Edwards' Cancer Strategy

Yesterday, presidential candidate John Edwards announced his National Strategy on Cancer Survivorship. At this juncture I admit that I am not following campaigns closely, but one point that I really like about Edwards' strategy is that he wants more research into the causes of cancer — including more work on the environmental contributors. I hope more of our politicians start looking at the connections between environmental factors and health.

Melamine and Dog Treats

The latest from the China front: WalMart announced today that melamine was found (again) in jerky treats for dogs, and they learned of it after pet owners complained of their dogs getting sick (and in some cases dying) after being fed the treats. How can we protect ourselves, and our families (including the four-legged members) from all these Chinese contaminants? It is hard since country of origin labeling is not required. But here's a couple of things you can do:

Buy less stuff, but seeker higher quality products. We are all guilty of buy, buy, buy, and that's part of the problem. Several years ago I made a firm commitment to cut down on my purchases of all types, but to spend more on what I do purchase.

Email your representatives and tell them that this is unacceptable. We need the federal agencies that are supposed to look out for us funded at a level that allows them to just that! You can find your elected officials email by going to www.house.gov (search for your rep by zip code) and www.senate.gov.

In Monday's post, I mentioned Lice B Gone as a sugar-based enzyme product on the Baby Green Genes site. In a follow up, Betty Mekdeci of the site's parent organization, asked me to clarify that her organization doesn't endorse individual brands of products, and she said that other manufacturers offer similar plant-based products for lice control. And, in another note, I have revised the other pages of the Toxic Burden site: The articles will have some longer articles (there's one on nanotechnology there now) and the tips page will be the place to find things like the kind of fish that are safe to eat, and the kind to be avoided, or tips on homemade and safe cleaning products. Check the other pages out at www.toxicburden.com.

Baby Green Genes Marketplace

Birth Defects Research for Children, Inc (BRCI), has launched the Baby Green Genes Marketplace. It is a place to find “green, safer, earth-friendly and organic alternatives for the products you need to take care of your family, home and garden."


BRCI is a nonprofit that runs the nation's only birth-defects registry, but over the last couple of years they have begun focusing on prevention, with their Healthy Baby Resources. The Baby Green Genes Marketplace is an outgrowth of that effort. "We want to provide people with positive steps they can take for themselves and their children," Betty Mekdeci of BRCI says.

There are products, in dozens of categories, ranging from accessories to water purification. Each product listed on the site has been approved by BRCI staff as having met certain minimum criteria for health and environmental safety. One example that Betty gave of the great alternative products that are on the market is a sugar-based product that can be used to control lice. Lice B Gone uses natural sugar enzymes, which dissolve the sticky substance that holds lice nits in hair. As Betty said, "Who really wants to dunk their child's head in pesticides?" (There is also a similar, sugar-based product that's effective for flea's and ticks.)

Eat Your Fish

Fish can be dangerous, with mercury and PCBs accumulating in their tissue, yet fish is also a truly remarkable health food. Fish are the best source of those wonderful omega-3 fatty acids, which are associated with all kinds of health benefits ranging from improved cardiac health to improved mood and behavior, and reductions in cancer risk and arthritis symptoms.

Our bodies can't produce these beneficial omega-3 fatty acids; they have to come through our diet, and cold water fish are by far the best source of omega-3 fatty acids. (Other sources include grassfed meat and milk.)

These fish are your best choices for both environmental sustainability and health reasons, and are safe to eat at least once per week:

anchovies,

clams,

Dungeness crab,

king crab (US),

snow crab,

Pacific cod,

crawfish,

Atlantic herring (US/Canada),

lobster (US/Baja/Cananda/Australia),

Atlantic mackerel,

blue mussels,

farmed oysters,

wild Alaskan salmon,

sardines,

farmed scallops,

shrimp (US/Canada),

squid,

tilapia (US/Central America),

farmed rainbow trout,

canned tuna (light/skipjack).

The fish you should absolutely avoid include:

bluefish,

striped bass,

American eel,

weakfish,

king mackerel,

bluefin tuna,

swordfish,

shark,

croaker,

Atlantic salmon.

If you forget the list, this list, and other tips on healthy living are available on the Toxic Burden Living Clean Tips page for easy access.

Cough Syrups and Kids: They Aren't Just Small Adults

I was reading an article on the New York Times website this afternoon. The essence of the article, 'Parents Warned Cough Syrups Imperil Infants,' discusses a Food and Drug Administration advisory issued yesterday. The FDA's website, says that in October the Nonprescription Drugs Advisory Committee will discuss the safety and effectiveness of cough and cold products for children. In particular, it says, "Questions have been raised about the safety of these products and whether the benefits justify any potential risks from the use of these products in children, especially in children under 2 years of age." (For parents and grandparents, it's definitely worth going to this site yourself, as FDA has an important statement on, "What should parents know about using cough and cold products in children?)

Back to the NYT article. The writer, Gardiner Harris, says,

"[T]he standards for drug approvals have changed sharply in the decades since many of the medicines in children’s cough and cold products were approved. If those drugs were currently up for review, they would not be approved for use in children because the manufacturers never tested them thoroughly in children.

Instead, the drugs’ makers performed studies in adults and then simply assumed that they would work in children. Such assumptions, once common, are no longer acceptable. Indeed, a growing number of studies in children suggest that cough and cold medicines work no better than placebos."

Harris' statement highlights something I've come to understand from my research into environmental health: "children are not just small adults,", a statement that researchers and physicians at the forefront of this topic make quite frequently. A growing number of their studies show that all kinds of exposures that would be inconsequential for adults have profoundly negative impacts on kids. Because they are going through frenetic development their bodies react differently to chemical exposures than an adult's would to the same exposure.

Children are generally the most vulnerable to exposures, so we need risk assessments that focus on them.

And More Toy Recalls for Mattel

Well, this morning's news is that Mattel is again recalling millions of toys for lead and magnets. I couldn't quite understand the magnet part of the story, but according to a piece in the Wall Street Journal, "Magnet issues surfaced recently in another toy recall. In 2006, the CPSC issued a similar recall for 3.8 million "Magnetix" sets, a toy produced by Rose Art Industries Inc. of Livingston, N.J. The sets consisted of tiny magnets that, if swallowed by an infant, bonded together in the stomach and caused fatal intestinal perforation in at least one instance. The CPSC documented 34 incidents involving the magnets, including one death and four serious injuries. A 20-month-old boy died after he swallowed pieces that twisted his small intestine and created a blockage."

One of the biggest problems with our global economy seems to be that while it has kept prices down (as Ms. Burnett said on Hardball last week) there have been other hidden costs. At the same time as we were off-shoring the production of almost everything we buy in order to save that few pennies at Wal-Mart, there was general gutting the regulatory agencies that protect us. For example, the Bureau of Consumer Protection, which regulates incoming products such as toys, had actual 2002 revenue of $83 million dollars, compared to actual funding of $47 million in 2005 (the last year for which actual figures are available).

Regulators are there to protect us. In an odd fashion, by doing their jobs, they also protected the regulated: Mattel was expecting a $30 million pre-tax income cut this quarter as a result of the earlier recalls. These subsequent recalls are going to add to the sting.

It's a Funny World, Why Am I Not Laughing

In the last few months we have heard that Chinese products are:

Making our dogs and cats sick. One story I read estimated that 39,000 pets were sickened and several thousand died after eating pet foods prepared with melamine-contaminated wheat gluten. Melamine is a by-product of coal production, and used in plastics as a fire retardant. It is also a member of the cyanide family--which explains its toxicity.

Contaminating toothpaste and cough syrups. Though no one died in the US, there were confirmed deaths in Panama from people using the diethylene glycol contaminated products (some of which did make their way into this country). Diethylene glycol is an industrial plasticizer, and a coolant/antifreeze. It's toxic attributes? They are many, and not for the faint hearted to consider: Nausea and vomiting, headache, anuria, narcosis, cyanosis, tachypnea, tachycardia, hypotension, stupor, prostration, hypoglycemia and unconsciousness, convulsions and death. It can also cause degenerative changes in the kidneys and liver, central nervous system depression, nephrotoxicity, abdominal pain, weakness, respiratory failure, cardiovascular collapse, and acute renal failure and brain damage. Ah, yes, and let us not neglect to mention that somnolence has been reported in children. Personally I don't even know what some of these conditions, listed on the Material Safty Data Sheet for diethylene glycol,are, but I know I don't want to experience them.

Causing a recall of millions of toys. The toys were painted with lead, a known neurotoxicant that has been banned here since 1978 for use in any paints headed toward the consumer marketplace. According to the National Institutes of Health, there are:

1. "No effective clinical interventions" to lower the levels of lead in children's blood once it is there
2. Children are "at risk of adverse developmental effects" at concentration levels of less than 10 µg/dL
3. Children "cannot be accurately classified as having blood lead levels above or below 10 µg/dL because of the inaccuracy inherent in laboratory testing"
4. And finally, "there is no evidence of a threshold below which adverse effects are not experienced"[emphasis added].

Wow, that is all scary. So what is the funny part of the story? Last Friday, on the MSNBC program, HARDBALL, Erin Burnett (the anchor of the CNBC program, STREET SIGNS) said, "[I]f China were to revalue it’s currency or China is to start making say, toys that don’t have lead in them or food that isn’t poisonous, their costs of production are going to go up and that means prices at Wal-Mart here in the United States are going to go up too. So, I would say China is our greatest friend right now, they’re keeping prices low and they’re keeping the prices for mortgages low, too.”

OK, the implication here is that you and I and everyone else in the United States would rather have people in other parts of the world dying from handling these chemicals in the production of our goods, and have our pets die, and have our children and grandchildren suffer the IQ reduction lead is best known for, just so that we can buy pet food or toys for a few pennies less? Huh? I just don't get it. I will say right here, charge me a little more.

A reader gave me the head's up on this story by email. Thanks, Lynn.

A Bit of Good News on the Mercury Front

Today I received an email from the staff at Oceana, the group whose report I referred to in the post about mercury releases from chlorine product. They were updating me with this bit of news: The Number One Source of Mercury Air Pollution in Wisconsin Commits to Switch. According to Oceana, this single action will result in a full 28% reduction in mercury air emissions in Wisconsin, nearly cutting the state’s emissions by a third.

I think this is evidence that open dialog and freely available information about the environmental health issues we face can result in change.

From a Utah Coal Mine, To Your Plate, Coal Is Dangerous Stuff

With the trapping of six miners in the collapse of Murray Energy’s Utah coal mine, we are again hearing about the hazards of mining for mine workers. My sympathies extend to the families of the trapped miners, but this incident highlights for me the need for us to move away from coal-fired energy production and into safer—and cleaner—alternatives.

Coal is not only hazardous to those working in the industry, but is also hazardous to all of us. For most of us, coal is unseen, and unthought about, yet in 2005, coal production in the United States peaked at over a billion tons, with almost 92% of it going to use in electrical generation plants. In fact, 1,522 coal-fired plants around the country supply almost half of the US demand for electricity. Some are small local operations, but most are monster facilities that eat pulverized coal dust like candy.

Mercury

Although each ton of coal the monster eats has but a trace of mercury in it, the total impact adds up: globally, burning coal for power and heat accounts for the greatest addition to the global mercury pool each year, and in the US, approximately a third of our annual contribution comes from our coal-fired power industry. When coal is burned in power plants, traces of mercury, which were captured millions of years ago when the coal was formed,are vaporized and released to the atmosphere.

The mercury released by coal burning, as well as mercury released in industrial processes, mining, and the burning of waste, joins the global mercury pool, making it available to the mercury cycle. And one in the mercury pool, it rains down on land and water, to be taken up by microorganisms, and then by higher organisms, including the fish we eat.

Dioxin

Then there’s also the problem of dioxin produced by burning coal. The term dioxin is actually a catch phrase used to denote several hundred chemicals that have similar chemical structure. Most dioxins fall into three main families—the CDDs, the CDFs, and the PCBs. The ‘C’ in all three acronyms stands for chlorine.

“Everybody in toxicology knows that if you add chlorine to something, you make it toxic,” says Suzanne Wuerthele, a career toxicologist with the Environmental Protection Agency in Denver.

CDDs and CDFs are mainly accidental chemical creations that come from (again) the burning of coal, the burning of municipal and medical waste, and certain industrial processes, while PCBs were manufactured and widely used in industrial transformers until they were banned in 1979. All three families of dioxins are found throughout the natural world, and in all individuals who have been tested by the CDC in quantities that are “at or near the level where effects of dioxin and related compounds, such as enzyme induction, changes in hormone levels, and indicators of altered cellular function, have been observed in laboratory animals and humans.” And, according to EPA’s analysis, potentially adverse effects are associated with exposure to dioxin in human populations at or near the background levels we now see in the environment. Like mercury, dioxin family members accumulate in fat, and work their way up the food chain.

Other Contaminants

Coal-fired plants also spew 59% of total U.S. sulfur dioxide pollution and 18% of total nitrous oxides every year, and release about 50% of our particulate pollution, as well as other toxics, such as arsenic and cadmium. Oh, yeah: They also release about 40% of total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, a prime contributor to global warming.

When the nitrous oxides that they emit react with volatile organic compounds and sunlight, they form smog, or ground level ozone. Of the six major criteria air pollutants regulated by the EPA, nitrous oxide emissions have historically been the hardest to control, in part because emissions from dirty coal plants in one region can easily pollute areas hundreds of miles downwind. The American Lung Association estimates that almost half of Americans live in areas with unhealthy levels of smog. Just last week, the State of Delaware confirmed in cancer cluster near the Indian River Power Plant that regulators believe is connected to the plant.

Protecting yourself

So what can you do to protect yourself: First, you can reduce exposures by watching what you eat. Several fish species are known for having high levels of dioxins (particularly of the PCB family) as well as mercury. Meat and dairy products also contain elevated levels of dioins, so the best way to reduce you personal dioxin exposure is to reduce the amount of animal fats in your diet: drink low-fat or reduced-fat milk and eat leaner cuts when you select meat.

Also, encourage your state and federal elected officials to close loopholes that allow coal-burning plants to continue spewing noxious and dangerous emissions into our air. To learn more, go to Clear The Air. Check out their power plant locater to learn about dirty plants where you live.

Dirty Diesel

Yesterday I sat in traffic at a stop light, the truck in front of me spewing a noxious diesel cloud. It made me think of a recent report, No Escape From Diesel, I read from the Clean Air Task Force.

“Anyone who commutes in any form of transportation is exposed to unhealthy levels of diesel exhausts,” according to the report, and commuting—even by foot in cities—is responsible for 60% of Americans’ daily exposure to ultra-fine particles "in spite of the fact that the average American spends less than 6% of his or her day commuting."

Ultrafine particles embed deeply in the lungs, and are associated with lung cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, asthma, increased allergies, increased susceptibility to lung infections (colds and bacterial infections), as well as slowed fetal growth, infant mortality, and DNA damage. Now, an interesting study just released by researchers at UCLA also shows that these fumes are particularly dangerous for people with high cholesterol levels and arteriosclerosis (or hardening of the arteries), because the particles emitted in diesel exhaust act as free radicals, and when mixed with the low density lipids that are often associated with high cholesterol, they activate the genes that promote cellular inflammation — a major risk factor for atherosclerosis, according to Dr. Jesus Araujo, UCLA assistant professor of medicine and director of environmental cardiology at the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine.

The Clean Air Task Force says that commuters using light rail or electric trains have the lowest exposure. But not everyone can commute that way, so the Task Force suggests that commuters:
1. Try to avoid the roads that carry the highest numbers of heavy trucks,
2. If you are forced to commute with heavy diesel truck traffic, close the windows and put your air system on recirculation.

The Task Force is also pushing EPA to require all diesel truck engines to have diesel particulate filters installed when engines are overhauled--an effort they say will cost between $2,000 and $7,000 per engine, but that will reduce particulates by up to 85%.

Why Am I Blogging About The Environment and Health

I have a couple of dogs, one adopted on the spur of the moment, when he stopped traffic—literally. There was something white hanging from his neck. Silly me, I thought it was a broken rope. I called him over: come here doggy, come here. Scared by screeching tires, he had plopped down in the middle of the road but came readily when called: any port in the storm, I suppose. I knew I was in trouble when I saw that the dangling white thing wasn’t a rope at all, but a note that said READ ME, sealed in a plastic envelope and wired to his collar.

Hi my name is Tuf, it read. I’m homeless due to unforeseen circumstances. I will love you and protect you with my life. I’m good with cats and kids and other dogs.

Tuf was young and cute and kind of skinny. His snout was a tender pincushion of porcupine quills. He wagged everything when I stroked his back. What was I to do? No other driver was ready to fight me for him. They scurried along as soon as he was out of the way.

Well, Tuf, I said, come on, get in the car.




Tuf is now middle aged in dog years, quite happy, and filled out at about 60 pounds. I share his story because he’s one of those dogs: once he gets hold of a bone, a leather chew, or anything of the sort, he won’t let it go. A team of professional firefighters could try to extricate it with Jaws of Life, but I wouldn’t place my bet on them. Tuf will keep his prize locked firmly in his chops with dogged determination: this is my bone, and I’m not giving it up.

This project became my bone. Once I started investigating chemicals and their links to our ever-worsening health, what I learned kept drawing me in deeper. I couldn’t just let it lay; I had to keep pursuing it.




The issue of environment and health, which I’d already been stewing about for a while, became an obsession a few years ago, after I flew to New Jersey for my mom’s birthday. It was torpid and muggy when I got to her house in the early evening. In spite of the temperature, the air conditioner was off, and she was curled under a blanket on the couch, bald, unable to speak because of canker sores the size of quarters, and too weak to get up. She was in her third month of chemotherapy. It is… disquieting to see a loved one laid so low.

My mother had found the lump one morning in the shower, just the week before Thanksgiving. It was her entry into a sisterhood that’s hidden behind wigs and prosthetic breasts. The breast-cancer sorority is big and getting bigger all the time. In 1940, one woman in twenty-two would join its ranks. When my mother was diagnosed, that number had jumped to one in seven. Some experts predict that by the time my young nieces are older women, their odds will be one in three.

My father died of cancer just thirteen months before my mother found the lump. His began in his intestines, metastasized to his liver. My sister-in-law has MS. My first-born nephew suffered severe colic as a baby, and was placed on Ritalin for ADHD in first grade. As an adult, he has continuing mental health challenges. Another first-borne nephew—on my husband’s side, and 1500 miles away from my blood clan—suffered from a less severe case of ADHD; his younger brother was afflicted with childhood asthma that sent him frequently to the hospital. A friend from North Jersey died at 55 of stomach cancer; another friend who lives in rural Virginia emailed that her 22-year-old son was recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer, which his sister had been treated for ten years earlier. And yet another friend—this one from Minnesota—was dreadfully sick, devastated by a collection of neurodegenerative symptoms that stymied doctors, including those at the Mayo Clinic, until one of the doctors finally tested her for a number of toxic chemicals and diagnosed her with mercury and lead poisoning. After starting chelation therapy, she was improving slowly but would likely suffer the consequences of her poisoning for the rest of her life.

This list could go on, and on, but you get the gist. Is it an unusual list? Hardly. For most of us, if we stop to take stock of our afflictions or those of our families, our friends, and our co-workers, we recognize a pattern that permeates the web of our modern lives: diseases, conditions, and disorders are everywhere. Over half of Americans are regularly taking prescription drugs; nearly a third take three-or-more drugs routinely. More than 1.2 million Americans hear the words, ‘you have cancer’, each year, and a half million die from it. Alzheimer’s afflicts 4.5 million older Americans; autism is on a steep rise among children; one in ten couples suffers from infertility problems; and perhaps most disturbing of all, fifty percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, birth defects, or chronic health problems such as asthma or ADHD. In spite of the remarkable feats medicine has made in treating what ails us, the ominous truth is we are continually needing more-and-more treatments that individually, and as a society, we can ill afford.

I don’t know about you, but I have to confess that I tended to think of the myriad maladies around me as discrete cases—each a terribly sad story, but nonetheless an individual story. Even as I began researching (initially to satisfy my curiosity about my mom’s illness) I saw them as individual stories, but soon the picture became complex, and I began to comprehend that each individual story was connected. As threads woven into a tapestry create a picture, individual stories of disease and disorder come together to reveal a much bigger story of how we have polluted our bodies and what that personal pollution means for us, and to future generations.

The spark that first fueled my curiosity and started me thinking about the story was something my mom told me when she was first diagnosed. Her doctor explained to her that hers was a type of breast cancer that accounts for less than two percent of all breast-cancer cases. “But there is some good news,” she told me. “He said you don’t have to worry—this form isn’t genetic.”

Those words focused my thoughts on a question: If it wasn’t genes that caused my mother’s illness, what was it?

Lead in Toys

The latest issue of the Journal Environmental Health Perspectives has an article on how even relatively small exposures to lead can affect kids' learning abilities: "The results show that blood-lead levels far lower than 10 µg/dL in early childhood correlate with lower educational achievement in elementary school as measured by performance on end-of-grade tests," they report. And today there are news reports about the recall of Fisher-Price toys due to lead paint used on some 967,0000 toys of Chinese import, this right on the heels of the June recall of a million and a half more Chinese toys--Thomas the Tank, a wooden train set--for lead in the paint.

How concerned should parents and grandparents be? Well, most environmental health experts agree that lead is quite dangerous, and at least some experts are advising parents whose children may have been exposed should arrange to have them blood tested for lead. In just one example from an article in Forbes, Dr. John Rosen, lead poisoning specialist at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore (NY), is quoted as saying, 'it's better to be safe than sorry.'

Rosen points out, childhood exposures to lead from paint in old homes is more common than poisoning from consumer products, but in either case, we know lead is a toxin. It shouldn't be in kids toys.

Eating Organic Can Improve Mental Health

From ADHD, autism, and Alzheimer’s, to bipolar disorder, depression, and schizophrenia, Americans are suffering with a serious and growing mental health and behavioral epidemic—and chemicals in the environment influence this epidemic. One in five kids under the age of 18 suffers from developmental disabilities and mental health problems, and the number is growing, according to the American Psychological Association. And, the World Health Organization estimates that by 2020, neuropsychiatric disorders in children will increase by over 50%, making them one of the five leading causes of childhood illness, disability and death, and that depression will be the second greatest contributor to the global burden of disease for all ages and both sexes.

According to National Academy of Sciences estimates, at least a quarter of developmental and neurological problems seen in children are directly related to the interplay between chemicals and genetic factors, and about 3% are strictly caused by exposure to environmental toxins, such as the organophosphate pesticides. The organophosphates account for half of the insecticides used in the US, with sixty million pounds applied to agricultural land and seventeen million pounds used in residential and commercial applications annually, and exposure to these pesticides are linked to hyperactivity, behavior disorders, learning disabilities, developmental delays and motor dysfunction.

The Food and Drug Administration has found that half of the non-organic produce in grocery stores contains measurable residues of pesticides, and tests of eight industry-leading baby foods revealed the presence of 16 pesticides, including three carcinogens. In fact, 62% of all foods tested had residues of at least three different pesticides on them or in them. And, what's on our food is in our blood: organophosphate pesticides are now found in the blood of 95% of Americans tested by the CDC, and levels are twice as high in blood samples taken from children than adults, because relative to their body weight, kids eat more fruits and vegetables.

But there is some good news: eating organically produced fruits and vegetables clearly reduces the exposure to pesticides. In blood samples of children aged 2 to 4, concentrations of pesticide residues are six-times higher in children who eat conventionally farmed fruits and vegetables compared with those who eat organic fruits and vegetables.

For many people, particularly those with young kids, the all-organic diet may be cost prohibitive. Switching to organic produce for those fruits and vegetables that are typically highest in pesticide residues is an effective starting point. The dirty dozen of highest residue fruits and vegetables are:
1. Peaches (highest concentration of pesticides)
2. Apples
3. Sweet Bell Peppers
4. Celery
5. Nectarines
6. Strawberries
7. Cherries
8. Pears
9. Grapes (especially imported grapes)
10. Spinach
11. Lettuce
12. Potatoes