Toxic Assault on Children's Health by Alice Shabecoff
Evidence that climate change was going to be a serious problem for the world was already strong when Philip, then the environmental correspondent for the New York Times, began writing about it in the 1970s. The evidence was largely ignored by the public and policy-makers for nearly 30 years and future generations will pay the price for that neglect.
Then, as our grandchildren were born and grew, he and I became aware of another serious problem, one that is also largely ignored and also constitutes a threat to human welfare and, indeed, the long-term viability of life on earth – and that is the toxification of the environment by chemicals, heavy metals, and nuclear contamination. The book we wrote to try to make this threat known is called Poisoned Profits: The Toxic Assault on Our Children.
Here are some numbers: One of every two pregnancies in this country either fails to come to term or produces a less than healthy child. One of every three of America’s 73 million children now suffers from some form of chronic illness, from cancer to asthma, birth defects and a range of neurological illnesses, from ADHD and learning disabilities to autism and bipolar disorder. Childhood cancer, once a medical rarity, has grown 67 percent since 1950. Asthma has increased 140 percent in the last 20 years, and autism rates without a doubt have increased at least 200 percent. Sperm quality has withered 50 percent since the ‘50s, the ratio of male births is decreasing at a rate of 1.7 per 1,000, while more and more boys are born with sexual deformities. Babies are increasingly born before term and are smaller at term, foretelling a future of lesser intelligence joined with a greater likelihood of mental and behavioral problems.
The sharp increase in chronic childhood illness has been paralleled by a rising flood in the number, quantity and variety of synthetic toxic substances. Over 80,000 industrial chemicals are in commerce in this country, produced or imported at 15 trillion pounds a year. Pesticide use has leapt 1,125 percent from the 400 million pounds used in Rachel Carson’s day to the 4.4 billion pounds in use today.
From conception to adulthood, the assault is everywhere: heavy metals and carcinogenic particles in air pollution; industrial solvents, household detergents, prozac and radioactive wastes in drinking water; pesticides in flea collars; artificial growth hormones in beef, arsenic in chicken; synthetic hormones in bottles, teething rings and medical devices; formaldehyde in cribs and nail polish, and even rocket fuel in lettuce.
Most synthetic chemicals have not been tested for their impact on human health, much less on the health of children. The law (the Toxic Substances Control Act) allows manufacturers to test their own products, with no requirement to prove safety for humans or the environment. Even chemicals proved by independent research to be a menace are not removed if industry can make the case their economic loss outweighs the harm to public health.
Poisoned Profits focuses on children for a couple of reasons. We thought people were more likely to heed our message if it concerned their children. The other reason is, that children are particularly vulnerable to toxics in the environment. Their biological defenses are not yet developed. Embryos and fetuses are particularly vulnerable; toxics cross the placenta and the blood-brain barrier. It’s now known that toxics in the womb can reprogram one’s genes, evidencing themselves later in life in illnesses such as breast and prostate cancer and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Recent research has further shown that such genetic changes can be inherited down through generations.
Yet, even as one toxic product or another occasionally makes front page news, and even as parents struggle to fight illness one child at a time, the public and health care professionals still remain in the dark about the enormity of this national crisis.
Why? One reason may be that the current boxes of training and practice separate people who should be working together. Environmental advocates don’t think ‘public health,’ public health practitioners don’t think ‘environment.’ Environmental groups battle coal-powered electric plants because of the global-warming carbon they emit, but seem to overlook the fact that the tons of lead, mercury, hydrochloric acid, chromium, arsenic and sulfur and nitrogen oxides these plants emit also cause autism, Alzheimer’s and other public health menaces.
A more serious cause of ignorance, however, is that the evidence of toxic harm is purposely obscured by many of the polluting corporations along with their Washington lobbyists, scientists-for-hire, politicians, lawyers and public relations firms, using strategies they honed in defense of tobacco decades ago, and acting within an unfettered free market system very like the one enabling the shenanigans behind the 2008 financial meltdown.
Family upon family, community after community, our interviews across the country revealed acts of corporate pollution papered over by researchers under corporate contracts. The Swiss company Syngenta (formerly Novartis), the world’s largest agrochemical manufacturer, makes the herbicide atrazine. Atrazine is the most widely-used weed killer in the Corn Belt of America; it is found in over 90 percent of water samples in farming communities, and in at least 23 states. Its use was never allowed in Switzerland, and it was banned by the European Union in 2003. Syngenta interfered with the publication of a hired researcher’s study that had found exposure to atrazine during frogs’ fetal stage, even at levels 30 times lower than currently permitted in the nation’s water, converted male frogs’ hormones to female, that the frogs had in essence been chemically castrated. (Frogs and humans have remarkably similar reproductive systems.) New researchers were hired, who found no risk from atrazine at the EPA-allowed levels. Despite the evidence that atrazine can turn male frogs into hermaphrodites, the EPA, after 50 private meetings with Syngenta and with two advisory committees composed of only Syngenta and EPA representatives, decided to keep it on the U.S. market with no new restrictions.
Money speaks at the legislative level as well. In our analysis of who voted for or against the Clear Skies Act (which, contrary to its name, would have loosened corporate obligation to reduce air pollution), senators who voted for the act received three times the amount of donations from corporate interests as those who voted against it.
Yet, after acknowledging these problems, we end with hope and optimism. Now we know what is happening. One countermeasure rests with the public health world. Suppose public health leaders made the case that 90 percent of all synthetic industrial chemicals are made from petroleum, teaming up with green advocates fighting to reduce the use of the petrocarbons that cause global warming --that would incomparably strengthen and speed the development of substitute greener products. It is our hope that the strength and knowledge that eliminated typhoid and malaria in this country will join forces with those who work for environment protection to eliminate the causes of toxic-induced disease.