As posted earlier today at the Democracy Cell Project blogsite (and reposted here to dKos with full permission of the author & DCP site owners):
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Easing the Body Burden -- THK Blog Tour, Day 3
Teresa Heinz Kerry is no stranger to the spotlight. She's been on stage in front of crowds larger than most of us can even imagine. But as far as she's concerned, her most important work takes place behind the scenes. As head of the Heinz Endowments and the Heinz Family Philanthropies, she has long been a leader in promoting responsible, sustainable social action.
One of Teresa Heinz Kerry's more visible projects is the ongoing Women's Health and the Environment Conference series. This year's keynote conference will be held in Pittsburgh on this coming Friday, April 20, and will feature a number of outstanding speakers, scientists, and activists discussing critical health issues facing women today.
We will be attending Women’s Health & the Environment: New Science, New Solutions conference and will posting reports about it here at the DCP blog. Today, however, we're also participating in a special 17-stop virtual blog tour (see the complete tour schedule here). And that gave us the opportunity to ask Teresa Heinz Kerry a few questions of particular interest to members of the DCP community:
DCP: Most of us usually think of the environment as being something that is "out there", something outside ourselves. But that is not the case. The world around us is not just external; we make it internal ourselves, every day. We interact with the environment around us by eating it in our food, breathing it into our lungs, and in many cases applying it directly to our skin.
You recently wrote an article citing Douglas Fischer's investigative reporting about how much accumulated toxins build up in each of our bodies over time. What is this "body burden", and how can we take steps to guard against its effects on ourselves even though we are surrounded by those substances every day?
THK: Recently, our foundation launched an on-line environmental newsletter focused on Women, Health and the Environment. As you note, in the first issue I recount a story written by journalist Doug Fischer of The Oakland Tribune. In his prize winning series, "A Body’s Burden: Our Chemical Legacy," Fischer reported on the environmental toxins in the blood of an average family in the area. The hair, blood, and urine of two San Francisco Bay area children contained concentrations of a pervasive flame retardant at levels higher than those known to cause reproductive and brain damage in rats. Surprisingly, the concentrations were much higher in the 18-month-old boy and his five-year old sister than in their parents. Fischer’s newspaper spent $17,000 on laboratory tests and on an independent scientific verification of an elaborate testing protocol to document these alarming concentrations.
Doug spoke in Boston at our 9th annual conference on Women, Health and the Environment. I will never forget his chronicle of how the story evolved from a simple report to the shocking conclusion concerning chemicals in our body and especially our children. "Our ability to detect these compounds, invisible even five years ago, has outstripped our ability to interpret the results," he explained, "but if it was your two-year-old, would you want to know?"
Every person in the world has industrial chemicals in or passing through their bodies, the result of five decades of intensive (and continuing) chemical use in industrialized nations. Scientists call this the human "body burden" of chemicals. Because of gaps in our system of public health protections, health effects of the human body burden are mostly unknown.
Pioneering work on the "body burden" has been done by the Environmental Working Group (www.ewg.org), which spearheads the Human Toxome Project, the largest non-governmental biomonitoring program in the country. EWG’s testing programs have uncovered nearly 500 chemicals in children, teens, and adults, including nearly 300 industrial chemicals and pollutants in umbilical cord blood collected from a sample of 10 babies at the moment of birth. In every person tested EWG has found complex mixtures of industrial chemicals never tested for safety.
To guard against the onslaught of chemicals, each of us needs to understand what I call the "consequences of our actions", that is, to educate ourselves about the products we use and buy everyday -- from household products to sun screens to soaps. What I have found very useful is going to the Environmental Working Group website where they list their analysis of lots of specific products -- what we need to know and why. By doing so, I become a better informed consumer and better understand the kinds of chemicals in the products I might want to purchase.
DCP: Women in particular seem to be more at risk for body-burden issues than men are because they traditionally apply so many external substances to their own body in the form of cosmetics, nail polish, hair spray, etc. Don't the cosmetics manufacturers test for any negative reactions to these products before releasing them to market, and doesn't the FDA enforce regulatory standards to make sure that there are no long-term effects of using these substances for personal decoration? Should women stop using such products entirely, or are there ways in which they can protect themselves against the unwanted side effects?
THK: Three important points here. First, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not have as their mandate safety testing for cosmetics. Second, the Agency does not systematically review ingredient safety. Third, in their 30-year history the cosmetic industry’s self-policing safety panel has reviewed the safety of just over 10% of the ingredients used in products.
Many organizations are working for policy reforms that would ensure that chemicals and products are safe before they are sold, particularly for children and other vulnerable populations. Finally, I would never tell a woman or a man to stop using products entirely, but I would and do encourage people to understand the kinds of chemicals that are in these products and to find out whether any have been tested or found to be linked to cancer or other health problems.
I might sound like a broken record, but the first place I would check is the website of the Environmental Working Group -- they have studied and analyzed many different products. Second, check the website for the National Resources Defense Council (www.nrdc.org). Their 2006 special report entitled "Bad Chemistry" found hundreds of man-made chemicals -- in our air, our water, and our food -- could be damaging the most basic building blocks of human development.
As Gay Daly reported in 2006 for NRDC, There are now more than 100,000 synthetic chemicals on the market and these chemicals are everywhere. They enter our bodies and those of other animals through every possible route of transmission. They are in our food supply, so we eat them. They drift in the air, so we breathe them. (Carried on thermal currents, they have long since reached the Arctic, so polar bears breathe them too.) Present in landfills, they leach into the water supply, so we drink them. Released as effluent into lakes and rivers by factories, they affect the habitat of fish, frogs, and all aquatic life, right down to plankton. Ubiquitous in cosmetics, they are absorbed through our skin. Pregnant women pass them to their fetuses; mothers feed them to their newborns when they breastfeed.
Finally, use your own common sense. Your greatest strength is the power of the dollar -- if you identify specific products that are not safe for you, your child or family, tell your friends and other parents and write to the corporation manufacturing these products and ask any or all of your questions. If you do not hear back from them, write again, but keep track of each letter. Then, if there is still no response, send a letter to the local newspaper, your local Congressman and other elected officials explaining that the specific company has refused to answer your questions.
And, if you really want to get their attention, find out what public employee pensions plans hold that company’s specific stock as part of their investment portfolio. Share your concerns with the investment fund managers of the pension fund, the union (if there is one) and others. We change behavior by challenging the status quo -- something we all learn at one point or another in our political lives.
These kinds of steps help make you a better consumer -- and ultimately help you make more or better informed choices.
We appreciate Teresa Heinz Kerry taking time to answer questions for our DCP readers as part of this virtual blog tour. Yesterday's stop on the tour was at Light Up The Darkness, and tomorrow's will be at A Dem Fine Woman. The full schedule for this virtual tour is listed in our introduction to the series here.)
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