Earth Day Sunday
April 21, 2002
Raising Children Toxic Free
by Shantilal P. Bhagat
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Shantilal Bhagat is
a Church of the Brethren representative to the Eco-Justice Working Group
of the National Council of Churches of Christ and the author of Your
Health and the Environment: A Christian Perspective.
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All children need our commitment to be better stewards of the Earth so that
their health, safety and success might be insured, but the plight of some
children calls for special attention-- the children whose homes or schools are
located near toxic waste sites, those who work long hours in factories and
fields (often in hazardous conditions), those who look for nourishment in
landfills, and those whose homes are washed away in floods or affected by
deforestation.
We are not alone in this task. The Convention on the Rights of the Child was
adopted by the United Nations in 1989. Unfortunately, the US is one of the two
countries that have not signed this treaty. In April 2001, the UN Commission on
Human Rights declared formally that pollution and destruction of natural
environment is both a crime against nature and a violation of human rights.
Better Living Through Chemicals
"Better Living Through Chemicals" was a slogan of some chemical companies in
the Chemical Age of the last century. Chemicals did provide relief through
antibiotics, penicillin, and other medical advances and have led to a range of
creature comforts our ancestors could have never imagined. Over the last sixty
years 80,000 new chemical compounds have been invented and dispersed into our
environment. These compounds end up everywhere-- in farmland soil; in storage
containers of varying reliability; in air, water, food; in consumer products; in
the tissues of plants, animals, and people.
Everyone on the planet is carrying at least two hundred and fifty measurable
chemicals in his or her body that were not part of human chemistry before the
1920s according to biologist Pete Myers who coauthored Our Stolen Future,
a book about endocrine-disrupting chemicals published in 1996.
Many experts believe that the rules and standards for protecting public
health and the environment from undue chemical risk are inadequate. The public
cannot tell whether a large majority of the highest-use chemicals in the United
States pose health hazards or not. New chemicals and new uses for chemicals
enter the global commerce so rapidly and the economic interest in their use
becomes so large so quickly, that we are by default conducting a massive
toxicological trial. Our children and our children's children are the
experimental animals.
Greater Vulnerability of Children
The interaction between environmental chemicals and child development is a
new area of public health science. Only in the past few years have we begun to
grasp the potential health effects of even slight disturbances in child
development. It is now clear from studies of animals and children that subtle
changes in the concentrations of normally occurring chemicals such as
hormones--as well as the presence of toxic agents like lead, mercury or
PCBs--can produce profound and permanent changes in the developing nervous
system. These changes can lead to decrements in mental performance and
alterations of reproductive system.
Why are children more vulnerable to toxics than
adults?
- Children absorb a greater proportion of many substances from the
intestinal tract or lung. For example, children take up approximately half the
lead that they swallow while adults absorb only about one-tenth.
- Children indulge in more hand-to-mouth activity than adults and transfer
more foreign substances into their bodies through this route. Because of their
smaller size, and the fact that they often play in the dirt, they are closer
to the source of many pollutants.
- Children take in more air, food, and water per pound of body weight than
adults.
- Children do not choose their environments. They depend on adults to make
decisions for them about the food they eat, where they live, what they are
exposed to.
- Some chemicals accumulate in the body of the mother (e.g., dioxin) and are
passed on to the fetus through the placenta and to the infant while
breast-feeding.
Health
Problems
- Asthma is reaching epidemic proportions. In the US, approximately 5
million children have asthma. Asthma is now the most common chronic illness
among children and the leading cause of school absences. The death rate from
asthma in the US has tripled in the past 30 years, to more than 5,000 a year.
- Fewer children are dying from cancer today, but the incidence of some
cancers is growing. There has been a 30 percent increase in brain cancer and a
68 percent increase in testicular cancer diagnoses in the past 30 years. Some
forms of leukemia are also on the rise.
Dioxin--A Major Culprit?
Dioxin is a major public health issue for the general population as well as
for children. Dioxin is the most toxic, deadly by-product of many chemical,
manufacturing, and combustion processes. Any use of chlorine in industrial
processes, including incineration, chemical and plastic manufacturing, paper and
pulp bleaching, or burning hazardous waste in cement kilns, results in dioxin
formation. Dioxin enters the human body through diet, with food from animals
being the predominant pathway. The American people are at serious risk from
their daily intake of dioxin in food.
- There is a growing body of evidence that dioxin exposure in the general
population causes developmental and reproductive effects in children. The
effects on the development of the nervous system are associated more with
exposure in the womb, while dental effects are more strongly associated with
dioxin exposure from breast milk. These effects, including the small shifts in
cognitive ability and alterations in thyroid levels, may be just the tip of
the iceberg of our understanding of the impact of dioxin on the general
population.
- All American children are born with dioxin in their bodies. The greatest
impact of this exposure appears to be on the growth and development of
children. Disrupted sexual development, birth defects and damage to the immune
system may result.
- Dioxin exposure has been associated with IQ deficits, increased prevalence
of withdrawn/depressed behavior, adverse effects on attentional processes, and
an increase in hyperactive behavior in children.
- There is evidence of both developmental and reproductive effects in
children exposed to dioxin. These developmental effects include defects in
permanent teeth, adverse effects on thyroid hormones, altered sex ratio (more
females than males), and increased respiratory disease.
What is our Government doing to protect children?*
- In 1993, the National Academy of Science issued a report on pesticides and
children. This report was the first acknowledgement that our laws then did not
protect children.
- In 1996, the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) passed overwhelmingly by
Congress. This statute requires pesticides to be reassessed by the EPA to
ensure that they protect children. Congress, unfortunately, has attempted to
repeal the FQPA because of its strict standards and the EPA has not been able
to collect data on pesticide residues or enforce the law as it was intended.
- In 2001, Centers for Disease Control released their first report
documenting the prevalence of 27 different chemicals in Americans' blood and
urine. The chemicals included phthalates (found in cosmetics, some soaps, and
vinyl plastics), associated with developmental effects. Phthalates were
highest in women of child-bearing age. Mercury levels were higher than
expected, associated with birth defects and IQ loss. They found high levels of
organophosphates pesticides. Because these pesticides break down quickly in
the body, their widespread presence indicates regular exposure.
What You Can Do*
- Resist using pesticides (bug sprays) and herbicides (weed killers) in
homes, daycare centers, schools and communities. Take your shoes off when you
come inside to avoid tracking pesticides from the lawn to the carpets.
- Buy organic and locally grown produce and milk products when possible.
Also, eat lower on the food chain, choosing fruits, vegetables and grains over
dairy and meat that harbor toxins in the fat.
- Keep your home well ventilated and use non-toxic cleaning supplies.
- Read the labels and demand the right to know what is in the products you
consume.
- Support efforts in your community to eliminate all waste incineration and
increase recycling efforts. Buy smart--choose less packaging and reuse
products, if you can.
- Don't smoke and don't allow others to smoke around your children.
- Tell Congress to strengthen environmental laws to protect children,
support better tracking of health trends, and law enforcement at the local,
state and federal levels.
- Impress upon companies that toxic chemicals do not belong in cosmetics,
toys and other children's products or food.
- Support efforts to reduce or prevent pollution in the entire process so as
to avoid toxic exposure from manufacturing to use and disposal of products.
- Get additional information for your area of interest from resources listed
below:
Children's Environmental Health
Children's Environmental Health Network, 110 Maryland Avenue NE,
#511, Washington, DC 20002.
Ph. 202-543-4033. http://www.cehn.org.
Children's Health Environmental Coalition, P.O. Box 1540,
Princeton, NJ 08542. Ph. 609-252-1915. http://www.checnet.org.
National Environmental Trust, 1200 18th Street
NW, #500, Washington, DC 20036. Ph. 202-887-8800. http://www.environet.org.
Toxics
Center for Health and Environmental Justice, P.O. Box 6806, Falls
Church, VA 22040. Ph. 703-237-2249. http://www.chej.org.
Environmental Working Group, 1718 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite
600, Washington, DC 20009. http://www.ewg.org.
Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility, 11 Garden
Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. Ph. 617-497-7440. http://www.igc.org/psr.
Pesticides
Beyond Pesticide/National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides,
701 E Street SE, #200, Washington, DC 20003. Ph. 202-543-5450. www.beyondpesticides.org.
Pesticides Action Network North America, 49 Powell Street, #500
San Francisco, CA 94102. Ph. 415-981-1771. http://www.panna.org/panna.
Healthy Schools
Healthy Schools Network, Inc., 96 South Swan Street, Albany, NY
12210. Ph. 518-462-0632. http://www.hsnet.org.
National Parent Teacher Association, 330 N. Wabash Avenue, Chicago,
IL 60611-3690. Ph. 312-670-6782. http://www.pta.org.
Reproductive And Developmental Toxics
Government Agencies
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Children's Health Protection,
1200 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Room 2512, Ariel Rios Building North, Washington,
DC 20004. Ph. 202-564-2188. http://www.epa.gov/children.
Additional Resources
For more information about the effects of toxic chemicals on human health,
see the following resources:
- Your Health and the Environment: A Christian Perspective, a
Study/Action Guide for Congregations by Shantilal P. Bhagat, available for
$7.50 from the National Council of Churches. (800-762-0968)
- Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and
Survival? by Theo Colborn et. al. (Penguin Books USA, New York, 1996)
- Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment
by Sandra Steingraber (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, New York, 1997)
* Adapted with permission from resources
produced by the National Religious Partnership for the Environment's campaign
on children's health and the environment. Ph. 212-316-7441. http://www.nrpe.org).
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