What You Can't See Can Kill You
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What You Can't See Can Kill You
Date:
Mon, 4 Nov 2002 02:27:27 -0500
From:
Stephen Tvedten <steve@getipm.com>
Organization: Get Set Inc. (www.getipm.com)
To: Paul Helliker <phelliker@cdpr.ca.gov>
Director, State of California, Department of Pesticide
Regulation
cc: Christine Whitman whitman.christine@epa.gov
Nov. 1, 10:51 EDT - Toronto Star
What you can't see can kill you
`We do not wait for boats to sink before requiring that they carry life jackets.'
Devra Davis - Toxicologist/ epidemiologist
------------------------------------------------------------------------`Most of the world's children are growing up in Third World cities where unrelenting pollution is just a way of life.'
Devra Davis - Toxicologist/ epidemiologist
------------------------------------------------------------------------`We're not going to find one cure. We've decided to move upstream and look at stopping breast cancer before it starts. The connection is environmental."
Sharon Wood - Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Many fail to notice how environment pollution harms health, says author "It is possible to look without seeing."
So writes toxicologist/epidemiologist Devra Davis in her compelling new book, When Smoke Ran Like Water - the basis of her keynote address yesterday at Breast Cancer Awareness Day in Toronto.
Looking without seeing - it happened to Davis on safari in Africa, when she was told by the guide that a lion was lurking in the bushes. She couldn't see it and didn't believe it - until the lion charged.
It is similarly possible, she notes, to look and not see the evidence of environmental degradation - and its impact on human beings.
Pollution arises "from the daily activities of people doing productive work," she writes. "Companies do not set out to pollute. They do not intend to cause harm. But we do not have to accept the consequences of pollution as necessary, we do not have to deny the harm it is causing, and we should not excuse those who allow the harm to occur."
Davis leads with data: Fewer males are being born, while the quality and quantity of sperm is dropping worldwide, with increasing numbers of birth defects of the penis and testicles, and increasing incidence of testicular cancer. Indeed, as Davis states, the number of new cases of testicular cancer has almost doubled since 1970 in virtually every industrialized country.
In Spain, a study showed that boys born missing a testicle had parents who were exposed to high levels of toxic chemicals at work.
Can we connect the dots to "starving hermaphroditic polar bears and whales in the Canadian Arctic with high levels of PCBs in their fat"?
Hermaphroditism - a condition in which male and female sexual characteristics are present in the same creature - used to be thought extremely rare. "Now they've found some whales with intact ovaries and testes," Davis says.
In Costa Rica, "20,000 men were rendered sterile after exposure to a pesticide banned in the U.S.," she says. "You know, we have only one planet. You can't protect your own little garden."
Making sense of what's happening around us, incrementally, every day, is the challenge of her profession. "Epidemiologists look for common connections of patterns of illness among groups of people," she writes.
To the environmental epidemiologist, the truth emerges through numbers, through "learning to count the patterns of life and death created by powerful forces in our environment."
Thus her position on hormone replacement therapy is clear: "HRT is a tragic illustration of how we shoot first and ask questions later when it comes to women's health," she says. "Hormones are growth factors and cause serious problems. There's another ticking time bomb in the use of testosterone by men on HIV cocktails."
It is well established that estrogen can fuel breast cancer growth, says Sharon Wood, executive director of the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation (Ontario chapter), which brought Davis to Toronto.
"The incidence of breast cancer continues to go up - over a 25-year period, we're looking at a 28 per cent increase," Wood says. "We're not going to find one cure. We've decided to move upstream and look at stopping breast cancer before it starts. The connection is environmental."
Hence the choice of Davis, an internationally known scientist whose work "focuses on the kind of research we're engaged in."
The foundation has raised $28 million for breast cancer research since 1986. Its current goal is to raise $10 million over the next five years to target "primary prevention, looking at environmental risk factors, occupational and chemical exposures," Wood says.
Which is Davis' field of expertise. With a Ph. D in science, a sterling reputation as an adviser to the World Health Organization, and a long list of scientific articles published in Lancet, Journal Of The American Medical Association and Science, Davis is a super-sleuth. As a scientist, she looks at the apparently random data that engulfs us, in an effort to see meaningful patterns.
Her professional passion was born in the most polluted of places: the coal-fired steel town of Donora, Pennsylvania, where she played as a child in "black ditches with iridescent pools of oily water at the bottom." But she had no awareness of pollution until, as a student at the University of Pittsburgh, she read about the town's infamous history.
In October, 1948, Donora had been enveloped in a blanket of cold air that trapped "all the gases from Donora's mills, furnaces and stoves," filling streets and homes "with a blinding fog of coal, coke and metal fumes." By midday, visibility was virtually zero. For days, the pollution fog thickened. Twenty people died in the first week, 50 more in the next month, as well as many more animals, cows and chickens.
It was written off as "an atmospheric freak."
The other damage wasn't counted. Her grandmother - seen in memory as an invalid tethered to an oxygen tank, suffered dozens of heart attacks; her mother and her mother's four siblings all developed heart problems; her athletic uncle dropped dead at the age of 50.
Today, Davis has asthma; her brother has allergies.
And so it goes: cigarettes weren't addictive and didn't cause lung cancer, according to cigarette makers. It took investigators "fifty years of finding unmistakably higher levels of sickness and early deaths in smokers for us to reach the conclusion that cigarettes really are bad for you," Davis writes.
She was one of the first investigators - she then worked for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences - to measure the levels of particles from cigarette smoke in airplanes. And she was part of the campaign to ban smoking on airplanes and in public places. She observes that the fight put up by cigarette manufacturers to deny tobacco's addictive, cancer-causing effect set back public health 50 years.
Similarly, the denial by corporate polluters, right-wing governments and commentators about the reality of climate change is making it even harder to deal with the crisis that grips us, she argues.
According to Davis, there is no debate about climate change. It has been documented by independent scientists around the world; it has been analyzed by 2,000 scientists for the United Nations. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences concurs that climate change is upon us.
One "astonishing effect" she notes: In March, "the Larsen B ice shelf, a floating ice mass larger than the state of Rhode Island, shattered and separated from eastern Antarctica .... The ice sheet had melted faster in a single decade that in the entire century before."
As to breast cancer, she frames the increase in incidence this way: when political activist Bella Abzug was a child, in the 1920s, one in 40 women developed breast cancer at some point in their lives; when Abzug was editor in chief of the Law Review at Columbia University, the rate was one in 20. In Abzug's 70s, back in the early 1990s, one in nine women got breast cancer before the age of 85.
Davis points out that Rachel Carson, author of the groundbreaking book, Silent Spring - which exposed the deadly contamination caused by DDT and other chemicals and pesticides - died of breast cancer in 1964, two years after her book came out. Since then, the levels of exposure to chemicals, pesticides, plastics, hormones and fuels have gone up, changing not only the climate but also lowering the age at which North American females experience the onset of puberty.
"Proof" about cause and effect is hard to nail down when scientists are trying to assess long-term exposure to chemicals, "and cancer is produced by so many things that do not leave any obvious marks on their victims," Davis writes.
Yet environmental epidemiology shows that "when folks who live in more highly polluted areas have chest pains or heart attacks, their chances of dying of heart disease are nearly 30 per cent greater than if they lived in cleaner regions."
Polluted air weakens the heart - but "environmental contamination" is never listed as the cause of death.
"Where you live and work, what you eat and drink and breathe, what happened to you just before birth - all these things play critical roles in determining your prospects for health.
"We do not wait for buildings to fall down or bridges to collapse before reinforcing and inspecting them for safety; we do not wait for boats to sink before requiring that they carry life jackets."
We have enough knowledge about pollution to make "informed choices," Davis writes.
To those who argue that a dirty world is the "unavoidable price of economic growth," she responds: "Those with a vested interest in not changing the causes of pollution will too often use this claptrap as an excuse for doing nothing and learning nothing."
The situation is worst in developing countries, she adds, where "most of the world's children are growing up in Third World cities where unrelenting pollution is just a way of life."
Here at home, a few tips from Davis about making daily life a bit safer: Don't eat or drink from plastic containers. Some plastics contain estrogen. It's especially important not to heat food in plastic or use Saran Wrap on food in microwave ovens.
Beware of cosmetics: Beauty products are not subjected to rigorous testing and may contain hormones and chemicals that will be absorbed into your body.
"One class of compounds widely used in nail polish and other cosmetics are phthalates," Davis writes. These plasticizing agents "have been found to speed up the growth of breast cancer cells in male and female rodents."
Experimentally, "phthalates appear to mimic estrogen and trick the body into early puberty ... Could the broad use of unregulated estrogens in hair products in the African American community have something to do with why about half of all black girls begin to develop breasts or pubic hair by the time they reach the age of eight, compared with only 15 per cent of white girls?"
*
To reach the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation (Ontario chapter),
http://www.cbcf.org/ontario/ad
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?GXHC_gx_session_id_=249be73
ce7fe88cd&pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1035773847715
------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Smoke Ran Like Water
by Devra Davis; Hardcover; (October 2002); Basic Book; ISBN: 0465015212
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation
Ontario Chapter
790 Bay Street, Suite 1000
Toronto, Ontario
M5G 1N8
Attention: Erin Lalonde
Bus: (416) 596-6773 ext. 235
Fax: (416) 596-7857
E-mail: elalonde@cbcf.org
http://www.cbcf.org/ontario/ad
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Devra Lee Davis, PhD,
Visiting Professor
email: ddavis@andrew.cmu.edu
H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA
USA 15213-3890
http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/researchers/faculty/ddavis.html
Devra Davis Talk Summarized
http://www.annieappleseedproject.org/devdavtalsum.html
HealthWeek No. 127
Funding for HealthWeek is provided by the Howard Heinz Endowment and the
Teresa and H. John Heinz III Foundation.
http://www.pbs.org/healthweek/127.htm
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Press Release
Contact:
Lisa L. Kirchner
412-268-1356
For immediate release:
October 17, 2002
National Book Award Nominee, Carnegie Mellon Professor Devra Davis to Give Lecture about Pivotal Environmental Events
PITTSBURGH-Devra Lee Davis, a renowned epidemiologist and visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University, will bring the story of two pivotal environmental events to campus on Nov.4 when she discusses "Backs to the Future: The Secret History of Figuring out how the Environment Shapes Life, Death, and Sex."
Davis' lecture, which takes place Nov. 4, at 4:30 p.m. in the Adamson Wing of Baker Hall on the Carnegie Mellon campus, is based on her book "When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution." Limited copies will be available for signing at a reception following the lecture. The reception is being co-sponsored by the Rachel Carson Institute at Chatham College.
"When Smoke Ran Like Water," an account of the way the environment affects our health, has been nominated for a National Book Award in the non-fiction category.
Davis, who is on the faculty of the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, is a renowned epidemiologist and researcher on environmental health, and chronic disease. Her research has appeared in scientific journals such as Science and Nature.
Carnegie Mellon's role in researching air pollution will be highlighted in the lecture, and Davis will show footage of lethal air pollution in 1948 in Donora, located in Pittsburgh's Monongahela Valley. She will also discuss the impact of air pollution in London in 1952, when an estimated 12,000 people succumbed to polluted air. "When Smoke Ran Like Water" discusses both of these well-known cases of air pollution, and also outlines other health problems and issues due to pollution in society.
Davis is the author of more than 160 publications in books and journals. She is a founder of the International Breast Cancer Prevention Collaborative Research Group, an organization that explores and researches the causes of breast cancer.
The United Nations Climate Convention, which asked her to be a lead author for their assessment of climate mitigation policies, has recognized Davis. The American Cancer Society has given Davis the Breast Cancer Awareness Award, and the National Cancer Institute has commended her for Outstanding Service. For more information about the University Lecture Series, contact Cathy Ribarchak, 412-268-8677 or Niloo Sobhani, 412-268-1503.
http://www.cmu.edu/PR/press_releases/021017_ddavis.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Devra Davis Nominated for a National Book Award
Devra Davis of the Heinz School has been nominated for a National Book Award in nonfiction for her book, "When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution." (Basic Books/Perseus Books Group)
The book will be the focus of her upcoming University Lecture Series talk, "Backs to the Future: The Secret History of Figuring out how the Environment Shapes Life, Death, and Sex." On Nov. 4, at 4:30 p.m. in the Adamson Wing of CMU's Baker Hall, Davis will explore Carnegie Mellon's role in researching air pollution. Limited copies of her book will be available for signing at a reception following the lecture.
Winners will be announced November 20.
Go to www.nationalbook.org and follow the links for detailed descriptions of finalist titles, author biographies, and other information about the National Book Awards.
http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/whatsnew/davisaward.html
From Steve - Quotes to Ponder:
"The
first task is population control at home. How do we go about it? Many of my
colleagues feel that some sort of compulsory birth regulation would be
necessary to achieve such control. One plan often mentioned involves the
addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of
the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the
desired population size." — Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, p.135
"A
total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels,
would be ideal." — Ted Turner - CNN founder and UN supporter - quoted
in The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor, June '96
"Childbearing
[should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a
government license ... All potential parents [should be] required to use
contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen
for childbearing." — David Brower - first Executive Director of the
Sierra Club; founder of Friends of the Earth; and founder of the Earth Island
Institute - quoted by Dixie Lee Ray, Trashing the Planet, p.166
"Truth
is not what is; truth is what people perceive it to be." -- Adolf Hitler,
Propaganda Maxim
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