March 31, 2000
NIEHS Press Contact: Bill Grigg, 301-402-3378 [email protected]
LINKS AND IDEAS FOR EARTH DAY, APRIL 22, 2000
GRADING OUR PROGRESS -- NIEHS Director Kenneth Olden Reviews Progress, Dangers of Earth Day, 2000 - for use as a column, for quotes or for themes for Earth Day interviews. (Follows at end. For interviews, photos, call contact above.)
Story ideas:
Journal Publishes Experts' Call for Health Protection from Global Warming. See http://ehpnet1.niehs.nih.gov/docs/2000/108p367-376patz/abstract.html
New Publications: Your Environment Is Your Health: How to Protect Yourself and Your Family from Environmental Hazards. See http://www.niehs.nih.gov/oc/factsheets/scene/adult/home.htm For a rhyming teen version - "Read the Label, Mabel," see http://www.niehs.nih.gov/oc/factsheets/scene/teen/home.htm
Cloned Genes May Screen Environmental, Industrial Chemicals for Safety. See http://www.niehs.nih.gov/oc/news/toxchip.htm
Mice With Our Genes Will Show How We React to Environmental Challenges. See http://www.niehs.nih.gov/oc/news/dnarep.htm
How Much of the Health Gap between Rich and Poor is Environmental? - feature, advance interviews available. (Call press contact, above.)
For authentic environmental health and science on the Web:
For authentic information on environmental health issues, your readers can reach the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (a part of the National Institutes of Health) and the National Toxicology Program at http://www.niehs.nih.gov
The NIEHS also has a Kids' Page at http://www.niehs.nih.gov/kids/home.htm
News features from the NIEHS' journal Environmental Health Perspectives are available at http://ehis.niehs.nih.gov
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Open House: Tour of laboratories, with employees giving out dogwood seedlings - since plants help clean the air and provide shade from solar radiation - at 1 p.m., April 20, in Research Triangle Park, N.C. (For details, call John Schelp, (919) 541-5723.
APPRAISING OUR PROGRESS AND FAILURE ON EARTH DAY, 2000 - A Grade of C or better for Ozone, but D or worse on Health Threats from Global Warming
A Review by Kenneth Olden, Ph.D.,
Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
for Earth Day, April 22, 2000
If Earth Day is a time for taking stock and grading our recent reactions to environmental challenges, humankind may get a strong C or C-plus for our actions to restore the earth's life-protecting ozone layer - but probably a D or worse for our efforts on Global Warming.
On the first score, we hope and believe that we have faced and overcome the destruction of the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere. This layer is needed to protect us from deadly radiation, but chemicals inadvertently used in air conditioners and cans for hair spray were destroying it. Luckily, three scientists - the Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen, and Mexico-born Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland, both working at the University of California at Irvine - not only discovered the problem but went on to campaign for the current ban on these substances.
The action that was subsequently taken should slow the ozone loss until, sometime in this century, the ozone layer will rebuild.
But we Earthlings are sliding toward another big trouble as temperatures continue to get warmer, bringing tropical diseases to formerly temperate areas - and who knows what problems to areas that are already tropical. Global Warming may not be Doomsday for all humankind, but it is at least a major health threat and a potential threat to crops. Unfortunately, we've treated this crisis as a political issue. We've gotten bogged down in a fight over how much of the warming is natural, unavoidable and perhaps cyclical vs how much is man-made.
Does it matter? Regardless of the cause of the warming, we need to stop fighting among ourselves and fight, instead, the problem, with a focus on the inevitable health and nutritional consequences of the warming trend and what we can do about them.
A few beginnings have been made. Our NIEHS journal Environmental Health Perspectives has carried studies showing ticks moving further north with warmer weather. The journal has reported the increasing potential for epidemics of mosquito-borne dengue fever -- a viral disease of fever, rash, prostration, pain and occasionally fatal shock . There are doubtless other debilitating and deadly diseases that may move north as well.
The April issue of our journal publishes the summary of the first expert American assessment of the health effects of global warming, with some dire warnings of health risks, including deaths. However, "adaption is feasible," at some cost, according to assessment co-chair Jonathan A. Patz, MD, of the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. (The federal government paid for the assessment through the Environmental Protection Agency.)
The "adaption"to Global Change means providing more protection against flooding, water contamination and heat waves, as well as early warnings of storms and of new carriers of disease. Our food sources must be monitored for safety.
But unless we're to blindly hope for a temperature reversal, or meekly settle for more illness and shorter lifespans, we will have to invest in these environment-related protections.
Such a focus on health might avoid the partisanship, from both left and right, that has sometimes barred environmental progress. Health, after all, is a matter that we all prize, wherever we are on the political spectrum.
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In other ways, Earth Day 2000 is a time for great optimism.
In the next few years, new chemical testing methods will help make this a safer world. We are finding new and better ways to evaluate the safety of chemicals - and perhaps even that elusive goal, chemical mixtures.
At our institute, for example, we are learning how to review chemicals for safety by seeing how tiny clusters containing millions of cloned genes react to them. That is, we are building a library showing the patterns of reactions of these genes to known chemical poisons. These patterns, if they then show up when we test a new or poorly known chemical, should provide us with an important warning signal.
We - along with many cooperating scientists in business and universities and other parts of government here and abroad - are also discovering how to use mice into which we've inserted key cancer or other genes to get answers about chemicals a lot sooner than the typical two-year, 800-rodent tests (that often take three to five years when you add in the planning and evaluation.)
We are also making in-roads regarding susceptibility - the 'why me?' question. We now know that genes not only mutate over time, they change in their depth of expression, so that 90 percent of us may be moderately affected by an industrial or household chemical or cigarette smoke or diesel exhaust, while, say, 5 percent are highly susceptible and, at the other end of the spectrum, 5 percent are highly resistant.
That's why, although all smokers are affected by their cigarettes, some get lung cancer while others escape with, perhaps, shortness of breath and a cough.
We are exploring susceptibility through the Environmental Genome Project, which has many other participants now within and outside of government.
In other experiments, our scientists have demonstrated how susceptibility changes at different stages of our lives, as various key genes turn "on" or "off."
Three of our scientists also recently demonstrated that the children of women who had higher-than-usual levels of DDE, which is a break-down product of DDT, and PCB, a widespread contaminant from its use in motors, seems to be associated with great height and weight at puberty - but not earlier.
We can prevent the lead paint-like problems of tomorrow, through new and better testing, combined with preventive action. While high dose lead poisoning -- with its vomiting, stomach pain, seizures and coma -- is rare today, lead remains the number one environmental hazard of many children in the United States, especially in older urban centers where long-banned lead paint flakes and crumbles, even today. Kids suffer IQ loss and may even be more likely to be delinquent as a result of even the low levels of lead we find today.
We can be proud of the progress, beginning years ago with the elimination of lead from paint and, much later, gasoline. Tests today can detect low levels of lead so that medical action can be taken before a child is badly damaged.
But we seldom reflect that much of the costly war that we have fought was avoidable. Because of the harm lead could do to painters, European nations typically barred its use in paints, and thereby avoided the environmental problems we continue to face.
I think that argues, in this new millennium, for the broadest possible definition of "Environment."
In reality, our environment includes our homes and jobs, where many chemicals are most concentrated; and our farms, where pesticide exposures are many multiples of what the consumer may have. It includes the crowded city environments and the "environment of poverty" in which people, even today, sometimes face the conditions of Charles Dickens' London slums.
Environment also includes the "environment of wealth" and the "environment of indulgence" - with their resulting overweight, drug and alcohol abuse, and under-exercise. It includes our lifestyles and our life's habits, our diets and medicines and our addictions to cigarettes, to sex and to violence.
When we look at the environment that way, it's easy to see that our environment is our health. U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher has said that 70 percent of all deaths in the United States are related to the exposures that make up this broad definition of the environment, with particular emphasis on the personal environments we create for ourselves.
What a challenge! Dr. Satcher's figures mean that most current causes of death can be easily controlled - if we individually and collectively recognize and correct them. That's, perhaps, the good news of Earth Day 2000 -- and, since we are creatures of habit, hard to change, it is the bad news as well.
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