Everyday Carcinogens: Acting for Prevention in the Face of Scientific Uncertainty.

Dr. Steingraber spoke about the new science of endocrine disruptors and how it's not  necessarily the dose, or even whether a toxin is a recognized carcinogen. Many scientists are now looking at 'windows of vulnerability' - and when we may be more susceptible to these toxic exposures, such as during stress, or prenatally or during puberty. Dr. Steingraber's topic was entitled: Everyday Carcinogens: Acting for Prevention in the Face of Scientific Uncertainty.

[ What is Precautionary Principal in relation to environmental toxins ]

[ Pesticide Poisoning and Kids ] * [ Symptoms of Pesticide Poisoning ]
[ MEMORIAL TO VICTIMS ]

Subject:     Better Safe Than Sorry --- Is Obviously Not in Your Vocabulary---
 Date:        Wed, 12 Jan 2000 09:52:23 -0500
From:        Stephen Tvedten <steve@getipm.com>
Organization:     Get Set Inc. (www.getipm.com)

To:     Lyndon Hawkins <hawkins@empm.cdpr.ca.gov>
          State of California, Department of Pesticide Regulation
          Integrated Pest Management

Dear Lyndon, I thought you might like to read the comments of  Dr. Sandra Steingraber, Author of Living Downstream, who was the keynote speaker on March 27, 1999, at the "Stop Cancer Ontario" conference.  Dr. Steingraber spoke about the new science of endocrine disruptors and how it's not  necessarily the dose, or even whether a toxin is a recognized carcinogen. Many scientists are now looking at 'windows of vulnerability' - and when we may be more susceptible to these toxic exposures, such as during stress, or prenatally or during puberty. Dr. Steingraber's topic was entitled: Everyday Carcinogens: Acting for Prevention in the Face of Scientific Uncertainty.

Good morning from Boston, Massachusetts.  As a new mom I'm really happy that this kind of technology exists that allows me to bring my message to you in Canada while still staying at home with my daughter.

"Living Downstream" explores twelve lines of evidence linking cancer and the environment and is organized into twelve chapters. What I would like to do is talk to you about four of those lines of evidence fairly quickly just to give you a flavour of how I see these connections working.

But what I want to do first is to kind of give away my main point right up front which is this. There is no one study that constitutes what we in the scientific community would call absolute proof of a connection between cancer and the environment.
 

Instead, what exists are many well designed, carefully constructed studies that all together tell a consistent story. So I began to see that each of these studies is like a little piece of a jigsaw puzzle. By themselves they are provocative, but they really only make sense when you bring all the pieces together and look at how they form a kind of startling picture. And I think it's a picture that we ignore at our peril.

The first line of evidence I want to discuss briefly comes from cancer registries and this is what measures the incidence of cancer in a population. Here in the US we don't have a big national cancer registry. Each state has its own registry. In Canada you do it differently and all the data are pooled together. And whether you look at the Canadian data or the US data, the overall picture is very similar. In other words, incidence trends in Canada and the US show a very similar picture. And what it does show is that non-tobacco related cancers have been rising in incidence among all age groups from infants up to the elderly, among all ethnicities and among both sexes. And these increases are definitely apparent since the early '70s. And if you take a longer view, you can see that they go back to about World War II. (When we started using your "registered" POISONS Lyndon!)

Now changes in hereditary patterns can't account for these increases in cancer. We're not developing more tumors because we are now sprouting new cancer genes. Nor can improved detection. It is true that some of the apparent rise in cancers is attributable to better and earlier screening, but the most swiftly accelerating rates are among those cancers for which we have no effective screening tools. These include childhood cancers which have more than doubled since I was born in 1959 and have jumped ten percent in the last decade alone. Another cancer rising really swiftly is testicular cancer among young men. Testicular cancer tends to strike men between the ages of 19 and 45 and there is nothing like a mammogram for the testicle. Men are very closeted about this disease. There is not a lot of public attention about it so when men find a lump they often delay a very long time before going to a doctor. Because there is not a lot of public education about this disease, because men aren't required or advised to go in for screening, the fact that testicular cancer has tripled in incidence rate since World War II in this age group, we believe represents a very real increase in the disease, not an artificial reflection of better and earlier screening.

Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is a disease that has doubled in the last four decades. That's getting some attention now because it killed Jackie Kennedy Onassis and more recently, King Hussein of Jordan, but we still don't screen people for non-Hodgkin's. Nor do we screen people for multiple myeloma, which is a painful cancer of the bone marrow. It has also doubled in incidence rate over the last four decades or so. Brain cancers among the elderly have jumped 54 per cent just in the last two decades and brain cancers are also ascendant among children in a remarkable and tragic fashion, particularly among girls under the age of four.

We have no life-style factors that we can attribute to the diseases I've just talked about. They are not related to smoking. They don't seem to be related to diet or exercise. We have eliminated those possibilities. Since early and better screening can't explain why the increase is going up, and neither can heredity because we don't know of any hereditary factors that would explain these diseases, we need to look at the environment. Again the registry data are not absolute proof of an environmental connection but they do give us grounds for further inquiry.

A second line of evidence I want to mention comes from computer mapping and this project takes these same cancer registry data and instead of displaying them over time so that you can look at time trends, it displays their distribution over space. And when you do this the maps that result clearly show that cancer is not a random tragedy.

Let's paint for a moment the picture of what breast cancer looks like in North America. So if you can picture the North American continent in your mind's eye and you wanted to draw the hotspots of where breast cancer tends to distribute itself .. where do you see the big excesses in breast cancer. What you would do is colour in red from Maine down to Washington, DC all along the Great Lakes Basin, including the area where you are now sitting, and the lower part of the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge down to Louisiana and also the San Francisco bay area in California. Those areas, except for the California cluster, also represent the places in the US and Canada where we see the most bladder and colon cancer. And again the Great Lake Basin is one the places where we see not only breast but colon and bladder cancers, highest in North America in those places. And of course, the eastern seaboard and the Great Lakes region and the lower part of the Mississippi River are the areas where historically are the most intensely industrialized areas. Again these maps don't tell us that there's a causal connection between industry and cancer. It's a correlation and correlations sometimes are causative and sometimes there's not. But we need to pay attention to them and it does indicate a possible hypothesis that we need to investigate further with other kinds of studies.

Now let's draw the picture for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Again, conjure up in your mind's eye a map of North America. You would colour in red the Great Plains areas, particularly Kansas and Nebraska. I haven't looked at the data to see whether they go up into Manitoba and Saskatchewan or not. I know the US data better here. But in the United States it's Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and a little bit in a shaded pink, Illinois and Wisconsin. And of course, this is where we have the highest intensity of pesticide use in grain agriculture in those areas. And again, these correlations are not necessarily causative but they are provocative.

A third line of evidence comes from our own bodies. We know that a whole kaleidoscope of chemicals linked to cancer exists inside of all of us. These include pesticide residues, industrial solvents, electrical fluids called PCBs, dry-cleaning fluids are found in the blood and breath of anyone living in the urban area, and they also include the unintentional by-products of garbage incineration and, of course, these are the very famous dioxins and furans, which unfortunately play such an important role in the recent history of Hamilton, Ontario.

These chemicals are found in various places in our bodies. They don't all go to one place, depending on the specific biochemistry of each one, they partition themselves in different organs and places in the body. I'm happy to answer questions about what goes where but in general where we've seen these chemicals turn up are breast milk, body fat, blood serum, semen, umbilical chords, hair, placentas and even in the fluid surrounding human eggs. So even before conception we know that we have exposure to chemicals that in the laboratory are linked with cancer. We do not know with certainty what the cumulative effect of all these multiple exposures is. All we can say is we know we have chemicals linked to cancer, both known carcinogens and suspected carcinogens, inside all the bodies of people who live in North America.

But we are not in the dark completely, even though we don't know all the interactive effects, everything about multiple exposures. There are some areas of this very new and confusing science that are becoming clearer and clearer.

For example, we are honing in on the various biological mechanisms by which these chemicals seem to be working their ill-effects. The old scientific thinking was that in order to cause cancer a chemical had to mutate your genes, it had to cause some kind of damage on your chromosomes. Chromosomes are the part of your body that's made of DNA and the genes lie along the chromosomes like beads on a chain. And its damage to those beads that we call mutations and we know that mutations are necessary for cancer to form. We think about eight to ten mutations are actually required before a cell is put on the pathway to cancer formation. So the old thinking was, well, if something didn't cause mutation then it probably didn't cause cancer. Well, the new thinking is showing us that there are a whole set of chemicals called endocrine disruptors that actually don't break our chromosomes, don't bother the genes, don't cause lesions on your DNA but they are able to in some way mimic or interfere with our hormones. And what the hormones are, are chemical messengers sent from one part of your body to another that by definition get inside cells and turn on and turn off certain genes. They're messengers that tell our genes to do something. So chemicals that have the ability to mimic hormones, that actually get inside our cells, they are kind of like toxic trespassers, and instead of damaging the genes they flip a switch during a time that that switch is not supposed to be flipped. And if it's a gene that's regulating cell division then you can get runaway cell growth which of course is one of the hallmark symptoms of cancer formation. Now probably these hormone disruptors can't cause cancer all by themselves, they probably need to work together with a mutating chemical or a chemical like estrogen, that's found in a woman's own body. But even though they may play the role of supporting actor rather than the prime mover in cancer, it may contribute to how swiftly the cancer develops, whether the cancer metastasizes, whether you're diagnosed at the age of forty instead of at the age of sixty, etc. So the new science is showing us that we can't just look at chemicals that cause mutations, we need to look at this whole other set of chemicals that seem to be interfering with hormones.

Another part of the science that is getting clearer and clearer has to do with the timing of exposure. And that is turning out to be critical. The old thinking was, and you probably all heard this phrase somewhere along the line, the dose makes the poison. That's actually a paradigm of toxicology that was coined by Paracelsus, a medieval monk who lived in Switzerland I think in the 1300s. And he recognized that, for example, a large amount of salt could kill a person but a small amount of salt might be very beneficial. And so the way we in Canada and the US have regulated toxic chemicals is presupposed on this idea that the dose makes the poison. So the thought is if we can regulate carcinogens to a low enough level below some kind of threshold that we can all continue to have exposures but these exposures will be negligible and they won't hurt us.

But the new science is really mounting a challenge to that supposition. Because it turns out that each of us go through various what we call windows of vulnerability during our lifespan, during which time we are exquisitely sensitive to the effects of small amounts of chemicals that can set us up for future cancers, even though larger amounts at some other time when we're not so vulnerable might not have an effect. So in other words, we're not all 150 pound white men, which is the basis on which we historically have regulated a lot of toxic chemicals and we are forced now by the new science to revisit that kind of regulation. We know for a fact that prenatal life represents a window of vulnerability. A six week old fetus whose entire development is being orchestrated by hormones is exquisitely sensitive to the tiniest amount for example of dioxin. And since I know that in Hamilton, Ontario you are very interested in dioxin, let me spend a minute to talk about some of the new studies on that.

When laboratory rats are exposed to dioxins in utero something very usual happens. If you take a mother rat who is pregnant and expose her at a particular point in her pregnancy to the tiniest level of dioxin that we can measure on our instruments, the baby rats are born and they look perfectly healthy and then grow up into adults who are perfectly healthy. But when you then expose those adult rats who were exposed previously to dioxin in utero, when you expose the adults to a carcinogen when they're old rats they go on to develop cancer. Whereas, if you expose adult rats to that same carcinogen and yet those rats have not been exposed prenatally to dioxin they don't go on to develop cancer. So somehow dioxin exposure in the womb serves as a magnifying glass for the harmful effects of later exposures to other chemicals. And if you expose adults to dioxin, they also don't have a harmful effect. So it's something about the timing of exposure before birth that's really critical.

Adolescence is another period of vulnerability. We don't know very much about adolescent boys, and there is a lot more to be learned, but we do know something about breast development in adolescent girls. And in my capacity as a cancer activist, I serve on President Clinton's National Action Plan on Breast Cancer, and we've been looking at how the breast bud develops during puberty in girls from the age of about ten to thirteen. And we feel that we have enough information in looking at the data, to advocate for a change in the way girls receive X-rays. When adolescent girls go in for dental X-rays or sprained ankles, there's enough scatter of the X-ray to the chest wall that we feel we need to shield those developing breasts with some kind of lead apron, anytime a girl receives any kind of X-rays, whether or not it's to her chest wall or any other place because the developing breast is undergoing rapid mitotic division and the DNA is more vulnerable to the effects of carcinogens during that time then they would be to say a forty year old woman or sixty year old woman or even a five year old girl whose breasts have not started to develop.

So the fact that we enter and leave these windows of vulnerability turns out to be really important because the question becomes then, where and how do we regulate toxic chemicals? Do we do it to protect the adolescent girl, do we regulate them tightly enough so that six week old embryos are also sufficiently protected? Well, if we believe in equal protection under the law then the answer would have to be yes. Because we all start off as six week old embryos, we all go through puberty at some point and we all need to have sufficient protection from cancer-causing chemicals during that time. But if we were to make the world safe for twelve year old girls and six week old embryos, it would require a big change in the way we regulate cancer-causing chemicals.

The last line of evidence I might have mentioned about comes from animals. This was actually an amazing revelation for me because I'm trained as a wildlife biologist and until I sat down and did the research for 'Living Downstream', I didn't know that there was a parallel epidemic among cancer in animals that in very many ways tracks what we are seeing in humans. We know this because in the US we have a registry for tumors in animals and when I was studying this it was held in the Smithsonian Institute, it's now held at George Washington University, and these document fish with liver tumours, whales with bladder cancer, salamanders with cancer, snakes, frogs, etc. And invariably, when you see high levels of cancer in populations of animals it's associated with some kind of known environmental contamination. When you look at the same species of animals in pristine places you don't see these kind of cancers. So for example in Canada, there are epidemic levels of cancer among the beluga whales in the St. Lawrence river, but in Canada's more pristine estuaries you don't see any cancer at all among the belugas. Animals are in some ways better to study when raising questions about cancer in the environment than humans because wild animals don't drink, smoke or hold stressful jobs. They don't have bad diets. So you can't blame lifestyle factors on the ascendant rise of cancer among fish.

Again, my argument to you today is that even though we don't have absolute proof in the way that the scientific community feels comfortable talking about proof, we in the scientific community set the burden of proof very very high. Statistically, we won't say we found anything of significance unless we're 95 per cent sure that we have something and that's because science does not like to say we've discovered something unless we're extraordinarily sure. So the wheels of scientific proof-making grind slowly, slowly onward. And I believe in that process .. it's important. And yet if we're in the middle of an epidemic of cancer, and not all cancers have reached epidemic proportions, but certainly those of us who are mothers who are looking at the data on childhood cancers, would say this is very frightening to see that more children get cancer every year than the year before. We have more two year olds with brain tumors than we ever have.

When you look at those data, maybe you don't want a 95 per cent certainty that a certain chemical causes a childhood brain tumor before you say .. you know what, all that I want to know is there's a possibility that this chemical is going to cause cancer in kids before we expose everybody to it. So there are a couple of different kinds of conservatism. There's the conservatism of the scientific community and then there's the conservatism of parents who want to protect their kids. After all, mothers don't need to know with 95 per cent certainty that their kid is going to be hit by a car when they tell the child, don't play in the street. They just need to know that there's a reasonable danger to that child and we need to take precautionary action to prevent people out of harm's way. Those are two different kinds of conservatism. And there's a healthy debate to be had between science on the one hand and the kind of things our grandmothers said, like 'better safe then sorry', on the other hand.

How does this apply to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma? Well, I think that there's pretty good evidence showing us that non-Hodgkin's has a link to certain kinds of weed killers. And we can't say this with 95 per cent certainty and there is no one study that shows us this. But here's how it works when you look at the weight of the evidence across disciplinary lines in biology.

We've already looked at the cancer registry data and established that we've seen this very swift ascending lines of non-Hodgkin's and we know that it's not related to heredity, it doesn't appear to be related to any lifestyle factors that we know about and it's not just affecting the elderly. An increase is seen in all age-groups. So we know that with certainty. We also know that if you look at the map of non-Hodgkin's across North America, it tends to cluster where we use a lot of herbicides.

Now, we can also look at the occupational literature and ask, are there any professions in which non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is rising even more swiftly then its rising in the general population. When you do this several things jump out at you. This is part of what I talk about in, I think it's chapter four of 'Living Downstream'. One group that has excess rates of non-Hodgkin's is farmers. Another group is Vietnam veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange, which is a weed killer, when they fought the war in Indochina. Another group is pesticide applicators, people who spray lawns, fumigate grain storage bins, things like that. The last group is golf course supervisors. What all those groups have in common are exposures to pesticides. And again, that's not absolute proof but we're starting to see a consistent story emerging here.

Now let's look at the animal data. Are there any animals that we know that get non-Hodgkin's? Well, as it turns out that dogs get canine non-Hodgkin's and it's a very similar disease to that of humans. And the incidence of canine non-Hodgkin's is also rising when you look at veterinary records. Moreover, when you look closer at those records it turns out that dogs whose owners who use weed killers in the backyard are twice as likely to have canine non-Hodgkin's then dogs whose owners who don't use lawn chemicals.

Finally we can look at the genetic data and ask, are there any mutations, any genetic mutations that are associated with non-Hodgkin's? And it turns out there is one. It's called a DNA inversion, which is a very rare event. It's caused when the chromosome actually breaks in half, flips upside down and reattaches itself. And this particular one associated with NHL is on chromosome thirteen or seventeen, I'm not sure which, it's one of the middle chromosomes but it's very specific and it's very easy to identify. My colleague Vincent Gary at University of Minnesota has done some of this work. And he was able to document that non-Hodgkin's patients have high frequencies, tend to have high frequencies of this mutation. So he asked, are there any other groups out there that have this mutation? And it turns out that pesticide applicators also have high levels of this strange mutation in the cells of their blood. So again, even though non of these studies by themselves are the absolute proof that we in the scientific community would feel comfortable with, the weight of the evidence from all of them together is starting to tell a consistent story.

And here's where I think activism has a role to play. The reason that we have smoking laws that now protect us from second hand smoke, in airplanes and work places and hospitals and churches, isn't because we've finally developed absolute proof for a link between smoking and lung cancer. In fact, we only developed that link in 1996 when we finally identified the carcinogen that mutated the exact gene, it's called P53, that tricked the cell in the lung into becoming a tumor cell. That was a 1996 discovery. But we got fresh air in the work place and we got smoke out of airplanes long before that. Why? Well, it's because the surgeon general in the US, and I can't speak for the Canadian story, but here in the US, in 1964 the US surgeon general announced smoking caused lung cancer. And he did so only on the basis of a few statistical associations and a couple of animal studies. He had the courage to act on good but partial evidence. And the reason we have smoke-free airplanes and smoke-free hospitals and churches and schools is because activists took that information and demanded clean air. It's the same way we got drunk drivers off the road. It didn't happen because we had yet another scientific study showing us how alcohol impairs the vagus nerve. It was because at some point Mothers Against Drunk Drivers lobbied and fought and got good laws.

So at some point we enough scientific evidence to take action and I do think we're at that point now with cancer and the environment and there's certainly a role for activism to play.

I'm going to conclude here by saying that the reason that I'm not there with you in person is because I am a new mother and it's a much more overwhelming job then I ever imagined and it's also an ecstatic one. It's also, I want to say, a very powerful thing, for a person like myself who's had cancer to become a parent. We who've had cancer become very accustomed to not looking too far into the future and having a child is a very long commitment. My daughter's name is Faith - and I'm learning what all parents must learn as I go through every week with her, it's a new kind of love, it's a love that is more than an emotion or a feeling, it's a deep physical craving, almost like hunger or thirst. It's a realization that I would lay down my life for this little person without a second thought. When you're a parent you discover these feelings that you'd never had, that you'd pick up arms for your child. You would empty your bank account. It's kind of love without boundaries and, you know, if this love were directed toward another adult, it would be completely inappropriate. It would be a fatal attraction. And a couple of my friends have suggested that, maybe, when directed at babies we should call this love 'natal attraction'. So I say this to remind all of us what's at stake here. If we're willing to die or kill for our children, wouldn't we do anything to keep toxins out of their food supply, particularly since we know that infants and embryos and children do exist in this world of exquisite sensitivity to carcinogens. And since dioxin is such an issue in Hamilton, let me just talk about that for a second.

Dioxin is found the breast milk of all nursing mothers in Canada and the US right now. And of all human food, human breast milk is the most contaminated with dioxin than any food you could possibly choose to talk about. And that's because it's one rung up on the food chain higher than the foods that we adults eat. Dioxin concentrates as it moves up the food chain so it's distilled one more step in my body before it goes into my breast. So my breast milk is ten to a hundred times more contaminated with dioxin than is cow's milk, cheese, meat, eggs, fish, etc. which would be the next highest contaminated group of foods, those made from animal flesh. This is why a breast infant receives its "safe", quote-unquote, lifetime level of dioxin within the first six months of drinking breast milk. And now that Faith is six months old, I can look at her and say, now I've filled you up completely with dioxin to a point that you're not supposed to be exposed to any more dioxin for the whole rest of your life. And I think about that every now and then when I'm breast feeding.

Dioxin is manufactured in a way that's not deliberate. Nobody makes dioxin. It's a by-product of burning plastic and that's how Hamilton, Ontario is being contaminated, that's how New England has been contaminated. It's primarily through incineration. There are some other ways of making dioxin but that's the main one. But even though it's an air pollutant, our route of exposure is not by breathing the air, it is through eating food. So the food that I have eaten is concentrated into my breasts and goes into the milk. Nothing I can do now in my lifestyle as a mother, as much as I want to protect my child, which is my most deep desire now, nothing I can do with my lifestyle can change that. Because it's not the dioxin I eat every day in my food - I could try to eat lower on the food chain and I do, to lower the amount of dioxin coming into my body - but this is dioxin that is laid down over my lifetime. Because when breast milk is manufactured, it's manufactured from fat globules all over my body, you know, in the liver, the fat apron around the intestines, etc. etc. The globules are carried into the breast and dioxin, pesticide residues or PCBs are in there, carried into the breast. So chemicals I was exposed to when I was a child, when I was a fetus, are now being mobilized and brought into the breast and into the mouth of my daughter. There's nothing I can do about that.

When we burn trash in New England and we burn plastic in it, especially PVC, poly-vinyl chloride, which is the most heavily chlorinated of our plastics, dioxin comes out of the stack, it drifts in the wind, it attaches to dust particles, those sift down and coat plants, plants are fed to animals and that is how it enters the food chain. The fat globules that then move into my breast are under the direction of pituitary hormones called prolactin, those are made into human milk. There's another pituitary hormone called oxytosin which carries that milk from the back of my chest wall into the sinuses, the milk-holding reservoirs right behind my nipple, and during the process called letdown, which is a kind of an amazing process in which milk is released from the breast and goes out into the mouth of the breast-feeding infant. That's how the process works. So, in other words, here's the connection. My milk contains dioxin from old vinyl siding, from discarded window blinds, from junked toys, from used IV bags, from plastic parts of buildings that have burned down accidentally, these have all found their way into my breasts and there's nothing I can do about this.

But let me tell you something else I have learned about breast feeding. It's an ecstatic experience. The same hormone, called oxytosin, that allows milk to flow from the back of the chest wall into the nipple, also controls female orgasm. So the so-called letdown reflex is not an unpleasant experience. It's probably nature's way of making sure you remember to feed your baby. When the letdown reflex fills my breast with milk, it makes it feel like it's fizzing, like my breasts were a shaken up bottle of coke. And it's through the ecstatic dance of an infant suckling and this hormonal dance inside the mother that the breast-fed infant receives not just calories, but also antibodies. The immune system is developed through the process of breast-feeding, which is why breast-fed infants have fewer bouts of infectious diseases than bottle-fed infants. In fact, all of the milk produced in the first few days after a baby is born is almost all immunological in function. This milk is called colostrum. It doesn't only have antibodies, it has living cells drawn from my lymph system, that are swarming around in this milk. It also has laxatives to help the baby secrete all of the waste products. It has special sugars that actually guide the neurons in the brain for special and important brain development. So what I'm saying here is that breast feeding is a sacrament. It is not a lifestyle choice - and by poisoning breast milk, we have committed not a problem with lifestyle, but a problem with a human right.

And if there's ever a need to invoke the precautionary principle, it is here inside the chest walls of nursing mothers where capillaries carry fat globules into the milk-producing lobes of the breast. Breast feeding is a sacred act and I think it's a holy thing. And to talk about breast feeding versus bottle feeding - to weigh the known risks of infectious diseases against the possible risks of childhood or adult cancers, I think is an obscene argument. And those of us who are advocates for not only breast cancer and women's health, but also for children and those of us who are parents of any kind, need to become advocates for uncontaminated breast milk. A woman's body is the first environment. Whatever contaminants are in a woman's body finds their way into the next generation. And I think there is no better argument for the precautionary principle than that. And that is where activism and science meet...   Thanks very much.

Well Lyndon, when will it ever be "legal" (in your opinion) to use safe and effective alternatives to your dangerous "registered" POISONS in California?

Respectfully,  Stephen L. Tvedten.