Soya milk and goats’ milk are high in oestrogen, which can cause breast cancer.

Blue algae is good for Alzheimer’s.

Microwave cookers kill germs but also everything in the food.

The oranges we buy in the shops are injected with arsenic.

Obuasi’s poisoned fruit

An impact assessment study carried out by a team of researchers in Ghana on mining points to various environmental, social and health problems in catchment areas of mining activities, writes * Yao Graham.

There is a local belief that oranges from Obuasi, site of AnglogoldAshanti’s main mine in Ghana, are very sweet. Now we know they are poisonous. Tests carried out on a sample of oranges from villages close to the mine have found startling high toxic levels of arsenic, mercury and zinc. The zinc found in the fruit was 5 times the level permitted by Ghana’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and 8 times higher than the stricter level imposed by the World Health Organisation (WHO). The amounts of mercury were 5 times the EPA levels and 26 times above the WHO level. The level of arsenic was 24 times higher than the EPA level and a staggering 1226 times the WHO level!

‘Fruit vendors on the streets of Bangladesh (allegedly) inject unsanitary water in to the fruits to increase the weight and make more profit’ – said the public health nurse in a small town of a southern state.

During a visit to the pediatrician’s office for a routine check up for my little girls I was given a pep talk on maintaining hygiene with ultra effort while visiting my hometown Dhaka.

I casually mentioned to the good doctor that my kids don’t get to enjoy their heritage as often as we’d like them to, so we are very excited about our planned trip to Dhaka this year. This launched an unprecedented cautionary tale by the doctor and the nurse alike.

As I had promised the Doctor I visited the nearby public health department that has an oversea travelers clinic. There, the nurse went a notch up and started educating me on do’s and don’ts while in Dhaka. She pulled out a fat binder that contained pages of pages of alerts issued by Center for Disease Control (CDC) and then there were some prints of comments posted by people recently visiting south Asia. One of them caught me by utter surprise and embarrassment…

The posting alerted people to not eat juicy fruits like watermelon or oranges or grapefruit because those could be doctored with unsanitary water injected via syringe.

I was stunned. I heard about the doodh-wala (milk-man) adding water in milk and all sorts of other “bhejal” mixing policies that are commonly practiced by the vendors in BD – but to actually inject water in fruit! I couldn’t believe my own ears. After all, fruits were always considered “safe to eat”. That was the only thing that my parents would allow me to buy from vendors (of course you had to wash them before eating) during tiffin-time in school.

British Geological Survey (BGS) a branch of the British agency the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) ran tests in groundwater in Bangladesh in 80’s and failed to detect arsenic.

The upper house of the British court recently threw away the case of Sutradhar vs NERC, where Sutradhar – a resident of Brahmonbaria district (one of the places worst hit by arsenic poisoning) and a victim or aesenicosis sued the NERC, holding them responsible for failing to report high concentration of arsenic in natural groundwater.

In America, a dog was drained of its blood, transfused with sea water and went on to live for 9 years.

I've read that seawater is chemically similar to blood -- is that true?

Actually, it is! It's even been used in transfusions in emergency situations when blood or plasma wasn't available and the patient needed to have his blood volume maintained.

Sea water is remarkably similar to blood in many ways. When comparing the concentrations of various elements in seawater and blood, we find that the two most common elements in each are Chlorine (Cl) and then Sodium (Na). Together they make Sodium Chloride (NaCl), or common table salt. The concentrations are higher in seawater than in blood, though. When it's been used for transfusions seawater needs to be diluted in fresh water first.

After Na and Cl, as you go to the lower-concentration elements the two liquids start to differ in their elemental concentrations as far as which is where on the list, but the next-most common elements or compounds in both are Sulfate, Magnesium, Calcium, and Potassium. So they actually are very similar.

The pH range (a measure of acidity or alkalinity) of seawater is normally 7.4 - 8.2, while in blood it's 7.38 - 7.44 (the body keeps this in a very tight range).

It's thought that seawater and blood used to be much closer in composition when organisms that eventually became land mammals developed in the oceans eons ago. Over time the oceans are believed to have risen in elemental concentrations (become more salty) as more elements dissolved and washed off of the land from the action of rainwater and into the sea.

When you look at the rarer elements in blood, you begin to find wider variations from what's in seawater. So it's certainly not identical to blood.

But it has been used in transfusions, both in emergencies and in medical experiments.

Experiments were run on dogs in the early 1900s to test diluted, filtered ocean water as a substitute transfusion liquid. An early experimenter named René Quinton and his team drained all of a dog's blood and replaced it with the seawater solution. The dog lived, and on the second day after the transfusion, half of its normal blood components had returned, regenerated by its body. By the fourth day its blood was back to virtually normal and the dog was active and full of energy and happy. The dog went on to live for many years afterward, with no visible problems as a result of the experiment.

[Website author's note: I'm not a doctor, but I would have thought that totally replacing an animal's blood with seawater wouldn't have worked at the start, because real blood uses hemoglobin to carry lots of oxygen to the tissues. Perhaps the seawater was highly oxygenated at the start, and the dog was breathing pure oxygen at the start also. I haven't read the details of the experiment so I really don't know.]

Not long after this surprising result was found the research was dropped, as World War I began and the researcher Quinton was drafted into the military. He later died in 1925. Similar tests were run by others who had read of his experiments, as late as 1969, with similar results.

As far as is known, no controlled experiments on humans have recently been attempted, as medical science has now developed safer, better-controlled alternatives. We now know that sea water contains many viruses, bacteria, and similar organisms that don't belong in a living organism's bloodstream unless there are no better options available.

For starters, seawater is not isotonic wrt blood or tissue fluid. Cannot remember if it is hypo- or hypertonic but a large infusion of seawater would likely cause cell lysis and some unhealthy fluid shifts.
I have dim and distant memories of a zoology lecturer going on about the conundrums of the non-isotonicity of seawater with most vertebrate sealife.

Do not confuse seawater with medicinal saline, which is commonly used to rehydrate or maintain hydration. If a patient is shocked or bleeding badly and there is no blood available then saline, or preferably some sort of starchy plasma expander is infused as fast as possible. The aim in this situation is to keep the blood pressure up so that the organs remain perfused, even if the remaining blood gets so diluted that it starts to look a bit like cranberry juice. Normal haemoglobin concentration is about 12, but a reasonably fit person, or presumably dog, or if one believes their literature any Jehovah's Witness, can survive for short periods with a Hb of <3, though they will not feel very sparky.

For comment like the oranges and the dog - These bits of information were passed onto me from ,someone who does have a medical knowledge. Infact both comments came from the same person. I fully trust this person and as you see from the evidence presented the orange claim is true. However if you listen to my talk you will find that I clearly state this is my opinion it is not backed up by any medical evidence so take what you want from it.

"...as you see from the evidence presented the orange claim is true".

"However if you listen to my talk you will find that I clearly state this is my opinion it is not backed up by any medical evidence"

My approach to all spiritual matters is very down to earth and I like to see the evidence.

Even going as far as to believe things that aren't true without evidence...

For those who believe and know the work of spirit is true no explanation is needed. For those who do not believe no satisfactory explanation can be given to satisfy your dis-beliefs. For ignorance is Bliss!

so take what you want from it