One of the most exciting reports I have ever read, Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk – What We Can Do Now, was released this week by the President’s Cancer Panel, along with significant coverage by Nicholas Kristof in The NY Times, Lyndsey Layton in The Washington Post and Liz Szabo in USA Today.

This signals a pivotal change in how we approach cancer (and, I hope, how we approach other illnesses that have increased in our lifetimes). The report acknowledges that we face “grievous harm” from chemicals that surround us every day and that we have “grossly underestimated” the amount of illness caused by these exposures – illness “that could have been prevented through appropriate national action.”

Why is this so exciting? By recognizing the importance of chemical and environmental causes of disease, we open the door to achievable environmental solutions. We can run in the right direction as we race toward prevention – not just race toward a cure. This report is about cancer – but the same issues apply to asthma, autism, learning disabilities, allergies, and more.

And it starts with kids. The report highlights the game-changing Environmental Working Group studies on umbilical cord blood that I helped EWG develop and release, where we found 180 carcinogens in babies (and 217 chemicals that were toxic to the brain or nervous system), even before the babies were born – chemicals that could set a trajectory for disease much later in life.

Parents can take simple steps right now to lower their children’s risk, from the cleaners you use in your home, to the plastics you use around food and beverages (watch our for BPA and phthalates!), to the sunscreens you put on your family’s skin.

In particular, the report highlights the value of organic food. There are ten foods (eleven, if you count wine) that I see as most important to choose organic.

And we can work together to change our chemical laws, under which the government has only assessed about 200 chemicals for safety out of the 80,000 chemicals on the market.

It’s a new era in our fight against cancer. It’s a new era for health.

Many parents assume that our current government regulations do a pretty good job of protecting our children from exposures to unhealthy chemicals – not realizing that the current law from the 1970’s is now as ridiculous and out-of-date as a polyester leisure suit. Of the more than 80,000 synthetic chemicals now on the market in the US, the EPA has only been able to require safety testing on about 200. This needs to change, and leaders across the political spectrum are calling for action.

On January 21, 2010 a broad coalition called Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families has released a powerful, readable report called The Health Case for Reforming the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Yes, they make a strong health case (at least one percent of all disease comes from environmental exposures, and 10 percent of diabetes, and up to 30 percent of now-epidemic conditions like asthma). But beyond this they (Or I guess “we”. both DrGreene.com and Healthy Child Healthy World are part of this coalition) make a powerful economic case. Chemical policy reform should save us at least $5 billion in health care costs each and every year.

Whether you care about preventing cancer, learning disabilities, ADHD, autism, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, reproductive and fertility problems, or asthma — or just saving our society billions of dollars – read the report, share the report, join the movement.

“In simplest terms, real reform will lead to more healthy babies, fewer women with breast cancer, a return to normal fertility patterns, and a lower number of people with Alzheimer’s disease. This is the promise of TSCA reform.”

From 1973 to 1999, childhood cancers increased by 26 percent, making cancer the greatest health threat to children. Currently, one in a 100 8-year-old children in the U.S. have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers, and the number might be as high as 1 in 58 for boys, according to a phone survey in the journal, Pediatrics. According to Robyn O’Brien, author of The Unhealthy Truth, one out of every three U.S. kids currently suffers from allergies, asthma, ADHD, or autism—our children’s bodies are clearly under assault. But why?

In yesterday’s article I mentioned how, as one concerned father, I set out to try to find out the dangers that are children are facing and how I learned about something called endocrine disruption, or the disruption of the hormones that control everything from mood to gene expression.

As I was researching my fact-based novel, one of the things I discovered was that since World War Two, approximately 80,000 chemicals have been invented, and thousands of these have been produced in excess of millions of pounds per year. Only a small percentage of these chemicals have ever been tested to discover their effects on animals and humans. (If you want to discover how the chemical industry undermined government regulation, watch Bill Moyers brave and brilliant documentary, Trade Secrets.)

We feed these chemicals to our children through the chemicals on the food they eat, in the water they drink, in the lotions we put on their skin, in the products that they touch, and even in the air they breath. A recent study of fetal cord blood—the blood a child is born with before they take their first breath—found 413 chemicals and on average more than 200 different chemicals per child.

Many endocrine disrupting chemicals are plastics. You may have heard of the chemical Bisphenol A, or BPA, which is a plasticizer that has been used to make plastic bottles (including baby bottles), to coat children’s teeth so they don’t get cavities, and to line canned food. In lab animals (we can not do controlled studies on people for obvious reasons), BPA has been shown to impair brain development, cause down syndrome, cause breast cancer, prostate cancer, low sperm count, and even obesity.

Obesity? Have a look at this picture. The mouse on the left is a normal mouse; the one on the right was exposed to tiny amounts of BPA during its gestation. Could exposure to this chemical, seven billion pounds of which is produced and put into our environment every year, play a role in the epidemic in adult and childhood obesity that is spreading around the world?

Why don’t you know about this? Well, let’s just say there are lots of people who don’t want you to know about this and have worked hard to obscure the facts. On Sunday, May 31, 2009, the Washington Post broke the story that manufacturers of packaging for beverages and foods, including some of their customers, like Coca-Cola, were trying to defend the use of BPA and use “scare tactics” to make sure that the chemical was not banned. I couldn’t believe it. It was as if some of the villains from my novel had come to life. But if I had my characters try to recruit a pregnant woman to discuss the benefits of BPA—as they industry execs apparently did—no one would have believed it.

Out of shortsighted economic interests, also known as greed, we are conducting an unprecedented experiment on the health of our children.

Tomorrow, we will look at how what’s happening to our children is happening to the whole planet, and the next day why some children get sick and other’s don’t. Then we’ll discover the silver lining and what can turn this around. Finally, on Friday, we look at what you can do to try to keep your family safe.

For more information about endocrine disruption, the research mentioned in this blog post, and about Doug’s fact-based eco-thriller, Eye of the Whale, please visit www.DouglasCarltonAbrams.com.

Autism and related conditions continue to become more common. Autism is the fastest growing developmental disability, increasing in frequency by more than 10 percent each year; this makes finding its causes and treatments an urgent priority. A new piece of the solution to the autism puzzle appeared online in the Annals of Neurology on November 15, 2004, in advance of its 2005 paper publication.

Scientists from Johns Hopkins considered 11 people with autism and 12 matched people without autism who had died from a variety of causes (most commonly drowning). The people studied ranged in age from 5 years to 46 years at the time of death. The average age was 16. Brain autopsies were done on those who had died. Researchers also considered spinal fluid samples from six living people with autism.

They found an unusual type and amount of chronic inflammation in the brains of those with autism. They plausibly suggest that new medicines to reduce this brain inflammation might prove to be powerful new autism treatments. This is likely to be true, but it is also possible that the brain problem is a direct effect of some ongoing environmental damage and that the inflammation is part of the brain’s defense – much like a fever is part of the body’s fight against infections, and not part of the problem. Either way, the brain inflammation is an important new clue as the search for autism solutions must continue to press forward.

“Someone snuck into my home and stole my one-and-a-half year old’s mind, leaving his bewildered body behind.” This is how it feels to have your son diagnosed with autism, according to Jon Shestack, vice president of Cure Autism Now. “If 1 in 250 children were actually being abducted rather than diagnosed with autism it would be a national emergency.” This sobering observation sets the tone of the January 7, 2004 Journal of the American Medical Association report on the National Autism Summit. It’s staggering how little we understand about autism spectrum disorders. An act of Congress in 2000 created the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, which developed a 10-year agenda for understanding what causes autism, preventing at least 25 percent of cases, and enabling speech in at least 90 percent of those who are diagnosed. This ambitious plan, nicknamed, “the matrix” was unveiled at the first Summit. One piece of the matrix already underway is the Childhood Autism Risks from Genetics and the Environment (CHARGE) study, where tissue and blood from 1000 children with autism will undergo unprecedented intensive analysis. I’m thrilled that this agenda is moving forward, and hope that the momentum and speed will build – even faster than new diagnoses of autism are skyrocketing.

In the meantime, even though we are operating in the dark, we do know that substantial early intervention and treatment offers the best results for kids diagnosed today with autism. It may seem unduly expensive, but not only does this effort improve life for the child, early intensive neurobehavioral treatment has been calculated to slash lifetime disability bills for each child by about $1 million.

Choosing organic foods can make a big difference for our children. Industrial agriculture techniques are relatively recent innovations. When my parents were young, the bulk of our food supply was not grown with antibiotics, hormones, or chemical pesticides. Their use became widespread in my lifetime. We are finally beginning to scientifically examine the impact of these techniques. I’ve summarized some of the most important recent studies below. These are some of the reasons that I am encouraging parents to take the Organic Lunchbox Challenge of giving their kids at least one serving of organic foods each day this year.

Background

We know that, at high enough levels, pesticides and other chemicals (such as mercury) found in food cause a variety of significant health problems in children, including cancer, attention deficit disorder, learning disabilities, genital abnormalities, and reproductive problems.

We know that the very problems caused by environmental chemicals are increasing in our society and in our children. We know that childhood brain cancer and leukemia have each increased by more than 50 percent since 1975. We know that autism diagnoses have increased 10 times since the 1980’s.

We know that children have higher exposures to pesticides and other chemicals than do adults, and that even at the same exposures, they are at higher risk.

We know that pesticides used to grow foods are actually getting into our children’s bodies.

We know that combinations of pesticides or other chemicals can increase the risks.

Major Recent Studies

• Organophosphorus pesticide exposure of urban and suburban pre-school children with organic and conventional diets. October 2002.
• Loss of neuropathy target esterase in mice links organophosphate exposure to hyperactivity. March 2003.
• Second National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals. January 2003.
• Body Burden. January 2003.
• America’s Children and the Environment: Measures of Contaminants, Body Burdens, and Illnesses. February 2003.
• Related Tidbits

Can you trust statistics? Back in 1999, a report from California’s Department of Developmental Services, concluded that the number of children with profound autism had grown from 2,778 in 1987 to 10,360 in 1999 — an increase of 273 percent! The study did not include the milder end of the spectrum, such as Asperger syndrome. But was this increase real? And if so, what was causing it?

Maybe we were just doing a better job of finding kids with autism. Maybe there was just an increase in awareness of autism. Maybe more children with autism were just moving to California.The California legislature directed the MIND Institute, an autism research center at the University of California at Davis, to investigate.

The report came back on October 17, 2002. There is a real epidemic of autism that cannot be explained away. But why? We still do not know. The study concluded that the increase cannot be attributed to genetics, birth injury, or immunizations (including the MMR). Genetics certainly play a role, but we don’t know what in the environment is triggering the staggering increase in cases.

We need to find out. Meanwhile, the numbers continue to rise ever faster, with 18,460 cases as of July 2002!