THE CHEMICAL EDGE

About Us, About the Site

My name is Varda Burstyn, I’m a writer and health policy consultant and I’ve been an active environmentalist for about forty years. Yes, I’ve definitely clocked the miles, and this site is one of the ways in which I hope to share some of what I have learned on this journey. Although one stream of my life’s work has concerned politics and culture, the other consistent – and ever-growing – stream has been my environmental work, with a focus on health related issues. I’ve worked with a number of important environmental organizations, and I’ve done a lot of writing about environmental issues, ranging from critiques of science and technology, to the problems of water, to the dangers of genetic modification of organisms through to – and this has been an abiding interest for thirty years – the health hazards of everyday chemicals. Several of my articles about these harms as they affect children, previously published in scholarly anthologies, are available on this site.

In addition to the more recognized health harms of toxic chemicals, one of my major preoccupations is a horror-show issue that really is a product of this new chemical age: loss of chemical tolerance due to toxic injury. My mother suffered from this terrible condition, and, thanks to the same DDT to which we were both exposed when I was a baby, and the genetic legacy I share with her, in my fifties I was struck by it too. But this is not and never has been for me just a personal story. Tens of millions of people in North America have been diagnosed with the condition, and it is growing so rapidly and is so consequential that it needs to be understood and addressed at all levels of society, and urgently. The biggest obstacles by far to this happening are economic and political, so this is natural grist for my mill.

You can read more about me at my professional website, www.vardaburstyn.com. You can read more about my take on loss of tolerance due to toxic injury in many places on this site.

My partner, web-master and co-researcher is David Fenton. David has graduate degrees in science and education, was Regional Environmentalist for the State of Oregon, Legislative Lobbyist for the Oklahoma Audubon Council, and has taught university courses on environmental studies, geography, computer science, and technical communications. He has also directed communication and training departments for global technology companies, and has worked in high-tech fields around the world. Today his company, Web Communication Wizards, builds websites. But he is never happier than when he’s outdoors, birdwatching, canoeing, or just being, especially if it’s with grandchildren, nieces or nephews. With the future, in other words.

MORE ABOUT WHAT YOU’LL FIND IN THE THREE GENERAL SECTIONS

If you want to know more about what you’ll find in the three general sections on the site, read on. Diseases and disorders are categorized individually, in the Categories side bar, and are self-explanatory.

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 chemical corporations and their representatives, such as the American Chemical Council, and many of our own public health officials, have so far refused to acknowledge it, we are already in the midst of a public health crisis due to chemical pollution. And I use the word ‘crisis’ advisedly.

Some of us, sauntering along the chemical edge, are still, somehow, 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. Others of us are teetering, fighting the effects of toxic chemicals, but rarely feeling really good, really sharp and happy. Yet others have tumbled over the chemical edge, and are barely hanging on to the cliff-edge with their fingernails, as the chemical harms express themselves through many, many different disease pathways and disorders. And some of us have dropped right off the edge, crippled and utterly dysfunctional at the bottom of the cliff, or, indeed, just plain dead.

It’s true that even for many of the apparently healthiest among us toxic chemicals are an unwelcome and significant drag on health. Just as strong, healthy trees in a forest which is continually stressed by drought or acid rain become susceptible to diseases and external assaults they would otherwise resist, healthy human bodies have become overloaded with toxins, and many eventually succumb to a host of environmentally-related diseases, dysfunctions and disabilities.

When you consider the impact of toxic chemicals on our health the conclusion is glaring: the suffering is staggering, the costs to society vast and depleting, and the waste of human life and potential incalculable.

Here is a sample of some of problems, addressed in various ways, throughout this section and in the ‘CATEGORIES’ section in more detail.

CANCER

Consider: A third of us will develop some form of cancer – and that percentage is growing decade by decade. Anyone who tells you that 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 percent of the population has cancer today. This is an apocalypse here and now, and a sign of how bad things can get if we don’t shrink our chemical footprint soon.

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 shortened lives. 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 few years new research from the United States, Europe and Korea is showing that a deeper cause is being detected: that of persistent organic pollutants which 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, some we’ve known for a long time, and new ones 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 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 everyday chemicals, we or our children are dealing with severe cases of attention/learning disorders and behavioural disorders, which are not being recognized for the chemical injury they really are, and are therefore not being treated appropriately. Tens of millions of children are being medicated and psychiatrized without any understanding of the need to address the neurological deficits as a toxic injury. It’s no wonder we’re not getting results. And today, we are facing autism spectrum disorders in roughly 1 out of 100 births, compared to 1 in 10,000 in the fifties and sixties. 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 on 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, SCHIZOPHRENIA, BI-POLAR DISORDERS, MANY TYPES OF MENTAL ILLNESS

Multiple tens of millions of people 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 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.

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

People with severe loss of chemical tolerance due to toxic injury – a condition known most commonly as MCS – live like aliens on planet Earth. They struggle every day just to breathe, to find and afford organic food so that what they eat won’t poison them, to wash their clothes in soaps that won’t make them so sick that they have to sleep on the floor with their old coat to keep them warm instead of sheets and blankets. Because so much of the built environment is laden with chemicals that threaten their ability to breathe and to function physically and mentally – from the supermarket store and its detergent aisle to their relative’s house with those lethal scented plug-ins to the city streets where gasoline, diesel and other petrochemicals may throw them into anaphylactic shock – they have been compelled to withdraw from society. So not only is their disability invisible in the usual sense – they don’t use wheelchairs or white canes – they are also truly invisible because they are so absent from all public spaces. They are unable to work outside their homes, and some of them can’t work at all any more. You won’t see them in most places, and most of them experience extreme stress from isolation. That’s why MCS has been dubbed ‘the invisible disability’, and its sufferers ‘invisible cripples’.

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

While everyone who has health problems related to the environment is a walking (or no longer walking) example of the health impacts of THE CHEMICAL EDGE, people with MCS are truly like the canaries in the mines of yesteryear: creatures with respiratory systems so sensitive to deadly mine gases that the miners sent them ahead, or kept them 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 human  canaries are sick and dying, we are not taking notice, not learning the lessons. We are not using their illnesses and deaths as the most direct indictment of the harms of the many everyday chemicals that surround us. 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. The hundred-million dollar public relations war chests of this industry continue to spin MCS as an ‘emotional’ problem. Because diagnostic methods were poor until about ten years ago, the industry PR succeeded in walling off the key information these canaries have to tell us, and left a legacy of medical myths that now must be fought. As a result, our public policy regarding health care and environmental impacts lags decades behind the real science and medicine of environmental illness.

In the navigation sidebar to the right you’ll see what’s on offer here – or will be as they 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. New information will be posted regularly.

Section 3: DARE TO STRUGGLE, DARE TO WIN

…is a section 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 see way out of the morass, 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 and we can’t harm it without harming ourselves. There is certainly no ‘away’. 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.

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So welcome to THE CHEMICAL EDGE, and I hope that you will feel moved to contribute your thoughts, 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