Earth Day Sunday: April 21, 2002

Raising Children Toxic Free

by Shantilal P. Bhagat

 


Shantilal Bhagat is a Church of the Brethren representative to the Eco-Justice Working Group of the National Council of Churches of Christ and the author of Your Health and the Environment: A Christian Perspective.

All children need our commitment to be better stewards of the Earth so that their health, safety and success might be insured, but the plight of some children calls for special attention-- the children whose homes or schools are located near toxic waste sites, those who work long hours in factories and fields (often in hazardous conditions), those who look for nourishment in landfills, and those whose homes are washed away in floods or affected by deforestation.

We are not alone in this task. The Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted by the United Nations in 1989. Unfortunately, the US is one of the two countries that have not signed this treaty. In April 2001, the UN Commission on Human Rights declared formally that pollution and destruction of natural environment is both a crime against nature and a violation of human rights.


Better Living Through Chemicals

"Better Living Through Chemicals" was a slogan of some chemical companies in the Chemical Age of the last century. Chemicals did provide relief through antibiotics, penicillin, and other medical advances and have led to a range of creature comforts our ancestors could have never imagined. Over the last sixty years 80,000 new chemical compounds have been invented and dispersed into our environment. These compounds end up everywhere-- in farmland soil; in storage containers of varying reliability; in air, water, food; in consumer products; in the tissues of plants, animals, and people.

Everyone on the planet is carrying at least two hundred and fifty measurable chemicals in his or her body that were not part of human chemistry before the 1920s according to biologist Pete Myers who coauthored Our Stolen Future, a book about endocrine-disrupting chemicals published in 1996.

Many experts believe that the rules and standards for protecting public health and the environment from undue chemical risk are inadequate. The public cannot tell whether a large majority of the highest-use chemicals in the United States pose health hazards or not. New chemicals and new uses for chemicals enter the global commerce so rapidly and the economic interest in their use becomes so large so quickly, that we are by default conducting a massive toxicological trial. Our children and our children's children are the experimental animals.


Greater Vulnerability of Children

The interaction between environmental chemicals and child development is a new area of public health science. Only in the past few years have we begun to grasp the potential health effects of even slight disturbances in child development. It is now clear from studies of animals and children that subtle changes in the concentrations of normally occurring chemicals such as hormones--as well as the presence of toxic agents like lead, mercury or PCBs--can produce profound and permanent changes in the developing nervous system. These changes can lead to decrements in mental performance and alterations of reproductive system.


Why are children more vulnerable to toxics than adults?

  • Children absorb a greater proportion of many substances from the intestinal tract or lung. For example, children take up approximately half the lead that they swallow while adults absorb only about one-tenth.
  • Children indulge in more hand-to-mouth activity than adults and transfer more foreign substances into their bodies through this route. Because of their smaller size, and the fact that they often play in the dirt, they are closer to the source of many pollutants.
  • Children take in more air, food, and water per pound of body weight than adults.
  • Children do not choose their environments. They depend on adults to make decisions for them about the food they eat, where they live, what they are exposed to.
  • Some chemicals accumulate in the body of the mother (e.g., dioxin) and are passed on to the fetus through the placenta and to the infant while breast-feeding.


Health Problems

  • Asthma is reaching epidemic proportions. In the US, approximately 5 million children have asthma. Asthma is now the most common chronic illness among children and the leading cause of school absences. The death rate from asthma in the US has tripled in the past 30 years, to more than 5,000 a year.
  • Fewer children are dying from cancer today, but the incidence of some cancers is growing. There has been a 30 percent increase in brain cancer and a 68 percent increase in testicular cancer diagnoses in the past 30 years. Some forms of leukemia are also on the rise.


Dioxin--A Major Culprit?

Dioxin is a major public health issue for the general population as well as for children. Dioxin is the most toxic, deadly by-product of many chemical, manufacturing, and combustion processes. Any use of chlorine in industrial processes, including incineration, chemical and plastic manufacturing, paper and pulp bleaching, or burning hazardous waste in cement kilns, results in dioxin formation. Dioxin enters the human body through diet, with food from animals being the predominant pathway. The American people are at serious risk from their daily intake of dioxin in food.

  • There is a growing body of evidence that dioxin exposure in the general population causes developmental and reproductive effects in children. The effects on the development of the nervous system are associated more with exposure in the womb, while dental effects are more strongly associated with dioxin exposure from breast milk. These effects, including the small shifts in cognitive ability and alterations in thyroid levels, may be just the tip of the iceberg of our understanding of the impact of dioxin on the general population.
  • All American children are born with dioxin in their bodies. The greatest impact of this exposure appears to be on the growth and development of children. Disrupted sexual development, birth defects and damage to the immune system may result.
  • Dioxin exposure has been associated with IQ deficits, increased prevalence of withdrawn/depressed behavior, adverse effects on attentional processes, and an increase in hyperactive behavior in children.
  • There is evidence of both developmental and reproductive effects in children exposed to dioxin. These developmental effects include defects in permanent teeth, adverse effects on thyroid hormones, altered sex ratio (more females than males), and increased respiratory disease.


What is our Government doing to protect children?*

  • In 1993, the National Academy of Science issued a report on pesticides and children. This report was the first acknowledgement that our laws then did not protect children.
  • In 1996, the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) passed overwhelmingly by Congress. This statute requires pesticides to be reassessed by the EPA to ensure that they protect children. Congress, unfortunately, has attempted to repeal the FQPA because of its strict standards and the EPA has not been able to collect data on pesticide residues or enforce the law as it was intended.
  • In 2001, Centers for Disease Control released their first report documenting the prevalence of 27 different chemicals in Americans' blood and urine. The chemicals included phthalates (found in cosmetics, some soaps, and vinyl plastics), associated with developmental effects. Phthalates were highest in women of child-bearing age. Mercury levels were higher than expected, associated with birth defects and IQ loss. They found high levels of organophosphates pesticides. Because these pesticides break down quickly in the body, their widespread presence indicates regular exposure.


What You Can Do*

  • Resist using pesticides (bug sprays) and herbicides (weed killers) in homes, daycare centers, schools and communities. Take your shoes off when you come inside to avoid tracking pesticides from the lawn to the carpets.
  • Buy organic and locally grown produce and milk products when possible. Also, eat lower on the food chain, choosing fruits, vegetables and grains over dairy and meat that harbor toxins in the fat.
  • Keep your home well ventilated and use non-toxic cleaning supplies.
  • Read the labels and demand the right to know what is in the products you consume.
  • Support efforts in your community to eliminate all waste incineration and increase recycling efforts. Buy smart--choose less packaging and reuse products, if you can.
  • Don't smoke and don't allow others to smoke around your children.
  • Tell Congress to strengthen environmental laws to protect children, support better tracking of health trends, and law enforcement at the local, state and federal levels.
  • Impress upon companies that toxic chemicals do not belong in cosmetics, toys and other children's products or food.
  • Support efforts to reduce or prevent pollution in the entire process so as to avoid toxic exposure from manufacturing to use and disposal of products.
  • Get additional information for your area of interest from resources listed below:


Children's Environmental Health

    Children's Environmental Health Network, 110 Maryland Avenue NE, #511, Washington, DC 20002.
    Ph. 202-543-4033. http://www.cehn.org.
    Children's Health Environmental Coalition, P.O. Box 1540, Princeton, NJ 08542. Ph. 609-252-1915. http://www.checnet.org.
    National Environmental Trust, 1200 18th Street NW, #500, Washington, DC 20036. Ph. 202-887-8800. http://www.environet.org.


Toxics

    Center for Health and Environmental Justice, P.O. Box 6806, Falls Church, VA 22040. Ph. 703-237-2249. http://www.chej.org.
    Environmental Working Group, 1718 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20009. http://www.ewg.org.
    Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility, 11 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. Ph. 617-497-7440. http://www.igc.org/psr.


Pesticides

    Beyond Pesticide/National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides, 701 E Street SE, #200, Washington, DC 20003. Ph. 202-543-5450. http://www.beyondpesticides.org.
    Pesticides Action Network North America, 49 Powell Street, #500 San Francisco, CA 94102. Ph. 415-981-1771. http://www.panna.org/panna.


Healthy Schools

    Healthy Schools Network, Inc., 96 South Swan Street, Albany, NY 12210. Ph. 518-462-0632. http://www.hsnet.org.
    National Parent Teacher Association, 330 N. Wabash Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611-3690. Ph. 312-670-6782. http://www.pta.org.


Reproductive And Developmental Toxics


Government Agencies

    U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Children's Health Protection, 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Room 2512, Ariel Rios Building North, Washington, DC 20004. Ph. 202-564-2188. http://www.epa.gov/children.


Additional Resources

For more information about the effects of toxic chemicals on human health, see the following resources:

  1. Your Health and the Environment: A Christian Perspective, a Study/Action Guide for Congregations by Shantilal P. Bhagat, available for $7.50 from the National Council of Churches. (800-762-0968)
  2. Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival? by Theo Colborn et. al. (Penguin Books USA, New York, 1996)
  3. Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment by Sandra Steingraber (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, New York, 1997)

* Adapted with permission from resources produced by the National Religious Partnership for the Environment's campaign on children's health and the environment. Ph. 212-316-7441. http://www.nrpe.org).

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