Poisoned Profits: The Toxic Assault on Our Children

by Philip Shabecoff, Alice Shabecoff

Overview

In this shocking and sobering book, two fearless journalists directly and definitively link industrial toxins to the current rise in childhood disease and death. In the tradition of Silent Spring, Poisoned Profits is a landmark investigation, an eye-opening account of a country that prizes money over children’s health.

With indisputable data, Philip Shabecoff and Alice Shabecoff reveal that the children of baby boomers–the first to be raised in a truly “toxified” world–have higher rates of birth defects, asthma, cancer, autism, and other serious illnesses than previous generations. In piercing case histories, the authors identify the culprit as corporate pollution. Here are the stories of such places as Dickson, Tennessee, where babies were born with cleft lips and palates after landfill chemicals seeped into the water, and Port Neches, Texas, where so many graduates of a high school near synthetic rubber and chemical plants contracted cancer that the school was nicknamed “Leukemia High.”

The danger to our children isn’t just in the outside world, though. The Shabecoffs provide evidence that our homes are now infested with everything from dangerous flame retardants in crib mattresses to harmful plastic softeners in teething rings to antibiotics and arsenic in chicken–additives that are absorbed by growing and physically vulnerable kids as well as by pregnant women. Compounding the problem are chemical corporations that sabotage investigations and regulations, a government that refuses to police these companies, and corporate-hired scientists who keep pertinent secrets massaged with skewed data of their own.

Poisoned Profits also demonstrates how people are fighting back, whether through grassroots parents’ groups putting pressure on politicians, the rise of “ecotheology” in the pulpits of formerly indifferent churches, or the new “green chemistry” being practiced in labs to replace bad elements with good. The Shabecoffs also include helpful tips on reducing risks to children in how they eat and play, and in how parents clean and maintain their homes.

Powerful, unflinching, and eminently readable, Poisoned Profits is a wake-up call that is bound to inspire talk and force change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781588367129
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/12/2008
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	496 KB

About the Author

Philip Shabecoff was the chief environmental correspondent for The New York Times for fourteen of the thirty-two years he worked there as a reporter. After leaving the Times, he founded and published Greenwire, an online daily digest of environmental news. He has appeared on Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Washington Week in Review, CNN News, C-Span, National Public Radio, and the BBC. For his environmental writing, Shabecoff was selected as one of the “Global 500” by the United Nations’ Environmental Program.

Alice Shabecoff is a freelance journalist focusing on family and consumer topics. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and the International Herald Tribune, among other publications. She was executive director of the National Consumers League, the country’s oldest consumer organization, and executive director of the national nonprofit Community Information Exchange.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One
 
Inquest
 
The small city of dickson is in the middle of tennessee, but it could be anywhere in America. It is reached by taking Interstate 40 some thirty-five miles west from Nashville and then exiting onto a busy multilane state highway that bisects the city. The highway itself is drearily familiar, lined with McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, and every other fast-food joint imaginable and by new- and used-car dealerships, body shops, modular-home sales lots, tiny churches with prefabricated steeples, army and navy recruiting stations, convenience stores, gas stations, motels, and a “Save-a-Lot” supermarket. The only out-of-the-very-ordinary feature on the road is a large structure with a bulbous dome, called the Renaissance Center, a multipurpose gathering place built by one of Dickson County’s wealthiest and most influential families. The road is heavily trafficked by speeding cars and trucks, and a pedestrian trying to get from one side to the other is living dangerously.
 
Once off the highway, however, the city appears to be a pleasant place to live. And, in fact, it was attractive enough to increase its population by nearly 40 percent in the 1990s, and it now stands at nearly thirteen thousand. Founded by General Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War as a railway depot to bring munitions and supplies to the Union Army of the Tennessee, it is an old-fashioned-looking town of small but well-kept frame houses, neat lawns, old trees arching over the streets, pretty little parks, and clean parallel roads. The old downtown, basically a single street three blocks long, is now a bit decrepit, an economic casualty of the standardized commercial activity on the big highway. Some of the shops are boarded up, and what had been a movie house now is a store selling general merchandise. A quarter of a mile or so outside of the downtown area, the landscape turns rural: undulating fields with rich green grass, wooded hills, pastures where horses and cows graze indolently, and large, newer houses with carefully tended gardens.
 
It is also a well-watered countryside, with springs, creeks, rivers, and lakes throughout Dickson County, sweet-tasting waters that prompted some of the current residents to buy land and build homes here.
 
Not God’s Fault
 
On a Friday early in May 1998, Judith Cude and her husband, Gary, accompanied their daughter Jenny to the hospital in Nashville where Jenny was to give birth to a son. Mrs. Cude, an attractive middle-aged woman and “Miss Judy” to all, runs the Honey Tree Christian Day Care Center in Dickson. She was looking forward to the birth of her third grandchild. She and the baby’s father and the father’s mother were in the delivery room, and all seemed to be going well. Gary Cude waited in the hall. The attending physician kept up a cheerful, reassuring stream of talk as he assisted Jenny with her labor. “Peyton came out facedown. When Dr. Booker turned him over, he stopped talking,” Judy recalled. “He had his back to us, but when the nurse gave him a shove, he turned around and he had tears running down his cheeks.”
 
The baby’s face was badly disfigured with a cleft lip and a bilateral cleft palate. And though they did not know it immediately, Peyton also had a damaged heart, a valve that failed to close properly. “I had never seen this defect except after it had been fixed,” Judy said of Peyton’s cleft palate. “My heart was in my throat. My husband walked into the room and put his arm around me, and we went into the hall. The first thing I said was, ‘Why would God do this to me, as much as I love children and worked with them all my life? Why would He do this?’ My husband said, ‘Honey, this is not God’s fault.’ ”
 
Elementary Epidemiology
 
Two weeks after Peyton was born, Jenny was given the name of another mother in Dickson whose child, born a couple of months earlier, also had a cleft lip and palate. Then a woman called Judy at her day care center and asked if she could accommodate children with special needs because ultrasound tests found that her child was about to be born with a cleft palate. “That made three,” Judy said. She and the other mothers kept a tally. Soon they had counted six. Judy placed a newspaper advertisement asking families with similar defects to contact her. And, as it turned out, nineteen children had been born in Dickson with a cleft lip and palate in a little over two years. The odds against such a series of identical birth defects were almost certainly too high to be coincidental. In a city the size of Dickson, perhaps as many as two cases of bilateral cleft lip and palate might be expected in the same period. Clearly, something was happening.
 
Cleft palates were not the only ills afflicting Dickson’s children. Within a brief period, four babies were born with a rare brain malformation, where the two hemispheres of the brain are not connected. There have been a large number of cases of hypospadias, a condition in male children where the urethra is inverted. There also has been a high incidence of heart problems in Dickson babies, as well as childhood leukemia, the families reported.
 
“When I realized how many children had defects, I called the Dickson County Health Department,” Judy said. “The registered nurse there said, ‘We’ll bring this up and call you back.’ They never did. I’m still waiting six years later. Then I called the Centers for Disease Control [and Prevention (CDC)] in Atlanta, but they said, ‘This isn’t what we do.’ ” Finally, on the advice of a public health official in Nashville, she contacted Betty Mekdeci, who runs a nonprofit organization in Orlando, Florida, that monitors birth defects around the nation. Mekdeci told her that there were as many babies with cleft palates born in Dickson during that period as in the entire state of Wisconsin and nine times the national average. Following Mekdeci’s advice, Judy got a map of Dickson County and put an “X” down to mark the location of each family with a cleft palate baby. What she found was surprising. Most of the families lived in the southwest quadrant of the county, where the Dickson County landfill is located.
 
The Source?
 
The landfill had opened in 1968 as the Dickson City dump. A decade later, the county bought the property and expanded it for use as a sanitary landfill; though the Tennessee Department of Public Health found the area suitable for use as a sanitary landfill, it recommended that no liquid wastes be disposed of there. Nevertheless, the landfill soon began accepting industrial liquid wastes from manufacturing facilities in the area, including Scovill-Schrader, Inc., which made automotive parts. It would be another ten years, however, before tests were conducted to determine if water beneath and around the fill was contaminated, and then only after a nearby resident contacted the county to voice a suspicion that a spring on her property might be contaminated.
 
It was. Tests conducted by private contractors working for the county and state, and later by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), found that a brew of chemicals from the landfill had made its way to the groundwater under the dump and was spreading out through the karst rock, a geologic foundation riddled with countless cracks, that underlies much of Dickson County. The pollutants included toxic chemicals such as benzene, toluene, xylene, and, most ubiquitously, trichloroethylene (TCE), an industrial solvent widely used for degreasing machine parts and in the production of other chemicals. TCE had been heavily used and then dumped in the landfill and elsewhere by the Scovill-Schrader plant and other manufacturers in the area, Judy Cude and other residents said. TCE is known or suspected of causing a number of chronic illnesses, including several forms of cancer and birth defects. There is evidence that it can be a specific cause of cleft palates, although the available data is limited.

Table of Contents

Introduction     xi
Inquest     3
Indictment     15
Victims     25
Evidence     38
Scene of the Crime     68
Forensics     95
Perpetrators     126
Co-Conspirators     153
Witnesses for the Defense     172
Posse Comitatus     198
Values     220
Justice     236
Acknowledgments     261
How to Reduce Your Child's Risk and Change the Future     263
Resources     277
Notes     285
Bibliography     339
Index     341

Editorial Reviews

The authors of this unsettling indictment of American industrial mendacity detail the impact of the "trillions of tons" of largely unregulated toxic pollutants that have been poured into the environment after WWII when synthetic chemical compounds entered mainstream life. The Shabecoffs argue that the world is becoming a perilous place for the young; fetuses, newborns and toddlers are vastly more vulnerable to environmental contaminants than adults, and hazards lie latent in teething rings (leaching plastic toxins), bath water (laced with chemical contaminants), lush lawns (dusted with herbicides) and the very air they breathe-all contributing directly to a "rising incidence of childhood illness," including asthma, autism, cancer-once "a rarity" among children-and even a drop in average IQ. The authors build their compelling case against polluters like dogged prosecutors, condemning "perpetrators," including General Electric and Dow Chemical, slamming "co-conspirators," most prominently compliant conservative governments, and exposing "witnesses for the defense," among them misleading scientists-for-hire. The authors' passionate exposé of corporate America's behavior is numbing in its impact; an appendix detailing steps parents can take to reduce risk eases the angst. (Aug. 12)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

Two environmental journalists angrily assert that spineless politicians and lenient regulators defer to rapacious industrialists as their factories drench America in toxic pollutants. The authors provide an avalanche of anecdotes featuring dreadfully sick children and their devastated parents appealing in vain to guilty industries and getting no help from mealy-mouthed officials. In chapter after chapter, they describe innumerable toxins, their poisonous effects, the researchers who study and denounce them, the regulators who sometimes act but mostly complain that their hands are tied and the industry representatives who defend their products, repeating ad nauseum that the evidence for harm is not conclusive. To those who assume scientists don't know what causes most birth defects, cancers, allergies, asthma, Alzheimer's, mental illness, attention-deficit disorder and premature births, this book offers the answer: pollution. Sadly, the Shabecoffs are preaching to the choir, pouring out so many horror stories that shell-shocked readers may grow annoyed with their bias. The authors treat industry representatives with the contempt they deserve, but not every victim or lawyer merits the respectful absence of skepticism accorded them here, and fringe groups given similar hands-off treatment include antifluoridation advocates and people who insist vaccines cause autism. The authors glide right over the unpalatable reality that industrial pollution is now so catastrophically severe that making the bad guys pay will not solve the problem. Taxpayers will end up funding the cleanup, and stricter regulation will mean more expensive goods. Politicians refuse to deliver this news because they want tobe reelected, but the Shabecoffs don't have this excuse. They conclude with sensible instructions for minimizing toxins within the household and good advice for regulatory reform, but neither is likely to improve our environment anytime soon. The best exposes leave readers yearning to take action. This one will make them want to gnash their teeth and discard their plastic containers. Agent: Wendy Strothman/The Strothman Agency

Kirkus Reviews