SECTION 1: THE WORLD IS A GIANT PETRIE DISH…
…and we’re the experimental subjects.
CHEMICALS AND OUR FRAGILE HEALTH
Since the 1930s, the chemical industry – with the once naïve, now inexcusable collusion of governments — has introduced upwards of 100,000 new chemicals into the environment of planet Earth. We and our fellow creatures did not co-evolve with these chemicals, and we have been discovering for some decades that a great many of them are poisons against which many of us – not to speak of our smaller fellow creatures – have no adequate defense. This saturation of the air we breathe, the food we eat, the soil we live upon, the water that sustains us – that is to say every element of our biosphere – constitutes the largest experiment ever conducted, and we are its subjects. We were not consulted about our status, and we did not give informed consent. But today, untold millions of us – billions, speaking globally — are paying the price of compromised health for this experiment, knowingly or unknowingly. Had we understood the trade-offs between the convenience of these chemicals and the costs to us in every dimension of our lives, I doubt that the majority of us would have agreed to allow the petrochemical industry to turn our planet into a giant Petrie dish.
How serious is the health crisis caused by chemicals, in the here and now? Well, it differs somewhat by region and country. For example, among the Ojibwa who live near Chemical Alley in Sarnia, Ontario, girls’ births outnumber boys by more than 2 to 1 due to the gender-bending chemicals that these folks breathe in every day. Cancer epidemiologist Devra Davis reports 80% cancer rates in some Chinese villages. So without question, those folks living on a poisonous ground zero, or right out there on the Chemical Edge – invariably poor folks — have the very worst health problems. and they can be of apocalyptic proportions.
However, truly serious health consequences are not restricted to those who labour with or live nearby to noxious chemicals. In fact, they’re generalized throughout our populations, because pollution spreads, because chemical pollutants persist and because a great many of us were not born with the genetic capacity to take in these chemicals without negative health consequences. So, for example, in Canada, Dr. Stephen Genuis, a member of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Alberta, and David R. Boyd, in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University have taken an in-depth look at “The environmental burden of disease in Canada: Respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and congenital affliction.” These particular diseases do not exhaust the ways in which we are paying in eroded health and quality of life, but they are very significant in themselves, they affect broad numbers of people, and they are emblematic of trends across this continent and the world. “The World Health Organization (WHO) concluded in 2006, “ they write by way of introduction, “that 23% of all mortalities and 24% of all disability adjusted life years (DALYs) globally are linked to preventable environmental factors.” As for the four areas that they document, here is what they found:
Our results indicate that: 10,000–25,000 deaths; 78,000–194,000 hospitalizations; 600,000–1.5 million days spent in hospital; 1.1 million–1.8 million restricted activity days for asthma sufferers; 8000–24,000 new cases of cancer; 500–2500 low birth weight babies; and between $3.6 billion and $9.1 billion in costs occur in Canada each year due to respiratory disease, cardiovascular illness, cancer, and congenital affliction associated with adverse environmental exposures.
Given many similarities in economic activity and large biogeographical connections between Canada and the United States, we can assume a similar profile in that country. If we multiply the figures above by a factor of roughly 10, the numbers boggle the mind: 100,000-250,000 deaths; 780,000-1,940,000 hospitalizations; 6,000,000–10.5 million days spent in hospital; 10.1 million–10.8 million restricted activity days for asthma sufferers; 800,000–2,400,000 new cases of cancer; 5,000–25,00 low birth weight babies; and between $36 billion and $91 billion in costs in the U.S. each year due to the same diseases associated with environmental exposure.
The article I co-authored in 2005 with David Fenton, “Toxic World, Troubled Minds”, also posted in this section and using US statistics, looks at the effects of chemical pollutants on the neurological development of children – from autism to behavioural and intellectual impairments. The costs to society of impaired intellectual ability on such a large scale are almost incalculable.
The propagandistic mantra of neo-liberal politics that has justified health care cuts for the last 25 years, “We can’t afford to spend so much on health care!” combined with tremendous resistance to change on the part of established chemical and pharmaceutical industries and powerful medical organizations, have all but obscured the fact that this is a crisis. It’s a crisis that promises to get worse, as chemical toxicity spreads through new industrialization with little or no regulation for toxicity (be that in China or India or right around the corner in our North American communities). And it’s going to get worse as the accumulated burdens of overwhelmed individuals, families and communities swamp health care systems and communities and cause larger economies to stagger under the weight of these problems.
For these reasons, chemical pollution and its relationship to health are everyone’s business.
This section provides some documentation of these problems, some very useful links and many references, as well as a place to talk honestly and intelligently. I want to keep my own comments accessible and footnote free, but visitors to the blog will find rich and authoritative references for the points we cover, both in the bodies of the longer previously published texts we post, and in their footnote sections. If you’re looking for proof or ammunition, please don’t neglect these sources.
Most of the articles contain suggestions for solutions to the problems at hand. As well, however, there is a whole section of this site, “Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win” devoted to solutions from the micro to the macro scale. With health problems of this magnitude, and with the perspective of worsening health that faces us, change must be made at many different levels: within families, in medical and health education, in clinical practice, in public health organizations and the involvement of all institutions in the public sector, and, of course, in the greening of all industries and economies. Such changes are possible, and they’re taking place creatively if unevenly in different ways in different places as I write these words. But to effect them on a broad enough scale to actually reverse the trend of chemical poisoning, we also need urgently to green our politics – so that theme is an important part of all these discussions, and all three major sections of this blog.
Your thoughts are welcome…
