What about using pesticides?

If you believe the lies being spread by some self-proclaimed environmental watchdogs, we are grim reapers exterminating weeds, family pets, or anything else within 500 miles of a lawn we have sprayed.

However, their arguments are misinformed and based on emotion and not facts. In a look at lifetime risks of dying, James Walsh published “True Odds.”

In the article in the Globe and Mail (Nov. 21, 1998) it stated “we worry more about pesticides in fruit than we do about going for a drive in the car - yet as the chart below suggests, that doesn’t make a great deal of sense. That sort of willful ignorance allows people to manipulate us.”

Lifetime Risks of Dying

• Flesh-eating disease.........................................................1 in 1 million
• Pesticide poisoning..........................................................1 in 200,000
• Heart disease (from eating a broiled steak a week)........1 in 48,000
• A lightning strike.............................................................1 in 30,000
• Cancer from eating a peanut butter sandwich a day.......1 in 5,000
• Homicide..........................................................................1 in 1,000
• Cancer caused by the average number of x-rays.............1 in 700
• Home accident.................................................................1 in 130
• Smoking one cigarette a day............................................1 in 100
• A motor vehicle accident..................................................1 in 60