Toxic Assault on Our Children

[Guest guest]

Home Sick

Are unregulated chemicals in everyday products making us ill?

Reviewed by Seth Shulman, Sunday, September 7, 2008; BW04

POISONED PROFITS: The Toxic Assault on Our Children

By Philip Shabecoff and Alice Shabecoff | Random House. 353 pp. $26

THE BODY TOXIC: How the Hazardous Chemistry of Everyday Things

Threatens Our Health and Well-being By Nena Baker | North Point. 277

pp. $24

As we near the end of an administration with the most lax regulatory

track record in modern memory, public fear rightly mounts about the

safety of everyday chemicals. Journalists Philip and Alice Shabecoff,

now grandparents, are fierce and vocal advocates for the nation's

children, and their book indicts industry and negligent government

regulators for a so-called " toxic assault " on children that they

contend " bears the hallmarks of a crime. "

The authors' contentions are enough to raise the ire of the most blasé

and scare many parents witless. Chapter five, for instance, entitled

" The Scene of the Crime, " offers a frightening portrait of the nursery

as " arguably the most toxic room in the home. " There we find little

ny and breathing volatile organic compounds from the

freshly painted walls, and formaldehyde fumes leaching from the

pressed wood used in floors and furnishings, as the kids lie on a crib

mattress that contains toxic flame retardants and ingest insidious

phthalate molecules from their teething rings.

Frightening though it may sound, the depiction will strike most

readers as overwrought. We want to know: Just how dangerous is the

nursery, really? But the Shabecoffs have other plans than to offer a

measured answer. Invoking Carson's Silent Spring on the very

first page of their book, they seem to think that a good, scary

polemic -- " We're poisoning our kids! " -- is what's needed to bring

the issue the attention it deserves. They may be right.

Certainly, Philip Shabecoff's well-earned reputation as an elder

statesman of environmental journalism lends the book credence. The

husband in this journalistic team was among the nation's first

full-time environmental reporters. After serving as a White House

correspondent for the New York Times during Nixon's resignation and

the Ford administration, he asked in 1977 to be reassigned to cover

emerging environmental issues. For the next 14 years, Shabecoff wrote

high-profile stories about everything from acid rain to scientists'

then-mostly-unheard-of concerns about global warming. And he inspired

scores of journalists like me to make reporting on the environment a

central focus of our work.

With Poisoned Profits, the Shabecoffs deserve credit for forcefully

urging the issue of our children's environmental health onto the

national agenda where it surely belongs. Unfortunately, though, the

book's hard-sell tactics ultimately work to its disadvantage. The

public has come a long way since Carson's day, and the Shabecoffs'

frequent failure to provide context and perspective will lead many

skeptics to dismiss their important argument while likely irking even

many sympathetic readers.

A prime example is the book's overreaching, headline-grabbing

contention that " of America's 73 million children, almost 21 million,

nearly 1 out of 3, suffer from one chronic disease or another. " A look

at the data quickly shows that figure -- and the Shabecoffs' claim of

a " steep upward trend " in the incidence of toxic effects in children

-- to be overblown. By the authors' own count, more than half of these

children (some 12 million) suffer from a constellation of ailments,

including the real but notoriously ill-defined and likely

over-diagnosed attention deficit disorder, whose link to toxic

chemicals is only tenuously established.

Hyperbole also creeps into the numbers of even more closely studied

environmental effects. They write, for instance, that 310,000 children

have had their " bodies and minds . . . poisoned with lead, " adding

that today's kids " carry more than one thousand times more lead in

their bones than pre-industrial age children. " This may be true, but

the book fails to note sufficiently that modern-day U.S. efforts to

protect kids from lead have been primarily a " good news " environmental

story. Data from the EPA show that the phase-out of leaded gasoline in

the 1980s helped reduce airborne lead levels by an order of magnitude.

A recent study of lead levels in children under 6 by the Centers for

Disease Control similarly found a more than six-fold drop between 1997

and 2006 to the lowest incidence of elevated levels in decades.

Don't get me wrong. I believe, as the authors clearly do, that too

many American children suffer from lead poisoning and exposure to

other toxins. But a book assessing the toxic threat to the nation's

children requires a great deal of separating the truly alarming from

the potentially worrisome, and on this score the Shabecoffs often shed

more heat than light.

The book does, however, include a useful appendix with common-sense

ideas to minimize toxic exposure at home, from installing a water

filter to using sticky doormats that remove potentially toxic

particulates from the soles of incoming visitors' shoes. Despite the

book's thrust as an exposé, some of its best reporting addresses the

work of scientists and designers seeking to create safer products. The

authors acknowledge the public's receptivity to these emerging

efforts, noting for instance that so-called green cleaning products

" are now hip " and that organic food " is jumping off the shelves. "

Alas, these promising signs of change are buried deep within an

alarming -- and too often alarmist -- jeremiad.

Less sweeping in its indictment but more balanced in its approach is

journalist Nena Baker's The Body Toxic. " When it comes to toxic

exposures, the personal is political, " Baker writes. Fittingly, as a

point of departure, the author pays $2,000 for a laboratory in Britain

to conduct a so-called " body burden analysis " identifying the amounts

of toxic substances in her blood. Like that of virtually anyone in the

industrialized world, Baker's body contains trace amounts of

everything from PCBs to flame retardants. Seeking to make sense of

what the levels mean -- and what kind of threats they may pose to her

health -- Baker has written an illuminating, consumer-oriented book

that sifts through some of the latest findings about the dangers of

everyday chemicals.

Unlike Poisoned Profits, which lumps together anecdotes of corporate

wrongdoing, scientific studies and downright red herrings to bolster

its case, Baker's readable chapters separately tackle specific toxic

threats, such as the widely used herbicide atrazine or the

now-notorious bisphenol A, which was (until recently) widely used as a

component in plastic water bottles. Throughout The Body Toxic, Baker

gives consumers information to help them make " informed decisions, "

and she includes a list of a dozen steps she has taken to minimize her

exposure to toxic chemicals.

Like the Shabecoffs, Baker saves some of her most scathing criticism

for the regulatory failures -- such as the notoriously weak Toxic

Substances and Control Act of 1976 -- that have allowed thousands of

new chemical compounds on the market without adequate testing. As a

result, Americans have for decades been " kept . . . in the dark about

the toxicity of everyday substances. " Despite differences in tone and

emphasis, both books pair solid reporting with an urgent message:

Chemical makers and regulators must clean up their act in light of

mounting evidence of untoward health effects from many widely used

chemical contaminants. ·

Seth Shulman is the author of " Undermining Science: Suppression and

Distortion in the Bush Administration " and, most recently, " The

Telephone Gambit: Chasing Graham Bell's Secret. "

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/04/AR2008090402404_\

pf.html