Homeland insecurity?

What public health standards leave out

commentary by linda stephan

Every year my city government sends me charts and graphs telling me the level of toxins in my drinking water. It lists substances I’ve never heard of and others I know are scary: mercury and lead, for example.

These are all in my drinking water? Are they killing me?

But as I read further, my paranoia subsides. The actual level of each toxin in the water I drink is compared to the maximum allowed levels according to state public health standards.

A sigh of relief. My water supply may have all of these toxins, but only in accepted amounts. I’m safe after all.

Or am I? These graphs paint a neat picture. They show me the current legal thresholds of toxicity in my water supply. But, according to ecologist Sandra Steingraber, public health standards also shield me from the debate within the scientific community responsible for setting those standards. Steingraber, an activist author and expert on environmental links to cancer and reproductive health, has testified before the United Nations and the European Union on environmental regulations and health standards. She’s also a cancer survivor and mother.

“[Scientists] try to find: what is the maximum level we can allow without the majority of people suffering ill effects,” Steingraber said. “The human rights question here is: when we set toxic regulations, are they significantly protective for all of us?”

Laws based on these scientific thresholds are discriminatory, Steingraber said, because they’re based on the average, healthy 150-pound adult. That excludes large pockets of the population, including children and the elderly.

“Very often it’s the timing that makes the exposure poisonous, as much as the dose,” she said. For example, girls in Hiroshima who were between the ages of 10 and 12 at the time of the 1945 bombing were more likely to later develop breast cancer than were women and younger girls in the city. All were exposed to the same amount of toxins, but the toxins proved to be more poisonous to a specific part of the population, Steingraber said.

Compounding the situation is what biologists call biomagnification, which occurs naturally in the food chain. An example of this process happens when toxins sprayed on crops as pesticides are multiplied 10 to 100 times in the animal that eats them. Biomagnification of toxins occurs through every step of the food chain, making the human food supply one of the most toxic in the ecosystem.

Looking back on the levels of toxicity in my water supply, I see the mercury levels are acceptable. But now I know about biomagnification and I wonder if those levels are also acceptable in the whitefish and lake trout I eat for dinner.

The Michigan Department of Community Health Fish Advisory strongly cautions women of reproductive age, children under 15, and women who are pregnant or breastfeeding against eating large amounts of Great Lakes fish. The advisory says toxins in Great Lakes fish may eventually affect a woman’s health, or that of her children.

“Mothers who eat highly contaminated fish before birth may have children who are slower to develop and learn,” the report advises.

Steingraber goes further than the report, saying all fish in the Great Lakes basin are contaminated with mercury and other toxins to the extent that “pregnant women, or any woman of reproductive age, should not eat Great Lakes fish.” She also cites evidence, based on her research, that miscarriages, birth defects and stillbirths are linked to women’s exposure to environmental toxins, including pesticides and household cleaners.

When studying birth records in California, Steingraber found a link between women who live within a mile of farms where pesticides are sprayed and the highest rates of stillbirth.

Steingraber points to breast milk as another example of how regulations based on toxicity thresholds don’t sufficiently protect the entire population.

While she said breast milk remains “the best food for human infants,” she added that it is “now the most chemically-contaminated food on the planet,” because a baby’s food supply has toxins that are multiplied 10 to 100 times in the mother’s breast tissue before it’s consumed.

For Steingraber, that means the scientific community is ignoring entire segments of the population when developing environmental toxicity policies that should protect everyone.

BACK TO TOP