Home

WELCOME TO THE CHEMICAL EDGE…

…an interactive informational website devoted to health issues created by man-made chemicals. Cornucopias of convenience and profit, embraced alike by ordinary people and the huge corporations that make them, these chemicals now threaten our health and reproductive viability in profound ways that are still not widely known.

So, most specifically, this site explores many of the health harms done by 100,000 or so new substances, both individually and synergistically, which have been released into the natural environment in the last seventy years. We are speaking especially of many different kinds of toxic petrochemicals – from diesel particulates to pthalates (the chemicals that make plastics soft and chemical fragrances adhere) to pesticides and flame retardants, to chemicals found in household cleaning solutions, cosmetic products and even toys and baby products – the vast panoply of modern chemicals that have now saturated every environment, from the nursery, kitchen and bedroom to the polar caps. We are speaking too of heavy metals such as mercury, lead, arsenic and cadmium. We are speaking of chemicals that bend gender and disrupt and destroy neurological capacities. And, as research in the last few years has affirmed over and over again, we are speaking of the involvement of such chemicals in every ‘modern’ disease our society struggles with, from cardiac ailments, diabetes and obesity to the modern curses of Autism Spectrum Disorders, Fibromyalgia, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and Multiple Chemical Sensitivity.

This site is devoted to helping all us understand that just as we must reduce our carbon footprint and our water footprint, it is equally urgent to reduce our chemical footprint.

So we are committed to posting and making better known a significant potion of new research with respect to these chemicals and to these illness, acute and chronic. What we want to do here is provide this information (we post new material every couple of months) so that folks who don’t read the science and health press have a place to find some of the most important information about the environments they live in and the chemicals that literally saturate their daily lives. When time permits, or when we can’t resist, we add our own comments

This site is also devoted to solutions — medical, social, environmental, political — to the crisis we’re in. So we also post selected pieces that we think provide important directions or commentary on the whole business of reducing our chemical footprint and rescuing our health from chemical harms. These pieces range from three articles written by Varda (and co-authored in two instances), published previously in anthologies on the well-being of children in America, to new paradigms for practicing medicine and regulating government.

We welcome suggestions. Meanwhile, let me extend a warm welcome, and an invitation to participate. If you have something to say, or know of some information that should be added to the site, please let me know.

A few words of  explanation as to the site’s organization. It is, at least for now, in three main sections:

Section 1, The World is a Giant Petrie Dish, addresses the grand experiment we’re conducting on the earth and all its inhabitants, and some of the known harmful health effects;

Section 2, The Song of the Canary, focuses on chemically-induced illnesses, particularly Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (MCS). Recognized by the World Health Organization as an illness of toxic injury or poisoning, related to neuroinflammatory conditions and musculoskeletal disorders, this is one of the most terrible of the chemically-induced illnesses, and, at least to date, the least treated.

Section 3, Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win, is the section where solutions will be addressed – what we can do to begin to work our way out of the mess we’re in.

Section 1: THE WORLD IS A GIANT PETRIE DISH

Here’s a newsflash: All of us live on THE CHEMICAL EDGE, to one degree or another, whether we know it or not. Though health officials have so far refused to fully acknowledge it, we are already in the midst of a public health crisis due to chemical pollution.

Some of us, sauntering along the chemical edge, are still, blithely unaware of its dangers, oblivious to the persistent organic pollutants – POPs – circulating in our bloodstreams and attached like time bombs to innumerable receptors on our vital organs. These toxins are our own personal share of the toxic chemicals introduced into our environment in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Yes, even for many of the apparently healthiest among us a nasty fate awaits. Just as strong, healthy trees in a forest continually stressed by drought or acid rain become susceptible to diseases and external assaults they would otherwise resist, even healthy bodies have become overloaded with toxins, and will eventually succumb to a host of environmentally related diseases, dysfunctions and disabilities.

When you consider the impact of toxic chemicals on our health, the suffering is staggering, the costs to society vast and depleting, and the waste of human life and potential – that of those who are sick, and their families and communities – incalculable.

CANCER

Consider: A third of us will develop some form of cancer, for example – and that percentage is growing decade by decade. Anyone who tells you this is not environmentally linked is in pathological or self-serving denial. Devra Davis, the distinguished cancer epidemiologist, reports that in some villages in China, 80 per cent of the population has cancer today. This is an apocalypse here and now, and a sign of how bad things can get.

CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE AND ASTHMA

Millions of us will have our lives prematurely shortened by cardio-vascular disease resulting from the constant assault of petro-chemically laden particulates spewed by machines, industries, transportation vehicles and generating facilities that use fossil fuels. The macro level – global warming – is mirrored at the micro-level – inflamed and hardened veins, arteries and lungs that just can’t do their job anymore. But it’s not just about when you die. Millions of us are struggling to live with asthma and reactive airways disease and the stress and often, disability, that comes from having to fight for breath, sometimes every day of our lives.

DIABETES AND OBESITY

Today diabetes is not just a challenge to health and quality of life for individuals; it represents the most costly and challenging chronic illness for Canada and the United States. For a long time, its causes were thought to be linked to diet and perhaps genetics. But in the last year or so, new research from the United States, Europe and Korea is showing that a deeper cause is being detected: that of persistent organic pollutants that disrupt the hormonal health of individuals and eventually damage the working of the pancreas. Parallel to this is a similar finding from research that shows that hormonal disruption also affects the body’s metabolism and the brain’s ability to sense satiety and regulate fat, muscle and sugar. The chemicals involved are now being dubbed ‘obesogens’.  Seems that the imbalances caused by chemicals are deeper and more important causes of many illnesses, one’s we’ve known for a long time, and new ones coming that are growing in numbers and severity.

SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE DISORDERS

Many girls are hitting puberty at age seven or eight, and in some very polluted places at even younger ages – sexually maturing long before their psyches and social skills can catch up. Yet, later in life, they are experiencing unprecedented difficulties in getting pregnant and bringing healthy babies to term. Ovarian and breast cancers are at epidemic levels. Our boys are experiencing equally grave problems:  delayed adolescence, genital deformations, sperm counts are down by 50% from mid-20th century, and prostate and testicular cancers are climbing ever higher. Indeed, in many parts of the industrialized world, including in Canada, the very number of boys born is shrinking relative to the number of girls.  The main culprits for these very scary health harms are the endocrine-mimicking and disrupting chemicals – the xeno-estrogens and androgen blockers of the chemical world,  the so-called ‘gender-benders’.

LEARNING AND BEHAVIOURAL DISORDERS

Thanks to neurotoxic chemicals, we or our children are dealing with severe cases of attention/learning disorders and behavioural disorders, indeed we are facing autism spectrum disorders in roughly 1 out of 100 births. Though the autism disability movement correctly asserts the right of autistic people to a way of life in which they aren’t constantly being forced to be ‘normal’, the reality is that at a given level of severity, these disorders fundamentally undermine a person’s ability make his or her way though life in a society where earning an adequate living depends certain skills and qualities that ASD undermines or takes away. Families that deal with such children in a world where there is no pre-existing space for them are often exhausted and impoverished in the process.

DEPRESSION, SCHIZONPHRENIA, BI-POLAR DISORDERS, MANY TYPES OF MENTAL ILLNESS

Similar levels of hardship and trauma are faced by additional millions who are just barely crawling along the chemical edge. Multiple tens of millions are challenged or felled by soul-crushing depression, thanks to chemical disruption of normal brain biochemistry. Their numbers overlap with those whose serious mental illnesses are caused or severely aggravated by the chemical soup we ingest every day. The disruptions in metabolism and brain function caused by toxic chemicals in individuals who do not have the ability to detoxify, or who were born with CNR damage or a heavy toxic load inherited from their mothers in utero are all part of the map and the human tragedy of mental illness. Chemicals can, literally, make you crazy. And the lack of knowledge on the part of most treating physicians about how they make you crazy can make you a whole lot crazier.

LUPUS, MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS, FIBROMYALGIA (FM), UNRELENTING FATIGUE (ME-CFS), MULTIPLE CHEMICAL SENSITIVITIES (MCS)

Another two to five percent of the population experience the modern chemical scourges of neuroinflammatory and autoimmune diseases, diseases capable of causing severe suffering and disability if not diagnosed and treated competently and effectively. The new arthritic scourges – Fibromyalgia and lupus – can be so painful that many with these illnesses are in agony much of the time, and many are disabled. We have now added these to MS. Unrelenting exhaustion and debility known as ME-CFS is often caused and then accompanied by chronic viruses such as Epstein-Barr, because the immune and nervous systems have broken down under the weight of toxic chemicals. In their severe form, these illnesses are devastating, and they are causes of impoverishment and marginalization. The numbers are growing, the acuity is worsening, and they are all about toxic chemicals and their myriads effects on the nervous, immune and endocrine systems.

ALL THESE ILLNESSES WHEN THEY THREATEN AND TAKE LIFE AWAY…

Of all of us who live on that chemical edge, many have already gone over the edge and are just barely hanging on by their fingernails, trying not to fall off as they contemplate the abyss below. These are the people who are struggling with the most severe forms of all these illnesses, fighting complete disability, fighting to stay alive.

Section 2: THE SONG OF THE CANARY – MULTIPLE CHEMICAL SENSITIVITIES/MCS

People with severe MCS (to which about one-third of this blog is devoted, and from which I suffer at present) live like aliens on planet Earth. We struggle every day just to breathe, to find and afford organic food so that what we eat won’t poison us, to wash our clothes in soaps that won’t make us so sick that we have to sleep on the floor with our old coat to keep us warm instead of sheets and blankets. Because so many of our environments are laden with chemicals that threaten our ability to breathe and to function physically and mentally – from the supermarket store and its detergent aisle to our relative’s house with those lethal scented plug-ins to the city street where gasoline, diesel and other petrochemicals may throw us into anaphylactic shock – we have been compelled to withdraw from society. We are unable to work outside our homes, and some of us can’t work at all any more. You won’t see us in most places, and most of us experience extreme stress from isolation. That’s why MCS has been dubbed ‘the invisible disability’, and its sufferers ‘invisible cripples’.

Those of us who have found a safe corner (a house without mold or chemicals in a community where we can breathe) are the fortunate ones, though many of us are bankrupt by the time we achieve this goal because our health care systems and insurers won’t pay for our treatments or the special modifications we must make to our housing. Many of us live in trailers or even in old cars or tents, struggling to survive on a rung even lower than the first on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. We are the invisible disability, the new homeless. And because of the politics and economics surrounding our chemical injury (see MCS 101.6, System Failure) we are also suffering from a conjunction of powerful resistance that profoundly deepens our isolation and prolongs and exacerbates our illnesses.

While everyone who has health problems related to the environment is a walking (or not) example of the health impacts of THE CHEMICAL EDGE, people with MCS are most like the canaries in the mines of yesteryear: those creatures more sensitive to deadly mine gases than the miners, sent ahead, or kept close to hand, to monitor the air. If the canaries died, the miners knew it was unsafe for them to proceed.

Unfortunately today, though the canaries are sick and dying, trillions of dollars are invested by massive global corporations in a deadly chemical economy that will eventually be the death or deformation of all of us if left unchecked and unchanged. Most of the corporations and plutocrats who run them resist environmental reform, including of medicine and health, with every fiber of their corporate being – though there are some tremendously important exceptions. As result, almost no attention is being paid to the MCS canaries, who have so much to tell us. As a result, our public policy regarding health care and environmental impacts lags decades behind the science and medicine of environmental illness.

So… having fallen from a state of chronic but somehow still functional MCS which, it turns out, I’ve had all my life, into a life-threatening and disabling state, I figure the universe is telling me it’s time I got serious about making people aware that there are canaries in our mines, and they have urgent lessons for us. And as an environmental writer who has long addressed the health impacts of environmental degradation, I want to continue to broadcast the things I learn and figure out on a daily basis. These two mandates are natural companions, and they are what this blog is about.

In the navigation sidebar to the right you’ll see what’s on offer here – or will be as we fill out all our pages and categories. Contributions from various experts and activists will be posted as well as my own views and opinions, published pieces and links. True, a lot of what’s here won’t make for happy bedtime reading. Yes, some of it could give you nightmares. Well, try checking those sections out earlier in the day!

But in order to dissipate both my despair and yours, this blog is also a place where all kinds of solutions will be reported, advanced and explored.

Section 3: DARE TO STRUGGLE, DARE TO WIN

…is a section that will be devoted to life and health affirming solutions – from the macro to the micro scale. So many brilliant, effective, solutions already exist – they just need to be adopted more widely – and so many more are achievable that you’ll be able to read this section before you go to bed, you’ll be able to breathe easy and yes, you’ll have sweet dreams.

The bottom line, as our corporate friends are so fond of saying, is that we are part of our biosphere. There is no “away”, that’s certain. But there is definitely blow-back. And so in this day of biospherical destruction, meaningful citizenship is eco-citizenship, meaningful health is eco-health, meaningful parenting is eco-parenting and meaningful politics are eco-politics – and they’re all related. So welcome to The Chemical Edge, and I hope that you will feel moved to contribute too, to make this discussion rich, lively and informative. Send us your comments, your stories, your facts, your solutions and your links. All are welcome.

Breathe easy, go green.

Varda Burstyn