[Chirley]

Hi,

Yes I grew up on a sheep and cattle station (ranch) in outback Queensland.

I used to play in an old sheep plunge dip that had previously had arsenic and other chemicals used in it. DDT was also the rage back then and we were told it was so safe you could drink it and I remember the salesman doing just that to demonstrate it's safety. I shudder to think what other chemicals were used as we always had grain crops growing as well as lucerne hay fields.

When we moved closer to the coast, we had a small farm and just had lucerne hay, sometimes canola and sunflowers. The farm next to us used to rent out their paddocks to big companies for experimenting with GM crops. They also did a lot of crop dusting which invariably landed on our roof and we used to depend on rain water from the roof for all our water supplies at the time. Who knows what the chemicals were.

After that we moved to the east coast and my parents managed a large poultry farm. In between batches of chickens (every 8-10 weeks) the sheds had to be sprayed with formaldehyde. Once again we depended on roof rain water for all our water use in the house (the farm used dam water) and I'm sure that it was always contaminated with the formaldehyde.

If all that wasn't enough, when I was in my mid to late 20s I worked for a nuclear imaging company and it was my job to inject the radio active isotopes for all the patients. Nuclear imaging was in it's infancy here and safeguards weren't as good as they should have been. I was never given protective clothing or had a radiation counter.

Who knows....maybe I was just going to get this anyway.