Toxic Nation: Maybe we Have Little Choice

I've blogged on the pervasive use of chemical toxins in this country before, and more recently how the more widespread use may be linked to everything from genetic damage to aggressive prostate, liver and breast cancers. For sure, the anomaly of American males in their 30s being diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer (Gleason score of 8 or higher) may be directly linked to their inhabiting a chemical toxic sea - most of whose components they know nothing about.

Right now, indeed, I am writing this amidst a toxic 'brew' in my own home, as a result of exposure to resins, acrylic acid (e.g. http://www.epa.gov/ttnatw01/hlthef/acrylica.html ) etc. from having a downstairs shower pan replaced and resurfaced. Yes, the thing looks fantastic after the replacement, but the toxins released - which we are now trying to expel using a high-powered fan, maybe not so much. (Don't blame me, btw, it was wifey's idea to refurbish the thing as it "looked too grungy". I guess maybe she figures we may have guests coming at some point to use it!) The point is, in this country there is almost no escaping the toxic stew, which accompanies everything from a simple bathroom shower floor redo, to pest and weed control and even handling DVDs (laden with bisphenol A).

Even oldish toxins can lay in wait and affect the most innocent among us, kids - who may have nothing to do with pesticide spraying or renovating showers. 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.

Sadly, when it came to the creation of America’s pervasive chemical stew, 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.

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.


What’s inside the new walls of your new home 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.


Is this the end of it? Dream on! 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  any cosmetics (including lotions- linked to hypospadias in male infants) in your bathroom,  or of your plastic water bottle or microwavable food containers.

As for Bisphenol A (BPA), the synthetic chemical used in a variety of plastic consumer products, including your DVDs, some baby bottles, epoxy cements (now wafting through my home) 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.”

Do we care? Maybe we do, but inhabiting a techno-civilization where these chemicals are so abundant and  intimately woven into our lives means there's little we can do to control them. Toss out all your DVDs? Hardly likely! Tell my wife no more bathroom renovations like this last one, unless harmless chemicals are employed? Even less bloody likely! Demanding wifey use a newspaper to kill that large 6" diameter arthropod over there as opposed to spraying RAID? Even less probable!


So, in the end, we swim amidst all these toxins, use them - in so far as we have to - then cross fingers and just hope to hell we don't get to be the one stuck with liver, prostate, breast or kidney cancer.....or some awful respiratory disease.

America the Toxic! (1)

Will the U.S. ever bring down its annual cancer rate? Will the "war on cancer" really ever be won? Arguably no, until and unless we fearlessly recognize the source of the carcinogens in our midst and cease buying the PR that the blame's all on us - based on the foods we eat! In fact, the blame is on the capitalist -driven American Chemical Industry, which seeks to prosper by polluting everything in our midst but waylaying any critics by asserting we need the chemicals in order to survive - or at least make our lives easier.

Thus, the PR push is to extol the benefits of water-repellent jackets and outerwear but not to divulge its effective basis is on account of being laced with perflurorooctanoic (PFOA) acid - used to make the fluoropolymer membranes to impart the waterproof utility. But already preliminary studies have shown PFOA to be one of the most toxic substances around, never mind the PR that says "no real proof" has been obtained.

Meanwhile those yellow child toys your kid plays with in the tub? Those are laced with phthalates (pronounced THAL-ates) and just one nibble of one of them is enough to impart a dose large enough to deform eggs - if a female, and impair sperm, if a male. Parents role the dice every time they buy or use these things, which are most prominently associated with "plasticizers".

And hey, all those DVDs you like to handle and play, as well as the bottle of water you bought at the store- all laced with bisphenol A. Risk benefit analyses- many done in Canada, show that even a billionth of a gram of bisphenol A can engender toxic effects, such as causing human cells to mutate toward a cancerous form (See: 'The Body Toxic', by Nina Baker, 2008, pp. 148-49). As noted by the author (p. 149):

"Bio-monitoring studies of bisphenol A in human blood and tissue suggest that people are already exposed to levels that far surpass the current government reference. Humans quickly metabolize bisphenol A, so in order to account for the levels detected, people must be exposed to ten times more than the current acceptable intake level".

I personally acknowledge this, which is why I also take one boron capsule per day to mitigate the effects - since I know on any given day I'll likely be handling hundreds of items laden with bisphenol A, from copmuter disks, to DVDs, to common yard materials, implements.

What we do know now, is that even from birth, dozens of chemicals in our environment begin to leach into our fat, skin, blood and bones....accumulating remorselessly with each passing day --- until by the time we're adults we are literally walking-talking chemical factories!

The verification is straightforward but not for the squeamish. No one likes to think his body is the domecile for 1.7 trillion microbes, which contribute 1/3 to total weight, any more than he likes to think he's harboring a cancerous chemical stew. But people can get the needed assay for about $2,000. Bill Moyers did for a memorable PBS NOW program in 2000, that I still have on tape.

Nurse Sharyle Patton did it near the age of 60, and was devastated to find out her body was polluted with the traces from 105 chemicals all linked in animal studies to devastating health effects, including cancers of the liver, bone, pancreas, bladder and breast...not to mention disruption of the hormone system, and birth deformities (such as hypospadia in male infants, now occurring more and more in proportion to mothers' use of cosmetics)

Author Nina Baker (p. 17) obtained her own body burden analysis performed by a lab in Manchester, England for $2,000. What she learned 8 weeks later floored her. An attached spread sheet disclosed her body contained at least three dozen highly toxic chemicals, including DDT and PCBs. These two chemicals and their metabolites (the products left after the original substance breaks down) are now routinely detected in the CDC's bio-monitoring program.

The U.S. Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) of 1976 was supposed to limit all this infiltration of chemicals, but it hasn't worked. Why not? Probably before its implementation it conferred a "blanket approval" (op. cit. p. 47) on some sixty two thousand chemicals used in commerce. As Baker observes (ibid.):

"No questions were asked. No hazard data were required. It's not suprising therefore that 99% (by volume) of chemicals used today are older substances that were grandfathered in under the toxics act, according to Inform, a New York based research organization."

Another obstacle to management and control, the permits for chemical manufacturers to deem "confidential" the most carcinogenic or debilitating of their chemicals - as also allowed under the TSCA. Baker notes that (ibid.):

"In 1998, for example, 40 percent of the substantial risk notices filed by manufacturers asserted the identity of the chemical was confidential".

This is serious, because it means that we the citizens don't know really how many serious poisons are being sucked into our bodies every day, or exactly how toxic these substances are! Even a simple lotion being used by a woman could have a devastating chemical in it, say PFOA -based, that causes monstrous birth or sexual defects in offspring or children around her. Another reason one needs to actually look at labels and decipher the contents. If one content is overly long with an unprounceable name or artificial sound....beware!

Meanwhile, dedicated researchers at Tufts University produced groundbreaking work (p. 159) linking bisphenol A to pre-cancerous mammary tissue and breast cancers in mature rats, as well as incepting infantile endocrine system disruptions (DES syndrome) by virtue of the fact that a fetus can absorb bisphenol A via its mother's blood.

Of course, many organs of the government-corporate nexus have seen fit to block these results from seeing the light of day. No surprise, since most Americans cocoooned as they are from real news and information, would literally shit bricks if they knew the extent to which they were being poionsed by their corporate Overseers. Hey, maybe that's the corps. way to dumb us all down or....maybe thin our numbers! Induce 548,000 cancers a year then make the bozos think it's their foods that are responsible. Don't eat that hot dog! It's got nitrites and you''ll get cancer! (Just move along, never mind that toxic chemical salesman trying to sell atrazine over there).

And atrazine is another horrific carcinogen used in most weedicides. Though people are led to believe the stuff is as innocent as some water lilies...and hey, your kids can still roll around on the lawn after you spray it. Yeah right! Just be sure if you do that you take out special cancer only insurance policies!

Nopers, my lawn doesn't look as green and lush as the neighbors'. Weeds, dandelions especially, sprout all over the place. I try to manually keep them under control (carefully removing dandelion "poppers" or seeder -hase balls) but that's about all. But what I will not do, no matter how much better the lawn would look, is spray some shit with atrazine all over it! At least I can sit down on my lawn or even stretch out, even among the weeds, something two of my neighbors across the street dare not do...if they have a grain of sense!

In the next instalment of this toxics issue, we'll look at things people can do to mitigate the harmful effects of this chemical soup we inhabit. One thing I do already, and fuck all the latest "vitamin and supplement findings" of the naysayers is take at least 12 vitamins and minerals each day, including: B-12 (1000 mg), D3 (1000 mg), Mg (500 mg), Niacin (500 mg), B2 (100 mg), lecithin (2400 mg), Selenium (100 mg), zinc (50 mg) and boron (500 mg), Vitamin C (4500 mg).

Those who want to believe the Cleveland Clinic findings that vitamins and supplements are essentially useless or harmful, fine - make your own choice.