Environmental Pollution: An Invisible Kind of Child Abuse

For the sake of our children let’s all of us make a strong and steadfast New Year’s resolution to become relentless in our activism against all kinds of environmental pollution, from military and corporate sources, from major funders of local government like the oil and gas industry, from mining and energy generation, and from the hundreds of untested new chemicals that move though our bodies and our economies every year. Let’s leave no polluter unchallenged in 2020.

Environmental pollution is, for all intents and purposes, an invisible form of child abuse. It is implicated in scores of hideous and tragic childhood ailments from brain cancer, acute asthma, and birth defects to leukemia, learning disabilities and type 2 diabetes. This abuse of children is a direct result of corporations and the military industrial complex being careless and irresponsible with their toxic waste. And this belief of theirs — that they can pollute with impunity — is largely true.

Toxic contamination of the environment is an abuse of children even if childhood maladies are “unintended consequences” because polluters, all of them, know the public health science that warns against pollution and have chosen to ignore it. Polluters make a practice of denying the toxicity of their products, processes and waste in the same spirit that the tobacco industry denied the dangers to human health of its products in the 1960s and ’70s, even when there was solid scientific evidence that lung cancer, heart disease and other ills were directly related to smoking.

The dangers of environmental contamination are especially acute in New Mexico, a state whose land and water has been befouled by toxic water from oil and gas fracking, by hundreds of abandoned uranium mines and tons of dangerous toxins from uranium processing, by nuclear research, development, careless hazardous waste disposal at national labs, by various toxic chemicals from military and electronic manufacturing, by jet fuel, fire retardant and other toxic chemicals in the ground water under and near every Air Force base in the state.

“Research in children’s environmental health and epidemiology shows us that children are exquisitely vulnerable to toxic chemicals.” This is the deeply alarming and corroborated view of the authors of “Children and Environmental Toxins: What Everyone Needs to Know,” by Philip J. Landrigan, M.D. and his wife Mary M. Landrigan, MPA.

Their book was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. Dr. Landrigan is a pediatrician, epidemiologist and longtime activist in children’s environmental health. Mrs. Landrigan is a public health educator and former health care administer specializing child health.

All polluters, private and governmental, abuse children and the rest of us by valuing their profits or their budgets over public health and by assuming the taxpayer will eventually clean up their mess. It proves true, I think, that one of the tried-and-true ways of protecting profit margins and military budgets is to externalize the cost of pollution, socializing its clean up. Polluters do this in four major ways:

First, by public relations scams, persistent obfuscation, and outright deception about the danger, and even the existence, of toxic substances in their products and in their permissive and lackadaisical policies and practices regarding pollution, pitting cost control against public health.

Second, by refusing to even acknowledge the dangers of pollution, they also refuse to apply practices and precautions well known in the field of chemical engineering that could prevent most pollution in the first place.

Third, even when found guilty of despoiling public water supplies or committing other acts of flagrant contamination, polluters do everything in their power, politically and financially, to stall or slow down clean up as long as they possibly can, thereby increasing the risk to public health and the well-being of children.

And fourth, by lobbying zealously against funding for environment regulation and research, polluters undermine the gathering of hard-science evidence that would compel them to not only clean up their waste but pay for it.

The Landrigans contend that despite the almost miraculous advances in containing and even eliminating many communicable childhood diseases, two “negative developments overshadow this extraordinary progress and threaten to unto it.” These are, first, “the invention and wide dissemination into the modern environment tens of thousands of new chemicals—new materials that never before existed in nature nor were found in the earth’s environment. These man-made, synthetic chemicals are used today in millions of consumer products…Some are highly persistent and will remain in soil and water for decades, if not centuries.”

“The second negative development is the rise of noncommunicable diseases.” Since the late 1990s, these “diseases and disorders have replaced the infectious diseases as major causes of death and disability.” They include many cancers, developmental and neurological conditions and genetic defects.

“The global pandemic of noncommunicable disease in the world’s children is one of the great health problems of our time,” the Landrigans wrote. And toxic chemicals are “important causes of noncommunicable diseases in children.” This is so because “Toxic chemicals cause disease in children at exposure levels far lower than in adults.”

The Landrigans assert that the rise in childhood noncommunicable diseases is due to the fact that most “governments around the world, including the United States, have simply presumed that new chemicals are safe until they are conclusively proven to cause harm.” And virtually no pre-testing for toxic effects has been done, turning us all effectively into guinea pigs for the chemical industry.

It’s now become clear that children are not only harmed by toxic chemicals but that they’ve become, so to speak, canaries in the mine shaft warning us of dangers we cannot see. “Early life exposure to toxic chemicals is now beginning to be linked to adult-onset hypertension, heart disease, stroke, and cancer, as well as to neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease and dementia.”

In this election year, it’s time to vote for people who understand and condemn the permissiveness and anti-regulation fanaticism that has led to this appalling and shameful assault on the health of our children and ourselves.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it