Atrazine is a chemical used to stop the growth of weeds in crops. It is banned in Europe because of its affects on the environment but is still being sprayed in the U.S. Tyrone Hayes, of UC Berkeley, discovered atrazine's affects on the Northern leopard frog. Rain and wind can spread atrazine into the frog's habitat and cause the testosterone in males to turn into the female hormone estrogen. In effect, the frogs are hermaphrodites. The only frogs that were actually affected were the ones that lived in the water that contained atrazine, but it only takes 0.1 part per billion of atrazine to affect the water to cause the deformity. Beluga whales in the St. Lawrence river are also experiencing problems with chemical levels in the water. Tests on these chemically affected whales show that cancer rates have gone up incredibly. When the chemicals get inside the whale's body, they inhibit healthy cells from reproducing, causing cell deformity, which can cause cancer. Some whales are so absorbed with toxic chemicals that they are classified as toxic waste when they wash up on shore.
These chemicals are starting to get into human water sources. In Missouri, the tap water that people drink affect the quality of seamen in men. Seamen quality in these men were poorer than those of men in Los Angeles, New York, and Minneapolis, which are highly industrialized cities. These chemicals are fou
nd in Missouri's tap water because of the pesticides used on crops on the state's farmland that get into the water sources. If higher concentrations of these chemicals get into our water sources, more and more deformities will occur, deformities that we have never seen before. If these chemicals are not cleaned up out of our environment, we will eventually experience the effects of our own corruption on the planet.
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