A
hidden epidemic is poisoning America. The toxins are in the air we
breathe and the water we drink, in the walls of our homes and the
furniture within them. We can’t escape it in our cars. It’s in cities
and suburbs. It afflicts rich and poor, young and old. And there’s a
reason why you’ve never read about it in the newspaper or seen a report
on the nightly news: it has no name — and no antidote.
The culprit behind this silent killer is lead. And vinyl. And formaldehyde. And asbestos. And Bisphenol A. And
(PCBs). And thousands more innovations brought to us by the industries that once promised “
,”
but instead produced a toxic stew that has made every American a guinea
pig and has turned the United States into one grand unnatural
experiment.
Today, we are all unwitting subjects in the largest set of drug trials ever. Without our knowledge or consent, we are
of
suspected toxic chemicals and compounds, as well as new substances
whose safety is largely unproven and whose effects on human beings are
all but unknown. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) itself has begun
for
151 potentially dangerous chemicals, detailing the variety of
pollutants we store in our bones, muscle, blood, and fat. None of the
companies introducing these new chemicals has even bothered to tell us
we’re part of their experiment. None of them has asked us to sign
consent forms or explained that they have little idea what the long-term
side effects of the chemicals they’ve put in our environment — and so
our bodies — could be. Nor do they have any clue as to what the
synergistic effects of combining so many novel chemicals inside a human
body in unknown quantities might produce.
The story of how Americans became unwitting test subjects began more than a century ago. The key figure was
Alice Hamilton,
the “mother” of American occupational medicine, who began documenting
the way workers in lead paint pigment factories, battery plants, and
lead mines were suffering terrible palsies, tremors, convulsions, and
deaths after being exposed to lead dust that floated in the air, coating
their workbenches and clothes.
Soon thereafter, children exposed
to lead paint and lead dust in their homes were also identified as
victims of this deadly neurotoxin. Many went into convulsions and comas
after crawling on floors where lead dust from paint had settled, or
from touching lead-painted toys, or teething on lead-painted cribs,
windowsills, furniture, and woodwork.
Instead of leveling with the public, the lead industry through its trade group, the
Lead Industries Association,
began a six-decade-long campaign to cover-up its product’s dire
effects. It challenged doctors who reported lead-poisoned children to
health departments, distracted the public through advertisements that
claimed lead was “safe” to use, and fought regulation of the industry by
local government, all in the service of profiting from putting a poison
in paint, gasoline, plumbing fixtures, and even toys, baseballs, and
fishing gear.
As
Joe Camel would be for tobacco, so the little
Dutch Boy of
the National Lead Company became an iconic marketing tool for Dutch Boy
Lead Paint, priming Americans to invite a dangerous product into their
children’s playrooms, nurseries, and lives. The company also launched a
huge advertising campaign that linked lead to
health, rather than danger. It even produced
coloring books for children, encouraging them to paint their rooms and furniture using lead-based paint.
Only after thousands of children were poisoned and, in the 1960s, activist groups like the Young Lords and the Black Panthers began
to use lead poisoning as a symbol of racial and class oppression did
public health professionals and the federal government begin to rein in
companies like the Sherwin-Williams paint company and the Ethyl
Corporation, which produced tetraethyl lead, the lead-additive in
gasoline. In 1971, Congress passed the Lead Paint Poisoning Prevention Act that limited lead in paint used for public housing. In 1978, the Consumer Products Safety Commission finally banned lead in all paints sold for consumer use. During the 1980s, the Environmental Protection Agency issued rules that led to the elimination of leaded gasoline by 1995 (though it still remains in aviation fuel).
The CDC estimates that in at least
4 million households in
the U.S. today children are still exposed to dangerous amounts of lead
from old paint that produces dust every time a nail is driven into a
wall to hang a picture, a new electric socket is installed, or a family
renovates its kitchen. It estimates that more than
500,000 children ages one to five have “elevated” levels of lead in their blood. (
No level is considered safe for children.) Studies have linked lost
IQ points,
attention deficit disorders,
behavioral problems, dyslexia, and even possibly high
incarceration rates to tiny amounts of lead in children’s bodies.
Unfortunately,
when it came to the creation of America’s chemical soup, the lead
industry was hardly alone. Asbestos is another classic example of an
industrial toxin that found its way into people’s homes and bodies. For
decades, insulation workers, brake mechanics, construction workers, and
a host of others in hundreds of trades fell victim to the disabling and
deadly lung diseases of asbestosis or to lung cancer and the fatal
cancer called mesothelioma when they breathed in dust produced during
the installation of boilers, the insulation of pipes, the fixing of cars
that used asbestos brake linings, or the spraying of asbestos on
girders. Once again, the industry knew its product’s dangers early and
worked assiduously to cover them up.
Despite growing medical
knowledge about its effects (and increasing industry attempts to
downplay or suppress that knowledge), asbestos was soon introduced to
the American home and
incorporated into products
ranging from insulation for boilers and piping in basements to floor
tiles and joint compounds. It was used to make sheetrock walls, roof
shingles, ironing boards, oven gloves, and hot plates. Soon an
occupational hazard was transformed into a threat to all consumers.
Today,
however, these devastating industrial-turned-domestic toxins, which
destroyed the health and sometimes took the lives of hundreds of
thousands, seem almost quaint when compared to the brew of potential or
actual toxins we’re regularly ingesting in the air we breathe, the water
we drink, and the food we eat.
Of special concern are a variety
of chlorinated hydrocarbons, including DDT and other pesticides that
were once spread freely nationwide, and despite being
banned decades
ago, have accumulated in the bones, brains, and fatty tissue of
virtually all of us. Their close chemical carcinogenic cousins,
polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs),
were found in innumerable household and consumer products — like
carbonless copy paper, adhesives, paints, and electrical equipment –
from the 1950s through the 1970s. We’re still paying the price for that
industrial binge today, as these odorless, tasteless compounds have
become permanent pollutants in the natural environment and, as a result,
in all of us.
The Largest Uncontrolled Experiment in History
While
old houses with lead paint and asbestos shingles pose risks,
potentially more frightening chemicals are lurking in new construction
going on in the latest
mini-housing boom across
America. Our homes are now increasingly made out of lightweight fibers
and reinforced synthetic materials whose effects on human health have
never been adequately studied individually, let alone in the
combinations we’re all subjected to today.
Formaldehyde,
a colorless chemical used in mortuaries as a preservative, can also be
found as a fungicide, germicide, and disinfectant in, for example,
plywood, particle board, hardwood paneling, and the “
medium density fiberboard”
commonly used for the fronts of drawers and cabinets or the tops of
furniture. As the material ages, it evaporates into the home as a
known cancer-producing vapor,
which slowly accumulates in our bodies. The National Cancer Institute
at the National Institutes of Health suggests that homeowners
“purchasing pressed-wood products, including building material, cabinetry, and furniture… should ask about the formaldehyde content of these products.”
What’s inside your new walls might be even more dangerous. While the
flame retardants commonly used in sofas, chairs, carpets, love seats, curtains, baby products, and even TVs, sounded like a good idea when
widely introduced in
the 1970s, they turn out to pose hidden dangers that we’re only now
beginning to grasp. Researchers have, for instance, linked one of the
most common flame retardants, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, to a wide
variety of potentially undesirable health effects including
thyroid disruption,
memory and learning problems, delayed
mental and physical development, lower IQ, and the early onset of
puberty.
Other flame retardants like Tris (1,3-dichloro-2-propyl) phosphate have been linked to
cancer. As the CDC has
documented in
an ongoing study of the accumulation of hazardous materials in our
bodies, flame retardants can now be found in the blood of “nearly all”
of us.
Nor are these particular chemicals anomalies. Lurking in the cabinet under the kitchen sink, for instance, are
window cleaners and
spot removers that
contain known or suspected cancer-causing agents. The same can be said
of cosmetics in your makeup case or of your plastic water bottle or
microwavable food containers. Most recently, Bisphenol A (BPA), the
synthetic chemical used in a variety of plastic consumer products,
including some baby bottles, epoxy cements, the lining of tuna fish
cans, and even
credit card receipts, has been singled out as another everyday toxin increasingly found inside all of us.
Recent studies indicate that its effects are as varied as they are distressing. As
Sarah Vogel of the
Environmental Defense Fund has
written,
“New research on very-low-dose exposure to BPA suggests an association
with adverse health effects, including breast and prostate cancer,
obesity, neurobehavioral problems, and reproductive abnormalities.”
Teflon,
or perfluorooctanoic acid, the heat-resistant, non-stick coating that
has been sold to us as indispensable for pots and pans, is yet another
in the list of substances that may be poisoning us, almost unnoticed.
In addition to allowing fried eggs to slide right onto our plates,
Teflon is in all of us,
according to the Science Advisory Board of the Environmental Protection Agency, and “likely to be carcinogenic in humans.”
These
synthetic materials are just a few of the thousands now firmly embedded
in our lives and our bodies. Most have been deployed in our world and
put in our air, water, homes, and fields without being studied at all
for potential health risks, nor has much attention been given to how
they interact in the environments in which we live, let alone our
bodies. The groups that produce these miracle substances — like the
petrochemical, plastics, and rubber industries, including major
companies like
Exxon,
Dow, and
Monsanto –
argue that, until we can definitively prove the chemical products
slowly leaching into our bodies are dangerous, we have no “right,” and
they have no obligation, to remove them from our homes and workplaces.
The idea that they should
prove their products safe before exposing the entire population to them seems to be a foreign concept.
In the 1920s, the oil industry made
the same argument about
lead as an additive in gasoline, even though it was already known that
it was a dangerous toxin for workers. Spokesman for companies like
General Motors insisted that it was a “gift of God,” irreplaceable and
essential for industrial progress and modern living, just as the lead
industry argued for decades that lead was “essential” to produce good
paint that would protect our homes.
Like the oil, lead, and tobacco industries of the twentieth century, the chemical industry, through the
American Chemistry Council and public relations firms like
Hill & Knowlton,
is fighting tooth and nail to stop regulation and inhibit legislation
that would force it to test chemicals before putting them in the
environment. In the meantime, Americans remain the human guinea pigs in
advanced trials of hundreds if not thousands of commonly used, largely
untested chemicals. There can be no doubt that this is the largest
uncontrolled experiment in history.
To begin to bring it under
control would undoubtedly involve major grassroots efforts to push back
against the offending corporations, courageous politicians, billions of
dollars, and top-flight researchers. But before any serious steps are
likely to be taken, before we even name this epidemic, we need to wake
up to its existence.
A toxic dump used to be a superfund site or a nuclear waste disposal site. Increasingly, however,
we –
each and every one of us — are toxic dumps and for us there’s no
superfund around, no disposal plan in sight. In the meantime, we’re
walking, talking biohazards and we don’t even know it.
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