Prenatal Exposures and Disease, May 15, 2003

769 -- Prenatal Exposures and Disease, May 15, 2003

http://www.rachel.org/search/index.cfm?St=1

Published July 17, 2003
At last, an ancient problem has been solved.

More than 2000 years ago people knew that the quality of the natural
environment affected their health. During the first century B.C., the
ancient Roman architect, Vitruvius, highlighted the relationship of
environment to disease in his book "De Architectura."[1] However,
getting hold of reliable information on the subject remained
impossible for more than 2000 years.

Even with the rise of modern science and medicine over the past 600
years, reliable information on environment and disease remained
difficult or impossible to lay hands on. Published in obscure journals
or books, stored in relatively few libraries, and written in jargon
that the public could not understand, good information about
environment and disease remained under wraps -- accessible only to a
privileged few with special training and special access.

Now the situation is rapidly improving because of two developments:

(1) A "scientific information movement" begun in the 1950s by Barry
Commoner and Margaret Mead and their colleagues within the American
Association for the Advancement of Science became a broader "public
interest science" movement in the 1970s thanks to Ralph Nader and his
co-workers.[2] Those pioneering efforts have now engendered two
generations of scientists who conduct studies that serve public needs
and who translate scientific findings into terms that people can
understand so that citizens can make informed decisions; and

(2) The world wide web now allows people almost anywhere to get their
hands on reliable plain-language descriptions of scientific and
medical studies that link the environment to human disease. Today
almost anyone with access to a public library (or a $500 home computer
and a telephone) can tap into a vast body of plain-language
information explaining how environmental contamination causes human
disease. The most exciting developments in web-based information are
evolving as we speak.

In particular, three related web sites now offer daily updates of news
stories, scientific studies, and medical reports linking environmental
contamination to human disease. See
http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org and
http://www.protectingourhealth.org/newest.htm and
http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/New/newstuff.htm .

When you dive into these three web sites, you may find yourself
thinking, as I did, "This is why everyone needs access the world wide
web!" There is simply no substitute for what these web sites offer.
Breaking news stories and current reports, with pictures, and with
hyperlinks to background information, provide real depth of
understanding. Current-awareness information doesn't get any better
than this.

These three web sites are related, but different, so it's good to
check each of them often.

The newest of the three is www.environmentalhealthnews.org. This one
provides breaking news. Every day, seven days a week, you'll find more
than a dozen current news stories from around the nation and the
world. Furthermore, the site is interactive -- citizens can add their
own news, and their own reports. This site is still in the test phase,
but it already contains a wealth of information on environment and
health.

The other two sites, somewhat older, are truly rich sources of
information. The "Our Stolen Future" site,
http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/New/newstuff.htm , is focused on
studies of hormone-disrupting chemicals and their effects on plants
and animals. Using hyperlinks, the site provides explanatory materials
that will give you all the depth you could want as you learn about the
role of hormones and other biological signaling systems, which can be
disrupted by a growing list of industrial chemicals. My description
does not do justice to the depth of this site -- to appreciate it, you
will need to spend some time there yourself.

The third web site, maintained by CHE (the Collaborative on Health and
the Environment) --http://www.protectingourhealth.org -- offers a
unique resource: peer-reviewed overviews that evaluate the medical
literature linking environmental contamination to asthma, brain
cancer, breast cancer, childhood leukemia, endometriosis, infertility,
learning/behavior disorders, prostate cancer, and testicular cancer.
Other overviews of other diseases are in the works. CHE's
"peer-reviewed overviews" project has been guided by physician Ted
Schettler, whose books have provided convincing evidence that
children's mental development can be derailed by exposure to low
levels of chemicals in the environment.[3]

Together these web sites represent a phenomenal -- and phenomenally
useful -- intellectual tour de force. Many people contribute to these
web sites, but the chief architect and driving energy behind all three
is John Peterson ("Pete") Myers, Ph.D., biologist and co-author of Our
Stolen Future --the book that propelled the scientific community onto
its successful search for industrial poisons that can disrupt the
fundamental signaling systems that control growth, development, and
behavior in plants and animals.[4]

When important new scientific studies appear, Pete Myers often
describes them in considerable detail -- how the study was conducted,
what it found, its relationship to previous studies and hypotheses,
and its scientific limitations. For non-experts concerned about
environment and health, this is a unique trove of real treasure.

The web also provides a unique perspective. Browsing a paper library
can be slow and tedious. The web is fast and smooth. When you browse a
web library, new patterns jump out at you. Recently, as I was scanning
the archives of these three web sites, I noticed that many recent
studies have now confirmed that much human disease is linked to
prenatal exposures --exposures that occur in the womb. It's as if a
gun goes off later in life, but the trigger is pulled before birth.
This is a chilling new picture of human disease. To cite but four
recent examples:

** A study published in the Journal of the American Medical
Association (JAMA) revealed that attention deficit hyperactivity
disorder (ADHD) has a real physical basis, and that the disease may
well begin in the womb.[5] F.X. Castellanos and colleagues found that
children with ADHD have brains that are significantly smaller than the
brains of children without ADHD. Furthermore, they concluded that the
events initiating ADHD are likely to occur in the womb.

** Lennart Hardell and his colleagues reported in Environmental Health
Perspectives in June that there is a strong association between young
men who get testicular cancer and the levels of long-lived
organochlorine pesticides measurable in their mother's blood (but,
importantly, not in the blood of the men themselves).[6] Exposure in
the womb seems crucial in the development of many testicular cancers.

** In April, Linda Birnbaum and Suzanne Fenton reviewed a wide array
of animal and human studies, concluding that exposure to
hormone-disrupting chemicals in early development can cause cancer
and/or increase sensitivity to cancer-causing agents later in life.[7]
They point out that the danger of prenatal exposures is firmly
established in the medical literature, yet few human studies have made
use of the information. For example, most breast cancer studies have
measured chemicals in the blood of women at the time they were
diagnosed with cancer -- probably the wrong time to be looking for a
connection between chemicals and cancer, Birnbaum and Fenton suggest.
The critical exposure likely occurred many years earlier. If you look
for answers during the wrong time-period, you will get wrong answers.
(This important study is available in PDF at
http://www.rachel.org/library/getfile.cfm?ID=182 .)

** In January, research in two New York City neighborhoods found a
correlation between environmental contamination and babies born with
low birth weight and small head circumference. Dr. Frederica Perera,
the lead author of the study, told the New York Times that the results
were particularly troubling because these birth outcomes are
predictors of "poor health and mental problems later in life."[8]

If prenatal exposures to environmental chemicals really do give rise
to lifelong disease, it means that the present systems for medical
care, public health, and environmental protection can never achieve
their goals. This should be a profound wake-up call.

If certain chronic diseases (some cancers, some immune disorders, and
some diseases of the nervous system, for example) -- many of which are
increasing today -- are being caused by run-of-the-mill prenatal
exposures, then people must be protected from exposure to
disease-producing chemicals even before they are born. Present-day
public-health systems are not remotely capable of achieving such a
goal. This is a powerful argument against business as usual, an
argument that is unlikely to fade any time soon.

In recent years, corporations that manufacture or use large quantities
of industrial poisons have devised two responses to this
distinctly-unwelcome new picture of disease.

In the past decade, corporations have spent tens of billions of
dollars to inject doubt and uncertainty into the debate about
low-level environmental exposures causing disease. Under the present
risk-based system, scientific uncertainty creates a "green light" for
chemical contamination. So long as the link between exposure and
disease has not been proven to a scientific certainty, exposures can
continue.

This is why corporate/governmental leaders created our present
regulatory system, based on "risk assessment." The risk-based system
assumes that we can determine "safe" (or "acceptable") levels of all
industrial poisons if we simply study the problem long enough. And
until we have completed such studies, contamination can continue
because that is what "individual liberty" combined with "free markets"
would dictate. (Never mind that corporations are nothing like
individuals and therefore should never be accorded the liberties that
individuals enjoy -- an argument seldom heard in polite company.[9])

This risk-based approach has allowed the entire planet to become
contaminated with potent industrial poisons -- with grievous
consequences for wild creatures -- and has allowed chronic human
disease to proliferate.

If you want to be reminded of the terrible consequences of this
risk-based approach, check daily at
http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org .

If you sit in a quiet place to read these daily reports of
contamination and disease, you can hear the hum of the industrial
system grinding up the biosphere, day by day. You hear the
self-assured voices of corporate officials denying their personal
responsibility, claiming there is no alternative, explaining that jobs
will be lost if they behave any other way (subtly shifting blame to
working people for management's refusal to innovate). In the
background, you can hear the monotone murmur of government officials
doing their jobs, deflecting public concern with the language of risk
assessment: "No immediate threat to health." "Acceptable risk." "Well
within the guidelines." And the grinding continues day after day after
day.

In recent years, it has become indisputably clear that low-level
environmental exposures DO matter, and so a new rationale for
business-as-usual was needed. The newest corporate/governmental answer
to these problems is "genes." Billions of dollars are now being poured
into genetic studies to show that it is our individual susceptibility
to disease that must be fixed -- not the industrial poisons that
attack our genes to cause disease.

The fundamental idea behind this genetic approach is that we can
continue to flood the environment with exotic disease-producing
chemicals because we will be immunized against harm by expensive
improvements to our genetic heritage.

Or, alternatively, we will be cured of disease after it occurs --
again, by expensive rearrangement of our genes.

The very latest corporate "solution" is nanotechnology, whose
advocates assure us that environment-related diseases such as cancer
will one day be cured by tiny "nanobots" --infinitessimally small
machines designed to motor through our arteries and identify (and then
zap) diseased cells.[10] So we should spend billions on nanobot
research and forget about the traditional basis of public health --
primary prevention. There is simply no money in prevention.

All these new approaches like genes and nanobots share one common
featu they will all increase our dependence on corporate "experts"
who will hold our lives in their hands, for which we will, no doubt,
be required to pay dearly. (Those who cannot afford to pay are
presumably lazy good-for-nothings whom we can profitably allow to
expire, preferably somewhere out of public view.)

But sooner or later the ancient wisdom of prevention seems sure to
prevail because the facts are driving us relentlessly toward that
necessity. Prevention is really the only affordable (and feasible)
solution to medical, public health and environmental problems.
Therefore, sooner or later, prevention must prevail.

The European Union is currently trying to institutionalize prevention
of harm in its proposed new policy toward industrial chemicals.[11]
The E.U. has made the audacious proposal that chemicals should
actually be tested to discover their effects on health and the
environment BEFORE they are marketed. This precautionary approach is
captured in the phrase, "No information, no market."

In response to this common-sense E.U. proposal, chemical corporations
world-wide have joined forces to declare all-out war on the E.U.'s
environmental ministry, and they have the full force and power of the
U.S. government behind them.

The National Journal recently described the U.S. vs. E.U struggle this
way:

"The conflict over the chemicals legislation goes deeper than the
usual arguments over dollars and cents. The root cause is the E.U.'s
use of the so-called precautionary principle. This is a concept,
codified in the European Union charter, that government can and should
make policy based on the significant possibility of risk, even before
all data is compiled. It is on the opposite end of the spectrum from
the way policy is usually set in Washington, where the government does
not usually pass broad reforms until there is concrete evidence of
harm.

"By contrast, the European chemicals policy is pre-emptive, requiring
a massive amount of testing in the hope of reducing harm before it
occurs.

"Although the costs involved with the chemicals legislation will not
be cheap, the European Union argues that the change will pay off in
the long run. According to E.U. estimates, the indirect costs of
higher chemical prices to European manufacturers and consumers over 15
years would be as high as $29.3 billion. But on the benefits side, the
E.U. estimates that in 30 years, there will be 2,200 to 4,300 fewer
cases of cancer, and savings of $20.3 billion to $61 billion in
occupational health expenditures."[12]

The chemical industry and the U.S. government are allies in a titanic
struggle for their right to continue poisoning people and the planet
unabated. Nevertheless, sooner or later, I believe, common sense will
prevail and a preventive approach will be adopted everywhere.

I do not think for a minute that it will be easy. Millions --perhaps
many millions -- more people (not to mention wild creatures) will have
to live and die with birth defects, cancers, attention deficits,
asthma, diabetes, and low IQ before corporations are brought to heel.

Corporations have captured control of our publicly-owned airwaves,
harnessed our public universities to satisfy a corporate agenda,
seized direction of our federal government's research budget, defiled
scientific advisory committees worldwide by packing them with
corporate shills, dumbed down our public schools, corrupted our
federal courts, and bribed the executive and legislative branches of
our government through the simple device of funding election
campaigns.

About the only feature of our democracy that corporations have not yet
entirely debauched is our right of free speech. And of course they are
working on that one, too. Slapp suits and veggie libel laws are
intended to silence critics of corporate violence. The best-known
veggie libel lawsuit is that of TV star Oprah Winfrey, who was hauled
into court by Texas meat mavens, charged with defaming red meat, a
crime under Texas law. Winfrey won the lawsuit but it reportedly cost
her upwards of $3 million to do so. No doubt, many a reporter and
editor now thinks twice before publishing new information about the
many dreadful diseases linked to excessive red meat in our diet. And
just last week, Monsanto, the St. Louis chemical bully, sued dairy
farmers in Maine who had the temerity to advertise to their customers
that their milk contains none of Monsanto's patent-medicine artificial
hormones.[13]

No doubt, the assault on our right of free speech is a purposeful,
coordinated, long-term corporate strategy, and extremely dangerous.

Yet despite this bleak picture of a world corrupted and intimidated by
corporate power, the ancient truth about environment and disease
continues to leak out through the cracks in the system. Indeed, on the
web, the truth fairly gushes out. This alone is powerful reason for
hope. With the creation of new web sites like those maintained by Pete
Myers, it IS possible to arm ourselves with information, to resist
tyranny. The truth shall set you free.

===========================

[1] Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, "de Architectura libri decem." Much of
the Vitruvius text is available at
http://www.ukans.edu/history/index/e..._rome/E/Roman/
Texts/Vitruvius/ .

In Book 1, Vitruvius wrote,

"Skill in physic enables him [the architect] to ascertain the
salubrity of different tracts of country, and to determine the
variation of climates, which the Greeks call klivmata: for the air and
water of different situations, being matters of the highest
importance, no building will be healthy without attention to those
points."

And in Book 2:

"7. Natural consistency arises from the choice of such situations for
temples as possess the advantages of salubrious air and water; more
especially in the case of temples erected to sculapius, to the Goddess
of Health, and such other divinities as possess the power of curing
diseases. For thus the sick, changing the unwholesome air and water to
which they have been accustomed for those that are healthy, sooner
convalesce; and a reliance upon the divinity will be therefore
increased by proper choice of situation."

[2] Peter Montague, "Ralph Nader and Barry Commoner: Strategies for
Public Interest Research, with Three Original Case Studies"
unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of New Mexico, 1971.
Available from University Microfilms, Inc. (www.umi.com). The
"Introduction" is available at:
http://www.rachel.org/library/getfile.cfm?ID=184 .

[3] Ted Schettler and others, In Harm's Way; Toxic Threats to Child
Development (Boston: Greater Boston Physicians for Social
Responsibility, May, 2000). Available at:
http://www.rachel.org/library/getfile.cfm?ID=183 .

[4] Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers, Our
Stolen Future (N.Y.: Dutton, 1996; Plume [paperback], 1997 -- ISBN
0452274141).

[5] F.X. Castellanos and others, "Developmental trajectories of brain
volume abnormalities in children and adolescents with
attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder," Journal of the American
Medical Association Vol. 288 (2002), pgs. 1740-1748.

[6] Lennart Hardell and others, "Increased Concentrations of
Polychlorinated Biphenyls, Hexachlorobenzene, and Chlordanes in
Mothers of Men with Testicular Cancer," Environmental Health
Perspectives Volume 111, Number 7 (June 2003), pgs. 930-934.

[7] Linda S. Birnbaum and Suzanne E. Fenton, "Cancer and Developmental
Exposure to Endocrine Disruptors," Environmental Health Perspectives
Vol. 111, No. 4 (April 2003), pgs. 389-394.

[8] Lydia Polgreen, "Pollution Linked to Low Birth Weights in
African-Americans," New York Times January 17, 2003.

[9] On corporations, see Rachel's #388 and #582 at
http://www.rachel.org , for example.

[10] M.C. Roco, "From Vision to the Implementation of the U.S.
National Nanotechnology Initiative," Journal of Nanoparticle Research
Vol. 3, No. 1 (2001), pgs. 5-11.

[11] Associated Press, "EU chemical-safety plan is called unworkable,"
Baltimore Sun July 11, 2003.

[12] Samuel Loewenberg, "The Chemical Industry's European Reaction,"
The National Journal Vol. 35, No. 28 (July 12, 2003).

[13] David Barboza, "Monsanto Sues Dairy in Maine Over Label's Remarks
on Hormones," New York Times July 12, 2003.