PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

Health & the Environment Conference 2005
by Jessica McPherson Monday, Apr. 11, 2005 at 12:56 PM

This past weekend the Collaborative on Health and the Environment in Pennsylvania hosted a conference on environmental health that brought together medical researchers, health advocates, and environmentalists to take stock of current science, share information and consider strategies to redress the serious environmental health problems of today’s times.

Health & The Environment Conference

This past weekend the Collaborative on Health and the Environment in Pennsylvania hosted a conference on environmental health that brought together medical researchers, health advocates, and environmentalists to take stock of current science, share information and consider strategies to redress the serious environmental health problems of today’s times.

Presenters revealed that in recent decades, the rates of incidence of wide range of chronic diseases have steadily and dramatically risen. These include childhood leukemia, breast cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, obesity, attention-deficit disorder, and learning disabilities. Breast cancer, for example, in the 1960s affected 1 in 14 women, while today it affects 1 in 7 women. Today more younger women and men are affected as well. Studies have determined that 2/3 of breast cancer cases are non-hereditary, clearly implicating environmental factors in the increase.

In recent years medical researchers have come to new understanding of the ways in which environmental factors influence health. A growing body of research indicates that the health burden of chemical exposures may significantly exceed current estimates. While understanding of the toxic health effects of chemical compounds has in the past focused on cancer risks and acute poisoning effects, today researchers are coming to understand that many of the chemical compounds that are ubiquitously released in industrialized countries can interfere in a variety of biological processes to impact health. A newly recognized class of compounds termed “endocrine disruptors” mimic the body’s hormones and have been linked to increases in certain birth defects, abnormal development of the reproductive organs, rising male sterility, a variety of forms of cancer, and behavioral alterations. Awareness is also growing among medical researchers that susceptibility to disease varies with age and developmental stage; children are at increased risk over adults, and humans are perhaps most vulnerable while in the womb. New studies reveal that exposure to even extremely low doses of endocrine disruptors and other compounds can interfere with fetal development to result in lifelong health impairments.

Many conference participants expressed concern that despite the steady increase in chronic and fatal diseases across the American population, and despite mounting evidence of the ways in which these diseases are linked to disruption of bodily processes by synthetic chemicals, 86,000 chemicals are produced and widely distributed today, while only 500 have been assessed to understand their impacts on human health.
Keynote speaker Teresa Heinz summarized that “We have become labrats in a complex biological experiment in which none of us agreed to participate.” Speakers also cited well-funded campaigns of deception and misinformation by industry as barriers to popular recognition of the health crisis and government action to redress it.

The final session of the conference addressed the need to build new partnerships for effective environmental health advocacy. Speakers emphasized the potential for a more powerful movement to grow out of environmental groups, labor, public health professionals, and advocates for health-affected groups working together. Diane Hemingway of the United Steelworkers related several campaigns which the steelworkers have taken on in recent years against industrial facilities committing egregious environmental violations which were endangering workers, surrounding communities, and the environment alike. Ellen Dorsey, environmental programs officer of the Heinz endowments, spoke of the need for a “paradigm shift” regarding health, echoing earlier speakers’ calls for national policy based on the precautionary principle, and for shifting the burden of proof in chemical safety evaluation. Currently industry is allowed to produce and distribute any chemical unless it has been proven to be harmful, whereas speakers suggested that industry should be required to evaluate chemicals and prove their safety to a reasonable degree before they are allowed to be released.

Several local initiatives addressing environmental health were also featured at the conference. The University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Healthy Environments and Communities unveiled a new report, “Environmental Health in the Pittsburgh Region: Towards an Assessment of the Current State of Information.” The document is available online at http://www.chec.pitt.edu and comments are requested. The Center for Environmental Oncology at the UPMC Cancer Institute studies the links between cancer and the environment. And, in example of an effort working against the pervasive American tendency to view environmental protection and human health as separate issues, which led speaker Teresa Heinz to say that “Americans care about the environment, but we don’t always connect the dots,” the new children’s hospital is being constructed as a green building.

For more information on the Collaborative on Health and the Environment in Pennsylvania, which hosted to conference, visit http://www.che-penn.org.

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