98% WATER BUT THE REST IS

Subject:
[NDRCALNEWS] We are walking toxic waste sites
Date:
Tue, 11 Feb 2003 15:28:55 -0800
From:
"Nader 2000 | California"
<nader-cal-news-owner@...>
To:
<nader-cal-news@...>

The Face of Environmental Contamination

Bay Area residents participate in test of chemicals in their bodies

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/02/01/MN161308.DTL

(SF Chronicle, Feb. 1) -- Michael Lerner has 101 industrial chemicals in
his
body. He's got PCBs, dioxins, phthalates, furans, lead, arsenic, and
methylmercury. Most Americans probably have a similar mixture from
exposures
over the years, but they don't know about it.

Lerner, founder of Commonweal, a Bolinas, California health and
environmental research institute, was one of nine people -- five in the
Bay
Area -- to undergo $4,900 worth of tests for 210 chemicals.

The volunteers don't work with chemicals and don't live near
industrial
plants. The Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York conducted the
study
along with Commonweal and the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit
that
monitors chemicals in the environment.

The groups released the personal data at the same time the Centers
for
Disease Control (CDC) released results of its major survey of chemicals
in
2,500 anonymous Americans. They wanted to put a human face on the
problem of
environmental contamination. The groups also are calling for tougher
regulation by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other
agencies.

EPA spokeswoman Laura Gentile said the agency had numerous regulatory
and
scientific measures to protect the public from unreasonable exposure to
chemicals. She said the EPA "will continue to work closely with CDC on
the
important issues regarding chemical exposures."

Altogether, the study found 167 chemicals, with an average of 91
chemicals per volunteer. Fifty-three can cause cancer, and the others
are
linked to an array of health problems affecting the nervous,
reproductive,
hormonal, cardiovascular, and immune systems.

Getting the news that his body contained 101 chemicals, Lerner, 59,
said
he immediately wondered whether the toxic stew was to blame for some of
his
health problems. He felt, too, that he shared a common burden with his
fellow humans.

"I was very high on some contaminants, including mercury and
arsenic,"
Lerner said. "They can contribute to tremors, which I've lived with for
a
very long time. There was a sort of 'aha' feeling. I wondered it it was
related. I didn't know if it was related, but I wondered."

He later read an article in the Chronicle about San Francisco
physician
Dr. Jane Hightower's study correlating consumption of swordfish, tuna,
and
other big fish containing mercury with higher mercury levels in her
patients.

"I decided to stop eating fish with mercury," he said. "It seems my
memory was not what it was, and slipping faster than other people my
age.
Maybe this would help. With mercury, there was something I could do
about
it."

For 28 years at Commonweal, he's worked with cancer patients and
children
with learning and behavior disorders. "Of course," he said, "there's a
good
deal of evidence that children are increasingly at risk because of fetal

exposures to these environmental contaminants. I thought, 'Not so many
years
ago, these chemicals weren't in the body. Now, every human being in
America
is carrying this body burden.' "

The results on the nine volunteers are available at www.ewg.org.

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North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
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