drank milk, ate cheese
sometimes, and made our own yogurt which I fed to Baby John and to Matt, my
three year old.  The public health recommendations to quit/continue
breastfeeding and take all children off dairy see-sawed back and forth for a
while.  I continued to breastfeed until the following Oct. when John was 20
months old.  I hoped the benefits of nursing would outweigh any detrimental
effect. And I continued to make yogurt, though less often.  I no longer fed
it to John but Matt, who had eaten it from the second half of his first year
of life, begged for it.  Btw, I gardened intensively and organically during
these years.

I've wondered several times in past months whether the heptachlor incident
is implicated in any way to what happened to Matt this past year, since the
brain is full of fat, too (and that heptachlor is stored in fat).  I guess
I'll never know the cause of it,  but on  Aug. 30, 2001 and a trip to the
emergency room, it was found that then-19-year-old Matt had a large
pilocytic astrocytoma brain tumor with an even larger fluid-filled cyst
attached to it.   Combined, it/they were so large that the mid-line of
Matt's brain had been pushed over to the other side. A gp had been treating
Matt's headaches that the he, the dr., said were from allergies (and had
changed his meds 3x) since June.   Matt had surgery on Sept. 1.  The
neurosurgeon said the thing had been growing for several years to reach that
size and the only reason it hadn't become symptomatic much sooner was that
it lay in a relatively quiet part of the right temporal lobe.  Still, he
said, if the gp had ever once bothered to look in Matt's eyes he would have
seen the optic nerve inflamed and that it wasn't "just allergies."

At one of the follow-ups I asked the neurosurgeon if the heptachlor could
have been at the root of this and he shrugged his shoulders and said he
didn't know.

I don't know how much total heptachlor is still, and will always be, in us.

I do know that commercially raised beef are routinely treated with
pesticides.  Ear tags are what's usually used these days, and they work
systemically from the inside out, I believe, but would have to check on this
to be completely sure (ticks suck a cow's blood and die), as opposed to the
older (but still used method of)  rubs/dustbags/dips which are topical
applications (though, no doubt absorbable ones, too).  If you've never seen
a cow (or, for that matter, deer at certains times of the year) with
"carpets" of hundreds to thousands of huge blood-engorged ticks on it, then
you wouldn't believe such pestilence could be possible.

I'm told that (at least some) grass-fed beef suppliers use (inert)
diatomaceous earth as rubs.  Back in the 80's we used to use it on our Dobes
who lived in the house with us.  It works pretty good to diminish the
numbers but is by no means a perfect no-ticks solution to an awful problem,
just a healthier one.

Theola