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Dr. Mitchell Gaynor, author of Nurture Nature, Nurture Health
discusses the impact of disasters, natural and unnatural.
There are natural disasters and there are unnatural disasters.
My definition of unnatural disaster is environmental toxicants
as opposed to environmental toxins.
We think of natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and
Hurricane Rita. They create major problems with sewage and cause
other environmental hazards. But most natural disasters simply
exacerbate the problems already created by unnatural disasters.
Unnatural disasters are environmental toxicants which are man-made
chemicals and by-products of man made chemicals. These are things
that bio accumulate in the human body for decades. One of the
things I talk about in my book is heavy metals -- lead, arsenic
mercury cadmium. These are extremely toxic. Mercury is one of
the most potent neurotoxins known to man and yet the EPA recently
changed the rules on the books. By 2008 the rules were that
all the coal-burning power plants in the United States would
have to have a 90% reduction in their mercury. The technology
for that has existed for many years. They were going to give
them till 2008 to institute that technology. Now they have changed
the rules to give them an extra 15 years. So, there are epidemics
of autism, huge numbers of people who have no idea that they
have toxic levels of mercury in their body walking around because
most doctors don't test for it. Clearly, more mercury is going
to mean more suffering for more people. I call that an unnatural
disaster.
There's a cement company two hours north of New York that is
applying to New York State for permission to burn 8 million
tires per year in their cement kilns. Incinerators aren't built
to incinerate hazardous waste. They aren't built to incinerate
tires. You can incinerate tires in there but what goes up must
come down. The tires have a lot of the heavy metals - arsenic,
cadmium lead. So where do you think that's going to go?
If you look at the World Trade Center disaster, what was incinerated
at 2500 degrees Fahrenheit? Look at the computers. The average
computer has many pounds of lead in it. It takes micrograms
of lead to cause effects on your body. Thousands of people were
exposed to that. Look at the nickel cadmium batteries in all
the products including all the cell phones that were incinerated
at that heat making things like cadmium oxide. These oxides
are incredibly potent poisons and they are also taken up by
the body because the body naturally needs certain metals iron
for part of the hemoglobin to carry oxygen and part of the calcium
for the bones. It will take up these heavy metals very readily
and these will stay in your body for decades.
We wasted 50 years debating whether smoking caused lung cancer.
The cigarette industry, even though the documents clearly show
they knew it did, argued successfully in the courts and to the
government that cigarettes did not cause lung cancer. We do
not have 50 more years to wait. The same thing now is happening
to pesticides, herbicides, to many of the environmental toxins
like mercury. Pennywise, pound foolish. Many companies are saying
let's wait another 15 years before lowering the mercury even
though the technology has existed for more than a decade to
enable us to do that. When we have epidemics of autism, epidemics
of learning disability, it is outrageous that we allow this
to continue.
Katrina is going to bring about a whole series of diseases.
You are going to start seeing epidemics again. West Nile. Sars,
Malaria. Avian flu. These you already are seeing as a consequence
of environmental pollution.
It's not a matter of simply rebuilding. We have to become more
conscious of how we live and where we live and focus on those
issues that affect us. The major issues are fossil fuel consumption,
deforestation and the proliferation of persistent organic pollutants.
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