http://www.democracycellproject.net/blog/archives/2007/04/teresa_heinz_ke.html
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We will be attending Women’s Health & the Environment: New Science, New Solutions conference and will posting reports about it here at the DCP blog. Today, however, we're also participating in a special 17-stop virtual blog tour (see the complete tour schedule here). And that gave us the opportunity to ask Teresa Heinz Kerry a few questions of particular interest to members of the DCP community:
DCP: Most of us usually think of the environment as being something that is "out there", something outside ourselves. But that is not the case. The world around us is not just external; we make it internal ourselves, every day. We interact with the environment around us by eating it in our food, breathing it into our lungs, and in many cases applying it directly to our skin.
You recently wrote an article citing Douglas Fischer's investigative reporting about how much accumulated toxins build up in each of our bodies over time. What is this "body burden", and how can we take steps to guard against its effects on ourselves even though we are surrounded by those substances every day?
THK: Recently, our foundation launched an on-line environmental newsletter focused on Women, Health and the Environment. As you note, in the first issue I recount a story written by journalist Doug Fischer of The Oakland Tribune. In his prize winning series, “A Body’s Burden: Our Chemical Legacy,” Fisher reported on the environmental toxins in the blood of an average family in the area. The hair, blood, and urine of two San Francisco Bay area children contained concentrations of a pervasive flame retardant at levels higher than those known to cause reproductive and brain damage in rats. Surprisingly, the concentrations were much higher in the 18-month-old boy and his five-year old sister than in their parents. Fischer’s newspaper spent $17,000 on laboratory tests and on an independent scientific verification of an elaborate testing protocol to document these alarming concentrations.
Doug spoke in Boston at our 9th annual conference on Women, Health and the Environment. I will never forget his chronicle of how the story evolved from a simple report to the shocking conclusion concerning chemicals in our body and especially our children. “Our ability to detect these compounds, invisible even five years ago, has outstripped our ability to interpret the results,” he explained, “but if it was your two-year-old, would you want to know?”
Every person in the world has industrial chemicals in or passing through their bodies, the result of five decades of intensive (and continuing) chemical use in industrialized nations. Scientists call this the human "body burden" of chemicals. Because of gaps in our system of public health protections, health effects of the human body burden are mostly unknown.
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It's a good, long post...why not go over to DCP and read all of it?
http://www.democracycellproject.net/blog/archives/2007/04/teresa_heinz_ke.html
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