Tony Stefani is an American hero. Not just because of his 28 years of service as a captain with the San Francisco Fire Department. Not just because he’s a cancer survivor who started a non-profit to prevent cancer among firefighters. All of that would make him hero enough, but not enough for Tony.

For years Tony has been a tireless advocate for better fire safety standards without harmful flame-retardant chemicals. His battle against these risky chemicals began after he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that his doctor said was usually only seen in chemical industry workers. Then he learned that two other firefighters from his station developed a more common version of the same cancer.

We are all exposed to risky flame-retardant chemicals every day. Most of the furniture sold in the U.S. is doused with these toxic chemicals — in some cases as much as two pounds of flame retardants are used in a single couch. In our recent work, CEH found flame retardants in baby products and nap mats used in daycares nationwide. Some flame retardants are known to causecancer, and others can interfere with hormones, reproductive systems, thyroid and metabolic function, and neurological development in infants and children, among other health hazards.

But firefighters face a double burden. In addition to these everyday exposures, firefighters can be dosed with massive amounts of these chemicals, and the cancer-causing dioxins and furans that are produced when the chemicals burn, when they work in and around burning buildings. A recent study found that the levels of a common flame retardant in the blood of 12 firefighters studied was 2-3 times higher than the levels found in the general population. One firefighter in the study had 11 times more of this flame retardant in his blood than average. Women firefighters face particular risks: A recent survey found that 10 of 117 women firefighters in San Francisco between ages 40 and 50 had developed breast cancer, nearly six times higher than the rate for women of that age in the general population.

When Tony Stefani connected his workplace exposures with his cancer diagnosis, he decided to take action. He founded the San Francisco Firefighters Cancer Prevention Foundation, an all-volunteer non-profit organization dedicated to the prevention and detection of cancer in both active and retired firefighters of the San Francisco Fire Department. The group’s annual screenings have caught six cancer cases so far.

He also speaks out regularly at legislative hearings to insure that California lawmakers know that we need a new state standard for furniture flammability, one that offers better fire safety and doesn’t require companies to use harmful chemicals. Now, California regulators are listening. The state has finally proposed an update to a 38-year-old standard, an outdated approach that has resulted in widespread use of flame-retardant chemicals in furniture nationwide. The updated standard takes a modern, scientific approach to fire safety, without harmful chemicals.

What’s Tony’s response? He’s started a petition calling for support of this new, safer standard. He also plans to be in Sacramento on March 26 to speak at a public hearing on the issue and deliver the signatures on the day the public comment period closes.

Firefighters know the risks they face every time they respond to a call. Given their daily life-saving service to our communities, shouldn’t we all take one minute to help prevent avoidable illnesses to firefighters — especially when this simple action will also help protect our children’s and families’ health? Please take a minute today to sign Tony’s petition in support of safer fire safety.

Crossposted from Huffington Post

When is a flame retardant not a flame retardant?

When it is no more effective in retarding flames than, well, nothing.

Since fire safety experts and government studies say that chemical flame retardants as they are used in many products are not effective, maybe we should stop calling them flame retardants.

Recently nonprofits from seven states announced that nap mats used in daycares nationwide contain harmful flame retardant chemicals, including a flame retardant that has been linked to cancer and others linked to hormone disruption and other serious health problems.

Maybe we should stop saying “flame retardant chemicals” and start calling them what they are: hidden time bombs.

Since most daycares don’t allow the kids to smoke at nap time, flame retardants are not only ineffective in nap mats, they’re also completely unnecessary. One of the unnecessary flame retardants found in several of the nap mats we tested is chlorinated Tris, a chemical linked to the development of cancer that was removed from children’s pajamas more than 30 years ago.

How did this happen? How could we allow chemical companies to put these useless and harmful chemicals in products our children and families use every day?

The Chicago Tribune recently exposed how decades ago, Big Tobacco and Big Chemical got together to promote the use of chemical flame retardants, in order to fend off legislative efforts calling for fire-safe cigarettes. Their advocacy (read: money) resulted in a 1970s-era California flammability standard (called TB 117) that to this day promotes the use of chemical flame retardants in furniture and other products sold nationwide.

Thankfully, last summer California Gov. Jerry Brown ordered state regulators to revise the standard to avoid supporting these harmful chemicals, and just this month the state released its proposed new rule (TB 117-2013). Due to the size of the California market, a new state standard here will impact furniture and other suppliers nationwide. So everyone in the country should write to the California Department of Consumer Affairs in support of the proposed standard.

But there’s still another reason that flame retardants have remained in use long after their severe health impacts were discovered. It’s the same reason that lead was used in gasoline and other products, and asbestos was used in hundreds of products, even decades after it was clear that people were getting seriously ill from these substances.

For too long, we have had the idea that products should be allowed on the market and considered safe until proven otherwise. The proof of safety, then, doesn’t happen with lab experiments on guinea pigs. Instead, our children and families are the guinea pigs in the chemical industry’s experiments.

What if we did things differently? What if chemical companies had to demonstrate that their products were safe before they were allowed to put them into our children’s nap mats, and into hundreds of other products our children and families use every day?

That’s a common sense change that could end needless illnesses and suffering. It’s also a change that would spur innovation in business, creating incentives for truly sustainable products that reap sustainable profits — not decades of lawsuits by victims who were sickened by hazardous products.

This ”safety first” approach is why we support the Safe Chemicals Act, which would for the first time in more than 30 years revise the main law governing U.S. chemical policy. The chemical hazards that we found in children’s nap mats show that it’s long past time to make this change, for our children’s health.

Crossposted from Huffington Post, see original article here.

As published on Huffington Post.

Earlier this month, the first-ever legally binding global treaty to protect people and the environment from mercury pollution made history when 140 nations reached agreement after four years of talks. The Minamata Convention on mercury pollution was hailed by Human Rights Watch, which has been battling to protect children in small scale gold mining communities from inadequate child labor protections and the severe health threats from mercury pollution related to mining.

Most Americans have also never heard of the Minamata mercury disaster. In the 1950s, in the town of Minamata, Japan, the Chisso Corporation began dumping large amounts of mercury into Minamata Bay and Minamata River. As a fishing and fish-eating community, when mercury moved up the food chain, the toxic chemical affected virtually everyone, killing 700 people, crippling as many as 9,000 others, and poisoning up to 50,000 who lived within 35 miles of the bay. Children born with mercury pollution suffered for decades more.

Like Monsanto’s years of dumping PCBs in Anniston, Ala., or DuPont’s dumping of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA, also known as C8) in Wood County, W. Va., company documentsshow that Chisso knew about the health effects from its mercury dumping, yet continued the practice for years as thousands of people suffered. Today, fracking companies are still allowed to use mass amounts of undisclosed toxic chemicals that can cause serious air and water pollution.

When I founded the Center for Environmental Health in 1996, one of our first efforts successfully helped close California’s last medical waste incinerator, a polluting plant in a low-income community just a stone’s throw from San Francisco Bay. At the time, medical waste incineration was known as the fourth leading source of mercury pollution. Community-based groups pointed to the environmental injustice of incinerators and other polluting industries that are disproportionately sited in their neighborhoods. We joined with the community-based groups working to shut the incinerator in support of environmental justice and because we believe that everyone has the human right to an environment free from chemical health threats.

To some, calling environmental health a human right seems radical. But as Rachel Carson said inSilent Spring, “If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons… it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.” Today, several state constitutions contain provisions on the right to a healthy environment, and their courts have used these provisions to establish the states’ right to act to prevent pollution in the face of serious health or environmental threats. Of 193 UN member nations, 177 today recognize the right to an “environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being… ” The U.S. remains one of the few holdouts unwilling to recognize this fundamental human right.

Fernando Lugris of Uruguay, the chair of the Minamata Convention on mercury pollution, noted on the adoption of the treaty that “[W]e have… opened a new chapter towards a sustainable future. This has been done in the name of vulnerable populations everywhere and represents an opportunity for a healthier and more sustainable century for all peoples.” Let’s take this as one hopeful step towards environmental justice and the right to a healthy environment for all.

Follow Michael Green on Twitter: www.twitter.com/4envirohealth

See the original article on Huffington Post here.

I gave testimony as part of a panel of experts that also included Jake Hays, the Program Director for Physicians Scientists and Engineers for Healthy energy; Dr. Donna Flayhan, the Director of the Lower Manhattan Public Health Project, Mary Jane Uttech, the  Deputy Public Health Director from the Cortland County Health Department, and pediatrician Dr. Larysa Dirszka.

The Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) created the new proposed fracking rules, yet failed to testify or even to submit written testimony.

In my testimony, I described just some of the health and environmental concerns surrounding fracking, including air and water pollution and the potential impacts from hormone-altering chemicals used in some fracking operations. Indeed, chemicals used in fracking carry a wide variety of potential health hazards. As I discussed, a 2011 review found that 632 chemicals have been used in natural gas fracking; the review found that many studies demonstrating health hazards from these chemicals, including:

• 75% of the chemicals have been linked to damage to skin, eyes, respiratory and gastrointestinal systems.

• roughly 40-50% could affect the brain and nervous, immune and cardiovascular systems and the kidneys.

• 37% could affect the endocrine system.

•25% were carcinogens and mutagens.

Despite these risks, the DEC’s proposed fracking rules fail to provide even for our basic right to know about chemicals used by fracking companies. Instead, the proposed rules allow companies to keep their use of toxic chemicals secret — making it difficult if not impossible to track when their operations pollute our air or water.

That’s why CEH called on DEC to go back to the drawing board, and require an independent, comprehensive health impacts assessment before they issue any regulations on fracking.

-SF Gate, November 2012

This week, a spate of excellent media came out, covering the release of two new studies showing the prevalence of toxic flame retardant chemicals in household furniture, electronics, and other products. The studies, led by UC Berkeley and Duke University scientists, found toxic or untested flame retardants in most of the couches they examined from across the nation. Numerous studies have linked fire retardant chemicals to lower IQ, reduced fertility, hormonal changes, reproductive harm, and damage to children’s brain development.

In the SF Chronicle, CEH’s own Sue Chiang speaks about the organization’s work to eliminate toxic flame retardants from furniture and baby products, and how this issue effects her kids and family directly. Many parents express concern about how these chemicals will negatively effect their children’s health.

For the original stories:

Chemicals in Furniture Hard to Avoid (featuring photos of CEH’s own Sue Chiang), San Francisco Chronicle SF Gate, November 2012

Flame Retardants From Furniture Found In Household Dust, NPR, November 2012

Many Couches Contain Potentially Toxic Flame Retardants, USA Today, November 2012

For the members of Union de Vecinos, this truth has mobilized and empowered their struggle for clean, healthy water for the city of Maywood, a small, working-class community in southeast Los Angeles County. For years whenever residents and members of Union de Vecinos protested the dirty tap water, they were told that they needed to do more specific studies of the different chemicals in the water, follow protocols for sampling and look at the water reports. Community leaders were frustrated because knowing what was wrong with the water was not enough to solve the problem.

One day one of our leaders Rafael Castro said, “The problem with the water is not that it is dirty, but that we have no control of it. If it was our water company we’d start cleaning and we’d stop asking why it was so dirty. What we need to do is take control of the water company.”

That is when Union de Vecinos’ campaign changed from a campaign about science to a campaign about democracy.

The right to clean and safe drinking water is a fundamental human right. Recognizing this right is not just a battle to avoid drinking dangerous water, it is also a fight for justice.

The balance of power regarding water issues is changing in Maywood. The problem with the city’s water is that the people who make the decisions don’t drink the water, bathe in it, or cook with it. The mutual water companies are controlled by absentee landlords in a city that is 75% tenants. Despite resource laws and national media coverage of their water’s known toxic chemicals and their dangerous health effects, Maywood is still plagued by foul-smelling and tasting, brown tap water.)

Numerous tests on Maywood’s tap water, including by the CA Department of Public Health have found dangerously high levels of manganese, which can disrupt the nervous system and is linked to Parkinson’s disease. There is no health standard for manganese and therefore no legal incentive for companies to purge it from the water supply. Another chemical contained in Maywood’s water supply is trichloroethylene (TCE), a byproduct of industrial waste that is known to cause cancer and liver damage. In addition there are documented dangerous levels of lead, mercury, and di (2-ethylhexyl) phthalates, a manufactured chemical commonly added to plastics. The mile radius of Maywood is also afflicted by the nearby Pemaco Superfund site, a chemical plant that burned down in 1993, that left a legacy of toxic contaminants.

Public officials continue to claim that dirty brown tap water is merely an aesthetic issue, not a public health risk. But Maywood residents continue to pay double for their water: to the water companies and vendors, or for store-bought bottled water to drink.

For years Union de Vecinos partnering with Comité Cívico del Agua and the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water have been working hard to organize and collaborate with community groups, local water boards, utilities commissions, state and local agencies to create a public water system in Maywood. Union de Vecinos is actively organizing trainings for the new water board, ongoing community forums, and outreach and support to residents.

This year they organized a meeting of water and land use experts in California to provide technical assistance to their Water Justice Committee to address several of the critical issues impacting the Water Companies, such as chemical filtration, cleaning up corroded infrastructure and financial resources. Leaders and advocates of Union de Vecinos are hopeful and excited so that they, the residents of Maywood, can begin to clean the water as soon as they control it.

Democratizing the water system will place the power over this precious resource directly into the hands of the residents, and guarantee the basic human right to have clean, healthy water for the future generations in Maywood.

Armed with knowledge and skills, PODER youth organizers created a project to engage youth in their neighborhoods in activities promoting the reduction of car and truck emissions in southeast San Francisco.  They encouraged youth to participate in co-ops, and inspired them to organize for community parks and gardens, affordable housing, and jobs. The youth created community resiliency biking tours to highlight environmental health hazards and community organizing victories in their neighborhoods while promoting sustainable transportation through biking at the same time.

The tours have grown and evolved in the past five years. In 2007, young people in the Common Roots program, a cross cultural collaborative between PODER and the Chinese Progressive Association, planned and hosted a toxics tour that educated other youth, media, and policy makers about the environmental hazards present in their neighborhoods. Small teams organizedto find and point out sources of pollution, build awareness of toxic exposure and its lifelong health impacts on the community. They marked these locations as stops in the toxic tour. They led the toxic tour throughout the city each one highlighting a different issue, from air pollution to sewage, incineration and industrial waste, to see how the mix of toxic chemicals is immediate and taking a severe toll on community health.

The youth-lead effort calls out environmental racism in San Francisco and how it is growing up in low-income and minority neighborhoods that don’t receive the same attention from government officials that more prosperous locations do. The bike tours marry environmental awareness about pollution and health behaviors with reducing transport carbon footprint through direct action organizing and collaborating with local businesses – entirely designed and mobilized by San Francisco’s young people.

For Edgar Molina, the benefits of this project are clear: “By becoming part of a co-op like the Bike Kitchen, not only do we get a bike at the end, but we gain skills and access to materials to fix and maintain our bikes to transport ourselves throughout the city without having to worry about whether or not we have bus fare. Also, by working on the bike resiliency tour of the Mission not only are we physically exercising and promoting alternative forms of travel but we are also educating our neighbors about the injustices our neighborhoods face and our victories that create change.”

We’re pleased to launch our 2012  Voter Guide with our positions on all of the ballot initiatives that will effect the health of you and your family.  We want to help you get the information you need to be an informed and engaged voter who votes with the health of your family and community in mind.

The election next week will be close, and your vote will make a difference.  Please see our guide below, and click here for a printable version of our Voter Guide that you can bring with you to the polls!

The Center for Environmental Health’s 2012 CA Voter Guide

For more information on why voting YES on Prop 37 is the clear choice, check out our helpful blog posts on GMO food risks and the corporate money from big agribusiness corporations like Monsanto.

From Dolly to Dinner: Your Right to Know

GMO foods are currently found in 70% of packaged supermarket food & pose serious health risks. Why it’s important to stand up for your right to know what’s in your food.

GMO Food Labeling: Lies and the Lying GMO Food Liars Who Tell Them

Debunking the myths and lies that Monsanto and the agribusiness industry have been spreading about GMO food labeling.

The Big Lie: Prop 37 and Lawsuits

The anti-Prop 37 campaign falsely claims labeling GMOs will lead to lawsuits- but GMO labels will help doctors trace health problems from these foods.

Political science professor Steven Schier of Carleton College called spending the “key variable” in the Prop 37 race, but the good professor is missing the other key variable that the anti-choice corporations have on their side: the ability and willingness to lie about labeling GMO foods.

Perhaps the biggest lie told by the anti-choice crowd is that GMO labels will result in increased food costs for needy families. To support this lie, the industry points to studies (funded by (surprise!) industry) that use absurd assumptions coupled with seemingly complex formulas to come up with ridiculous “estimates” of cost increases. But they never talk about any of the dozens of countries that have adopted GMO food labeling. Why don’t they want to talk about these countries? Because there is not a single real-world case they can point to where GMO labels have resulted in increased food costs. As Consumers Union (publisher of Consumer Reports magazine) has stated about GMO labeling, “Based on the experience of the European Union [countries] that have instituted mandatory labeling of genetically engineered food, we anticipate that the impact on consumer food prices will be negligible.”

The San Francisco Chronicle has pointed out that the anti-choice campaign’s cost increase estimates have not been independently verified, and noted that the anti-campaign lied about an increased state bureaucracy that would cost the state “millions” of dollars. This whopper is just one of the lies told by Monsanto and their allies. Their desperate campaign of lies and distortions has already been exposed for the following dirty tricks:

• Including the FDA logo along with a phony FDA statement suggesting the agency opposes the initiative in a mailer that went to thousands of Californians. In fact, the agency has taken no position, and use of the FDA logo by private groups is prohibited.
• Stating in the official voters’ guide that the Academy of Nutrition opposes Prop 37. The nutritionists’ group put out a statement to correct the Monsanto lie, noting that “Voters need accurate information in order to make an informed choice” (which sounds delightfully similar to the Yes on 37 argument that consumers need accurate labels to make an informed choice when they shop).
• Claiming that no foods could be labeled as “natural” under Prop 37. An NPR blogger uncritically repeated this claim, until CEH staff pointed out that it was a total lie. When the blogger went back to the author of the study with the CEH critique, she recanted her claim and admitted that Prop 37 “could be interpreted different ways.”
• Relying on a phony “expert” with a false affiliation. In an early TV ad, the anti-37 campaign spokesperson was identified as “Dr. Henry Miller, MD, Stanford University.” In fact, Miller works for the far-right Hoover Institute, and has a long history of denying climate change, promoting pesticide use and nuclear power, and attacking the FDA. When Stanford (where the Institute is based) learned about the false use of its name, they demanded the ad be changed.

What else does the anti-choice campaign say? They say Prop 37 was written by trial lawyers so they can pursue lawsuits and big paydays. In fact, the Yes on Prop 37 effort is a grassroots campaign led by Californians who simply want to know what’s in our food. The Monsanto campaign says Prop 37 has “loopholes,” but the exemptions in the measure are there to protect businesses (like restaurants) that generally don’t have the same labeling requirements that grocery food has. They say Prop 37 is anti-science and would ban safe foods. But Prop 37 doesn’t ban anything – it simply says people have a right to know what’s in our food. Further, there is nothing to back their argument that GMO foods have been around for many years without health problems. As pediatric neurologist Dr. Martha Herbert (who is actually a professor at Harvard) says, “Tracing health problems to genetically engineered foods is almost impossible right now, because these foods are not labeled and there is no way to keep track of them. So there is no scientific basis at this time for saying that these foods are problem-free.”

But maybe the biggest lie Monsanto told about GMO labeling was in the 1990’s, when the company told consumers in Great Britain that “Food labeling has Monsanto’s full backing.” Apparently this is a company will say anything to get your vote. Don’t fall for it – vote Yes on Prop 37!

In dozens of other countries GMO labeling is required, but here the FDA claims no authority to require GMO labels on these foods. Given the agency’s failure, California has no choice but to protect its citizens by mandating truthful GMO labeling.

Companies that make GMO foods say they can create healthier food with genetic tinkering, although no such GMO foods are currently on the market. But they do have high hopes. Earlier this month, for example, genetic researchers boldly announced they had successfully created a GMO cow to produce “hypoallergenic” milk. Given that milk allergies are a serious problem, especially for young children, this achievement was hailed widely by the worldwide press as a milestone for human health.

There are just a few small details (completely missed or severely underemphasized by most press accounts) that sour the claims about the new GMO wonder milk. Like, the fact that it won’t work and may cause even worse allergies than natural milk. And the fact that it relies on genetic technologies that are inherently cruel to animals and result in massive, unnecessary animal suffering.

Who says it won’t work? Not me – that’s the word from Dr. Hugh Sampson, Director of the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at Mount Sinai Medical School, who when asked about the GMO cow said bluntly, “(T)hat’s not going to eliminate allergies.” The reason is that the GMO cow milk eliminates one kind of allergy-causing protein but increases levels of casein, another milk protein that can cause even more severe allergies. But don’t take his word for it – ask his colleague Dr. Scott Sicherer, Chief of the Division of Allergy & Immunology in the Department of Pediatrics at Mount Sinai. He says the casein-enriched GMO milk “would seem problematic” given that scientists believe that casein “causes most of the severe milk allergies.” Or check in with Dr. Robert Wood, the Director of the Division of Pediatric Allergy and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, who said the GMO milk is “probably the worst-case scenario for most of our patients.”

Ironically, Dr. Woods’ statement was buried in a Los Angeles Times story about proponents of GMO foods who complain that the government isn’t approving foods from GMO animals fast enough. Because when you’ve got great products from GMO animals, like hyper-allergenic milk that could make even more kids sick and causes severe unnecessary animal suffering, why wouldn’t you want to rush these products to the market – especially in a country that has no required safety tests or labeling for GMO foods?

Who says creating food from GMO animals is risky and cruel? Not me – that’s what the world’s leading animal cloning scientists say. To create a GMO cow, scientists must first create a clone with the desired trait. But cloning means mass animal suffering. One cloning scientist recently told the New York Times about her failures to create a cloned monkey, referring to the “grotesquely abnormal embryos” as her “gallery of horrors.” But food animal clones like cows and pigs are different, right? Wrong. As Ian Wilmut, creator of Dolly the sheep, the first mammal clone told the Times, “cloning appears to create serious abnormalities in almost all embryos.” One review of the cloning literature listed just a few of the common problems found in cow clones:

(L)large offspring syndrome [a condition often fatal or debilitating to the clone and the surrogate mother cow] , diabetes, pulmonary hypertension, dilated cardiomyopathy, internal hemorrhaging umbilical artery, viral infection, dystocia, kidney problems, leg malformations, pneumonia, heart defects, liver fibrosis, osteoporosis, joint defects, anemia, and placental abnormalities.”

In pigs, this study found problems including “abnormal teat numbers, cleft lips, and malformed limbs,” and recently more pig cloning problems have come to light. In FDA’s 2007 review promoting the “safety” of cloned food, the agency admitted that success rates in pig cloning “are low even when compared to reports of cloning in other species.” But even for “successful” animal clones, life is nasty, poor, brutish and short. In one Franken-research project, 22 out of 35 “successfully” cloned pigs died within the first week of life (another five died at birth) after suffering numerous health problems, including cerebromeningitis, diarrhea, leg and face abnormalities, male pseudohermaphroditism, and others. The authors concluded blandly that their data showed that “the safety and long-term adverse biological effects of cloning must be further investigated.”

Allergy-free milk is hardly the first false promise from genetic food manipulators. Proponents of GMO animal foods include Canadian scientists who spent more than a decade to bring the phony “Enviropig” to market and the GMO salmon company Aqua Bounty, which has been promising unlabeled, untested GMO salmon for about as long. Other creepy researchers are attempting to bring GMO food from just about every food-animal species on the planet to market, whether consumers want this Frankenfood or not.

Labeling the current crop of GMO foods is important enough, but when we consider the potential GMO animal foods that industry wants to  bring to our dinner tables, untested and unlabeled, Prop37 is even more important. If you want the right to choose safe, natural, non-GMO food, vote YES on Prop 37!