Helping You Keep
Your Valentine's Day
Safe, Happy, and Healthy
In This Issue
As we approach that day when we give ourselves once-a-year permission to buy and eat the most decadent sweets, we'd like to alert you to some news you won't read in your newspaper: This year, some farmers will grow a new variety of sugar beets - a kind that has never before been used as food for people. What's more, this laboratory-made plant may pose serious health and environmental risks.
What is this new beet? A genetically engineered, artificially created plant made with DNA from species that could never cross in nature, using genes from non-food sources that have never before been part of the human diet. For generations, plant breeders have developed new varieties using genes from related species. But with genetic engineering, plant foods have been created using genes from viruses, animals, and even human genes.
It is unnatural, reckless, and driven by the biotech industry's unquenchable thirst for profits.
Scientists worldwide have expressed grave concern about genetically engineered foods, since it may take years for the foods' effects on human health to become clear (think tobacco, asbestos, PCBs, etc.) Health advocates are also concerned since the vast majority of GE crops are engineered to enable them to survive massive doses of pesticides, which in turn, puts even more dangerous chemicals on our plates and in the environment. And let's not forget the fact that the beets and other genetically engineered crops don't confine their pollen to one field; they can cross-pollinate as far and wide as the wind will carry their genetically engineered DNA. This threatens to permanently contaminate the genetic identity of natural varieties of the food we and our children have enjoyed, unadulterated, for millennia.
In spite of clear warnings from doctors and scientists that the safety of genetically engineered foods has not been established, sugar from these FrankenBeets may soon be used in thousands of products, ranging from candy to breakfast cereal to bread. And in the US, where powerful biotech companies exert dangerous influence over the government, no law will require that these genetically engineered products be labeled as such. Consumers will have no way to know when they are eating foods made with these inadequately tested, genetically engineered beets.
Doesn't our government have the strictest health requirements in the world? In a word: no.
The biotech industry has established toeholds in major markets around the world, even in Europe, where safety standards for food and other consumer products are much higher than they are in the US. In Europe, however, the food industry is at least required to label products that contain genetically engineered food. In the US, no such prudent warnings exist.
For tips to help you protect your family from genetically engineered foods, see below. . .
What is CEH Doing About Genetically Engineered Foods?
We are working to exploit two strategic leverage points that affect the food industry: the government and the marketplace.
Because the federal government has made clear its intention to rig and ignore science to protect the biotech industry's profits, we are active in coalitions that are working at the state level to protect people. For example, Monsanto has been pushing for laws banning truthful labels that identify milk made without its genetically engineered bovine growth hormone (rBGH). We are working with allies nationwide to ensure that dairies can continue to label milk made without rBGH. Our coalition's work just defeated one such proposal in Pennsylvania and is fighting back similar ones in other states.
The public has a right to know what is in our food and our environment, and CEH continues defending this right and opposing the reckless contamination of our food.
To support the demand for safer foods, we are also using the power of the marketplace, encouraging huge, institutional purchasers of foods to avoid these dangerous products. For example, we wrote a policy for the international Health Care Without Harm coalition urging hospitals and other health facilities to take action to avoid GE foods. (See the policy at http://www.noharm.org/details.cfm?ID=1540&type=document). CEH is also helping to lead legislative efforts in California to hold biotech companies accountable when GE crops contaminate natural crops (see http://www.gepolicyalliance.org/). We are urgently fighting to keep genetically engineered, experimental foods like FrankenBeets off your plate.
How can concerned citizens support this important struggle? A few suggestions:
- Educate yourself. The biotech industry is banking on your ignorance. Take that tool away from them. Visit http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/geneticall7.cfm to learn more.
- Tell your friends. The media is far too busy covering the unfortunate travails of Brittney Spears to bother with the safety of our food supply. The only way we can put this concern on people's radars is by doing so ourselves.
- In the US, conventionally grown corn, soy, and canola are almost always genetically engineered. You can reduce your family's exposure to genetically engineered products by purchasing the organic versions of these crops and by avoiding products made with the conventional version of these crops, e.g. conventional corn chips.
- Share your concerns with the stores you support. When they hear that you will only buy organic, non genetically engineered produce, they'll put it on the shelves.
- Write letters. Our government representatives should work for us, not for Monsanto. Support campaigns like the rBGH one here: http://www.truefoodnow.org/
- Support organizations like the Center for Environmental Health that are working to protect your family from reckless industries: http://www.cehca.org/donate/
We strive to make sure that our newsletters provide you with information that will equip you to protect your family from toxic chemicals and the other environmental health threats that are all-too pervasive today. 
Interested in our take on toxic toys and China? Read last summer's edition. Want some tips on showering your valentine with healthy, organic gifts? Read last year's Valentine edition. Looking for advice on purchasing safe toys? Read last December's edition.
You can find them all here: http://www.cehca.org/newsletters/
Support the Work that Keeps Your Family Safe
Here's a fact that's often overlooked, even by our strongest supporters: the Center for Environmental Health is a private, non-profit organization. We do the government's work, protecting children, families, and communities from toxic chemicals, but we don't get a dime of government support.
We rely on the generosity of people like you who share our values, who believe that dangerous chemicals have no place near children. This work depends on people who see value in efforts like:
- Protecting children from lead in jewelry, lunchboxes, and baby bibs
- Removing dangerous, gender-bending phthalates from the plastic products we all have at home
- Reducing the unspoken, but monumental health impact of the food and electronics industries
- Getting arsenic treated play structures off the market
- Forcing the government to adopt and enforce prudent public health precautions
With your support, these efforts happen every day at the Center for Environmental Health. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to ensure that this work continues. Children, families, and communities everywhere are counting on us.
And on you. Please help ensure that this vital work continues.
The uncorrupted science agrees: vinyl is a dirty plastic. It is toxic to the people who make it, live near the places where it is made and disposed of, and for those who use it. CEH has found high levels of lead in many vinyl-based children's products, including vinyl cords on necklaces and bracelets, vinyl lunchboxes, and most recently, vinyl baby bibs. Incredibly however, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (the president's agency responsible for keeping dangerous products off the market), has recently promoted vinyl as a means to keep babies "safe" from another hazardous chemical: brominated flame retardants.
In the CPSC's latest effort to champion industry profits over children's health, the moribund agency was asked about brominated flame retardants. These lab-synthesized molecules are added to products like computers, televisions, stereos, furniture, and children's pajamas. At the bidding of the chemical industry, our government has ordered that these products and many others be doused in flame retardants, ostensibly to reduce fire risks. Of course, the actual reason for this mandate is to sell a profitable and, it turns out, dangerous class of chemicals.
Brominated flame retardants, some of which have been banned in Europe, have a similar molecular structure to Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) - the chemicals that were banned in the US in 1975 because they were shown to cause cancer, birth defects, and a number of other serious illnesses.
The chemical industry touts the success of brominated flame retardants at reducing deaths and injuries in residential fires. Firefighters, however, are not convinced: they have found that products with BFRs can eventually catch fire, and once they do, they are much more difficult to extinguish and the smoke they emit is even more toxic than it would otherwise be.
Whether burning or not, these chemicals are dangerous, which is why there are increasing concerns about their presence in infant's mattresses. In a response that could have been written by the chemical industry, the CPSC, opposing the vast and growing body of scientific studies to the contrary, urged parents not to worry about the presence of flame retardants in children's mattresses, stating "The CPSC has extensively tested mattresses for any health problems associated with flame retardant chemicals and the risk has been proven to be insignificant."
This cutting-edge scientific conclusion from the agency that lacks the funding to protect children from lead in toys.
And the story gets even stranger: for parents plagued by nagging concerns about flame retardants, the CPSC has another dangerous recommendation: vinyl.
In yet another twist of logic that only this beleaguered agency could concoct, the agency urges parents who are worried about flame retardants to cover their infants' mattresses with vinyl shrouds. Says Davis: "Vinyl acts as a barrier to flame-retardant chemicals used in the mattress."
Worried about toxic chemicals in your products? Just buy more hazardous products contaminated with different toxic chemicals.
Only from the CPSC.
Spotlight on a CEH Staff Member: Christine Cordero
Christine Cordero coordinates our Community Health Program. She connects community based environmental justice groups to legal, scientific, and other resources, keeps CEH in touch with the work of low-income communities that bear the worst brunt of chemical pollution, and ensures that the perspective of these communities continues to inform all of our work.
Q: What's a typical day like for you?
A: A lot of days, I participate in meetings with other environmental health and environmental justice groups, for instance, the Ditching Dirty Diesel Collaborative, a strong coalition that's effectively working to reduce the impact that the fuel has on the communities who live where it is used most: rail yards, ports and big centers of distribution. On the same day, I might come back to the office and write a workshop curriculum about the way our government fails to regulate new chemicals and the impact that has on disenfranchised communities. The goal of all my work is to build connections between the big-name environmental groups everyone has heard about and the smaller ones that work in poor communities.
Q: Environmental Justice? What's that?
A: Privileged people are outraged when companies pollute in their communities. They assert the categorical right to a clean and healthy environment for themselves and their children. When companies violate this right, these communities have the power to respond.
Unfortunately, it's not the same in poorer areas. The waste and pollution that are created to give us the standard of living that we enjoy are almost always concentrated in the communities where poor people and people of color live. It's a blight and a shame on our society.
Environmental Justice is the notion that we all have the right to a clean and healthy environment no matter what other privileges we enjoy. It is also the idea that the most impacted communities know the problems that affect them and that they can speak for themselves about the problems and solutions in their immediate environment.
Q: How did you get involved with environmental justice?
A: In 2002, I saw an exhibit about a young girl in the Philippines who lived at the fence-line of a former U.S. military base that was polluted with massive amounts of toxic waste. It was called "Benzene and Butterflies," and it told the story of how the girl died really young of a rare cancer called myolucidic leukemia. Children born and raised in the vicinity of these bases suffered from an alarming number of diseases.
And it wasn't just a couple of them, it was the whole community. On a single street you'd find three kids with cerebral palsy or 4-year-olds who'd had heart surgery because of congenital heart defects.
The film got me thinking about the connection between where I grew up and my own health history. I was raised in Pittsburg, California, a community that absorbs a huge amount of pollution from a Chevron oil refinery. I'm also a cancer survivor.
Q: What if I don't live in a community that faces Environmental Justice issues? Why should I care?
A: Because pollution affects us all and the diseases associated with it do too. Asthma, cancer, diabetes, autism, developmental disabilities: they're all on the rise. While it's true that families in underprivileged communities face a greater risk, they are not the only ones facing the risk. Right now environmental justice communities are our society's canary in the coal mine. When we protect those who are most directly impacted by exposure to toxic chemicals, we protect everyone.
Q: What does your work seek to accomplish?
A: Traditionally, environmental health groups and community based groups pursuing environmental justice have not complemented one another as much as they should. I'm working to build bridges between these movements. Our goals are mutually supportive. We can accomplish so much more if we work together.
The Center for Environmental Health has a strong reputation as a reliable ally in both movements. I'm using that reputation to help get everyone working together.
I also aim to ensure that all of our projects at CEH are guided by the principles of environmental justice - that whatever we do, in the end, it should protect the most vulnerable communities.
Q: What else would you like CEH supporters to know about you?
A: I'm here to listen. If you have questions about the work, if you want to know more, if you have ideas to share, please call (or email: christine@cehca.org). And one more point: CEH is an organization that really lives its mission. I'm really proud to work here.