Correlation, Causation, Chemicals, Congress, Cancer

You might know her as Don Imus' wife.

Pause.

But Deirdre Imus is also deeply involved with the Imus Ranch for Kids With Cancer and, near as I can tell, someone who is convinced that health begins with a relatively chemical-free life. Today she is celebrating International Childhood Cancer Day with an article about chemicals, cancer and political will, over at the Huffington Post.

I'm not totally convinced by her chemical absolutism, but is it rather shocking to read this:

In 1976 Congress passed the Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA) with the goal of protecting the public and the environment from the harm caused by toxic chemicals. Three decades later, most of the 80,000 chemicals used in commercial products today have never been evaluated for safety by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

And this:

In 1998, the PBS series Frontline aired a story, "Fooling Mother Nature," about toxic chemicals and their affect on humans. Dr. Christopher DeRosa, a director at the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) stated the obvious. "If you start to look at all the data together, you start to see a convergence", said Dr. DeRosa. "It is time for public health action...we may not have a smoking gun, but there are bullets all over the floor."

Even more shocking to me (despite the small sample size), is the cord blood study that she refers to, the Executive Summary of which says:

In a study spearheaded by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) in collaboration with Commonweal, researchers at two major laboratories found an average of 200 industrial chemicals and pollutants in umbilical cord blood from 10 babies born in August and September of 2004 in U.S. hospitals. Tests revealed a total of 287 chemicals in the group. The umbilical cord blood of these 10 children, collected by Red Cross after the cord was cut, harbored pesticides, consumer product ingredients, and wastes from burning coal, gasoline, and garbage.

This study represents the first reported cord blood tests for 261 of the targeted chemicals and the first reported detections in cord blood for 209 compounds. Among them are eight perfluorochemicals used as stain and oil repellants in fast food packaging, clothes and textiles — including the Teflon chemical PFOA, recently characterized as a likely human carcinogen by the EPA's Science Advisory Board — dozens of widely used brominated flame retardants and their toxic by-products; and numerous pesticides.

Look, I don't know what caused my son's leukemia. Recent research on twins seems to indicate a two-stage cause: an initial genetic predisposition (perhaps created very early after egg fertilization) and a later environmental "trigger" that sets off the uncontrolled growth of the leukemic cells.

We have wondered about that environmental trigger.

Was it something in the soil where he used to play "Bob the Builder"? Our house at the time was near an old smokestack....what sort of chemicals would a woolen mill spew into the air? And how long would they linger in the soil?

Then there was the T-Shirt-dying warehouse across the street. Foul smells would sometimes emerge from that place, and strange colored smoke that stained their own roof red.

Happily, we've moved from that town.

We've concluded, though, that the most likely cause was the flu that Fergus came down with 10 months before he was diagnosed. I had never seen him so sick. In fact, he looked so bad that (embarrassingly enough) I took his picture.



It was Christmas, 2003. He was three years old. By the following November, he was a boy with leukemia.

But there's no way of knowing if this was the trigger. In fact, I think we had avoided giving Fergus a flu shot that year because, well, three years old just seemed too young to be injected with whatever it is that comes inside those hypodermic needles.

But if we had given a flu shot that year, would we be wondering whether the shot had been the triggering event?

...Or was it some other, more subtle, trigger--like maybe exposure to of one of those 80,000 untested chemicals that Deirdre Imus talks about?

Frankly, we'll never know. For Fergus, it's too late to matter. For other kids, though? It means all the world. And the bullets are all over the floor.