THE CHEMICAL EDGE

Special Report

‘SLOW AND FAST DEATH BY RUBBER DUCK: WHY WE NEED NEW AND RECONFIGURED HEALTH CARE SERVICES AND BROADER GOVERNMENT RESPONSES TO CHEMICAL HEALTH HAZARDS’

Read Varda Burstyn’s submission to the Ontario Commission on Quality Public Services and Tax Fairness, January 18, 2012, and learn about:

• healthcare needs resulting from multiple pandemics of chronic illnesses linked to our ‘chemical footprint, and the research that documents them;’
• how the MCS case study shows the urgent need to change, save and reinvest in the right health services;
•  how a ‘green deal’, or integrated political and economic approach to production,  employment, revenue, taxation and public services can answer our needs for life and livelihood.

Go to Solutions under Section 3 in the navigation sidebar at the right, or click on: Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win / Solutions.

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NEW FOR 2012

Study: “Isolation and lack of access in multiple chemical sensitivity: A qualitative study“

Interview: “Chemicals and Health“, by Living on Earth’s Bruce Gellerman with Dr. Richard Dennison of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).

Blogpost: from the EDF’s senior scientist, on Everyday Chemicals and Disease. Covers recent studies of the effects of three everyday chemicals on human health, ranging from behavioral problems to obesity to interfering with the effectiveness of vaccines. In addition, the blog highlights a study of the relationship between socio-economic status and epigenetic health effects, with powerful implications for the health of future generations.

The dangers of common cleaning products: (1) “The Dangers of Febreze” (You don’t think this stuff actually makes odors disappear, do you?; no, it encapsulates the molecules and lodges them in your lungs.) (2) and for a summary of what’s in the cleaning products used in schools in California (and in schools in your neighborhood), check out “School Cleaners Test Results” – the results of which are pretty scary: carcinogens, asthmagens, etc., while disclosure by manufacturers is shockingly low. Just check the chart.

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Consult Varda Burstyn

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WELCOME TO THE CHEMICAL EDGE

My name is Varda Burstyn and with my co-researcher and webmaster, David Fenton, I’d like to welcome you to THE CHEMICAL EDGE.

Every day – and I do mean every single day – more than a dozen environment and health related stories, most of them about chemicals and their hazards, cross our desks. They come from our web feeds (such as Science Direct and ENN), they come from our network of researchers and physicians, they come from magazines such as New Scientist and Scientific American, from top-tier medical journals and universities, they come from health activists and activist organizations, such as the Environmental Working Group and Greenpeace, and they come – in much simpler words and concepts – from the mainstream press.

We are seeing more than 2,000 such stories a year now, and we are by no means on top of the real numbers. Researchers around the world are working furiously on myriad issues to do with the health hazards of everyday chemicals. But most people don’t make this subject their daily pre-occupation, don’t want to read articles that sometimes contain difficult terminology and an alphabet soup of chemical names, and most can’t possibly keep up. That’s why we’re here.

The quantity of these stories alone is stunning, and in itself tells a very striking tale: the health hazards of our use of many, many chemicals, including many once thought to be benign, has produced a massive, global cascade of health problems that is crashing down on all of us, directly or indirectly, in one way or another and changing the fabric of our lives – our health, our economic viability, individually and socially, our capacities for learning, working, loving and reproducing ourselves. That’s right – the whole enchilada.

People who inform themselves – through whatever media they choose – are hearing or reading at least some of these stories on a daily or weekly basis too. But experience tells me that much of what they’re taking in doesn’t fully register.  The stories are here one day, gone the next, and they are deeply disturbing – “tests show that European environment ministers have more than 73 chemicals circulating in their bloodstream,” or “women who use air fresheners and commercial cleaning products are at greatest risk for breast cancer”, or “breast milk and placental fluid shown to transmit hundreds of chemicals to fetuses and newborns”, or “children found to be most vulnerable to chemicals in the environment” or “new research shows endocrine disrupting chemicals, not overeating or genetics, cause obesity and diabetes” or “Alzheimer’s and cardiac illnesses severely worsened by diesel particulates” – these are a tiny sample of the kinds of headlines we’re all reading every day.

For many of us, the human impulse to pretend that the momentary flash we caught of the monster in the black lagoon doesn’t really mean that the monster is lurking beneath the waters, that human impulse to ignore a scary reality against which we feel powerless, simply files these stories far from our everyday concerns. At the same time, though, I have observed that most thinking people are slowly building up a pool of corrosive anxiety about the toxic nature of our environments. It’s an increasingly heavy, if not always spoken, part of the growing stress and fear we carry around with us all the time.

I believe that people really want to protect themselves, their children and their social and natural environments – and that requires developing a calm and conscious understanding of the problems that face us. Folks need certain kinds of information to develop this understanding, and it’s not always ready to hand. Despite the great efforts of many extraordinary individuals and organizations to publicize the health harms of toxic everyday chemicals – scientists like Theo Colborn, John Petersen Meyers, David Schindler and Shana Swann, and organizations such as the Environmental Working Group, Environmental Defense and Greenpeace, to name only a very, very  few — people need other types of sources as well.

So David and I decided a couple of years ago to start posting important pieces – at least pieces we think are important – about the health harms of toxic chemicals on this site, and to link to other sites where other important information is available. We wanted to provide a place where people could browse through at their leisure, a site that covered more than just one kind of problem, a place where people could return as they wanted, where they could download research or medical opinion or examples of change to use as they grappled with these issues in their lives and with the people around them.

WHAT YOU’LL FIND AT THE CHEMICAL EDGE

HOW THIS SITE IS ORGANIZED

As I write this, our new postings are already bursting the original structure of the site, and at some point in the next few months, we’ll have to re-cut the pie. For the moment, though, the site still falls into in three main general sections, followed by postings listed by disorder or disease.

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 particularly on the spreading condition of loss of chemical tolerance due to toxic injury – most commonly called 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.

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

Categories: Just look to your right in the contents sidebar, and you will see what’s on offer.

Want to know a little more? Read on.

REAL STUDIES, REAL HEALTH AND REAL POLITICS OF HAZARDOUS EVERYDAY CHEMICALS AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

We post research that originates in the labs and medical schools, from the big environmental organizations, and from organizations devoted to a host of specific illnesses as a resource for ordinary people – but wherever possible, we post journalistic accounts, as well as scholarly references, for easy accessibility.  Check out the contents side-bar and you will be able to find many issues by name of illness or disorder.

But do please read some of the more general posts as well (Sections 1, 2 and 3). Because, when we can, we post pieces that address the economics and politics of these issues – from inside the medical profession through the petrochemical industry all the way to governments – as well as their scientific and medical dimensions. We believe that at this time in human history economics and politics drive the production and use of harmful chemicals much more powerfully than scientific and medical evidence. Ultimately, that’s what has to change.

LOSS OF CHEMICAL TOLERANCE DUE TO TOXIC INJURY

The other feature we offer to readers is a serious treatment – both in my writing and in other posts and links – of what we consider to be the biggest blind spot in health research, healthy policy and public policy related to the health hazards of chemicals today: the spreading scourge of loss of chemical tolerance due to toxic injury, a condition that affects tens of millions of North Americans today.  In Section 2: The Song of the Canary, we offer material linked to this ongoing disaster. The condition  has many names, and the ‘name game’ that surrounds it is important to know about – hence our little section on that topic. Most commonly it’s referred to as MCS (multiple chemical sensitivity), including by the World Health Organization. My mother suffered from it, hit hard by severe MCS in her fifties as so often happens to women. I share her  ‘poor detoxification’ genetic profile, and I also shared the prolonged DDT exposure she had as a young mother, and I as a baby – an exposure that never left my body and finally brought it down in my fifties as well. The condition struck me like a sledgehammer. As a caregiver and as a sufferer, I know the suffering this condition brings, I have lived with the lack of care and understanding in our health care systems, and I know the despair of trying to deal with t he stigma still attached to it as a result of a massive campaign to pyschologize it and cast it as unreal, initiated more than twenty years ago by the chemical industry. I also know the sheer joy of receiving the right care when the right diagnosis was made; the sense of having my life given back to me, the inspirational physicians who pioneered the right care for this condition against all the defamation and damage that has been thrown against them.

Let me emphasize this is not just a personal story. Over 1 million Canadian have received this diagnosis, and with the usual multiplier used to extrapolate for the US, that means somewhere in the neighbourhood of 10 million people have been diagnosed there – likely more, for understanding is better in the US, and expert physicians more numerous. Yet, this disabling, painful and often impoverishing ailment remains largely invisible in society at large, and even in the environmental health movement – a triumph of massively funded and strategic chemical industry public relations duplicity over at least twenty years, combined with a perfect storm of other factors which I discuss at length in Section 2, ‘MCS 106: System Failure.’ So, millions are left suffering without any social supports, and are so invisible that society does not draw the necessary conclusions that the chemicals that made them so sick – the very same chemicals that are causing so many of the other problems that we have. Only grudgingly, and with the industry fighting every step of the way, has acknowledgment been growing.

With original material I’ve written for this website, as well as links and posts from others, we cover this resistance to acknowledge reality, what causes it, the politics surrounding it, and its unbelievably high costs – to individuals, families, communities and society – to you, in effect, directly or indirectly.  Even well informed people have no idea of the terrible realities of this disorder to those who suffer from it, on the one hand, and the huge expenses it presents to taxpayers in many hidden but costly ways, on the other. We make the invisible chemical injury visible and understood – right here.

SO WHAT CHEMICAL, EXACTLY?

What are we talking about when we speak of  harmful ‘everyday’ chemicals? We’re talking about the tens of thousands of new substances with which we did not co-evolve and to which we cannot adapt in such a short time span, and which are causing us a flood of grief and pain. They include:

• many different kinds of toxic petrochemicals – from diesel particulates to pthalates (the chemicals that make plastics soft and chemical fragrances adhere) and Bisphenol-A, from  pesticides to flame retardants. These chemicals are used in industrial applications, but they are also everywhere in household cleaning solutions, laundry products, cosmetics and personal care items, and, yes, toys and baby products are loaded with them. They rub or leech off all these trusted products, directly into your mouths, lungs or skin, or sit in dust-bunnies in the corners of your house and your children’s daycare center, where your toddlers love to hang out and taste whatever is lying around on offer.
• the heavy metals that are used or released in industrial processes and flow through our rivers and our drinking water, and not infrequently coat the objects we use every day at home – such as children’s toys or cookware.
• these same chemicals, that have found their way into the remotest regions of the world, including the Amazon rainforest and the polar ice caps.
• These same chemicals that bend gender and disrupt and destroy our brains and brain power.
• And, as research in the last few years has affirmed over and over again, these chemicals have now been identified  in every ‘modern’ disease our society struggles with – cancer, cardio-vascular ailments, diabetes, obesity, Alzehimer’s and Parkinson’s and other dementias and neurological disorders, the epidemic of depression,  kidney and liver disease, obesity, arthritis, Autism Spectrum Disorders, Fibromyalgia, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and, of course, the bete noir of toxic injury -  toxic-induced chemical hypersensitivity.

REAL SOLUTIONS TOO

Though most of what we post is about problems, we also post material about solutions – and we hope to do a lot more of that in 2011. There are a lot of websites and printed resources today that offer product guides to the good, the bad and the ugly, and very helpful information for individual solutions in how to reduce your use and personal exposure to chemicals at  home and for your kids, for example. These are so important, and we will be building in more links to these sites very soon.

We don’t need to re-invent that particular wheel here. What we want to emphasize are collective solutions – changes in medical understanding and practice, in approaches to industrial production, in public policies and public heath, in community actions, in national and international government regulations of toxic chemicals. We’ve chosen to take this approach because no-one, however conscientious and affluent, can protect themselves or their families completely today when the problems are corporate, industrial, and global in reach and absolutely ubiquitous – therefore not solvable by individual action only. Knowing about the positive actions and approaches that have been pioneered by others is perhaps the most important way that we can learn, be inspired and act effectively ourselves.

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 and our health care from chemical harms. These pieces range from articles and briefing papers I have written (co-authored in two instances), published previously in anthologies and magazines or presented to various branches of government, to new paradigms for practicing medicine, and to issues of government regulation of toxic materials. In the next few months we hope to have a new section called GREEN CHEMISTRY online too – some links to and about a whole new movement which is as important to avoiding social suicide as fighting climate change is.

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

If you’d like to read a more detailed summary of what’s on the site, and a little more about me and David, please go to our About page.

We’d love to hear from you.

Varda Burstyn