Saturday, December 29, 2012

How much cancer could have been stopped by regulations against toxics we could have imposed but didn't, because of the power of polluters? ... by gimleteye

The power of dis-proving a negative has confounded critics of regulatory failure for decades, while the American public blithely ignored the application of science and technology to assess the causes of cancer through the proliferation of man-made chemicals in the environment.

Concurrently, well paid lobbyists and lawyers have successfully throttled government exploration of risk to the most vulnerable forms of life. Radical right wing extremists succeeded in defining a woman's right to choice on the point of abortion while utterly failing to account for real, true damage to fetuses from environmental causes that could have been regulated but weren't, because of the dominant American economic model: socialize risk, privatize profit.

In retirement, a former chief scientist for the South Florida Water Management District, Larry E. Fink, has been speaking out on this and other subversive measures adopted by government in favor of obscuring the well-laid plans and profits of the state's largest polluters.

While the nation worries about fictional "fiscal cliffs", the cancer-causing pollutants that are lightly regulated or not regulated at all have already pushed real people over real cliffs related to their own health.

If you have end of year contributions still to make, consider donating to Friends of the Everglades that is pursuing these issues and can do more, with your help.


Here is what Mr. Fink published on a list-serve today, which we re-publish in the hope it is widely read:
Over my 30+ years of professional career, I have advocated for routine sampling and analyses of human tissues to validate exposure models and assumptions and to correlate adverse health outcomes with the concentrations of persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic substances (PBTs) in various organs and tissues based on sound epidemiological study designs. Non-invasive tissues of reproductive relevance for the female include menstrual blood, post-partum umbilical cord blood, and breast milk, and for males, semen. Hair can also be sampled, as it accumulates both inorganic and organic contaminants with an affinity for protein from the blood supply with which the hair follicle is in contact. Since hair grows at a relatively constant rate, it captures information about instantaneous and cumulative exposures over
time.

If implemented, this National Epidemiological Study would have severely impacted the various industries that manufacture, use, or dispose of these PBTs. They would then have been highly motivated to find substitutes or advanced treatment technologies,
because that would have given them a competitive advantage over their less clever peers. Instead, they invested their efforts in undermining environmental regulations, putting political hacks on key regulatory bodies, and industry hacks on key advisory committees. Concurrently they attacked scientists who conducted such studies, including Florida State University's Ralph Dougherty, because such work is a threat to their profitable way of life. http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2457&dat=19810312&id=B4kzAAAAIBAJ&sjid=oSMIAAAAIBAJ&pg=1510,3897648 ; http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es1013664;

Now, despite 30 years of such machinations, a new study by reputable scientists demonstrates a correlation between the incidence of reproductive failure and the concentrations of certain PBTs in blood or semen. http://www.emagazine.com/daily-news/chemical-exposures-delaying-pregnancy/ Perhaps these body burdens also account for the roughly one-in-three chance of contracting any kind of cancer during a lifetime, of which about one-third has been attributed to environmental exposure to
carcinogens and their promoters in the home, at work, and from the environment. http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/causes; http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/EnvironmentalHealth/19956

So rise up in righteous anger for having your rights to life and to reproduce compromised by industry's provielge to use the environment to dilute and treat its wastes. Renegotiate your social contract to restore the value of your life, health, and peace of mind. Otherwise, it's business as usual, and you and your children, and your grandchildren are expendable for the greater good, which for the private sector is generally measured in net profit, not the net health or well being of consumers, workers, children, veterans, or retirees. To understand why it is not personal, its just business, see the classic boardroom scene form the movie "Network," because their world is increasingly ours. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mggkGeDX6lg

Larry E. Fink, M.S.
Waterwise Consulting, LLC

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

With respect to one statement in your postcard: a "woman's right to choose" has become such an accepted part of the politically correct dialogue, no one even questions it any more. This type of liberal dogma has reduced the decision to terminate a human pregnancy akin to deciding whether or not to have a skin tag removed. Sad.