How Far Would I Go to Protect Children? by Jean-Marie Kauth

Figure 1: Katherine undergoing her first bone-marrow transplant – I was sure there was a better picture. This issue is personal. This book is personal. This blog is personal. Recently, I was talking with Robin Coleman, my editor at Johns Hopkins University Press, about promoting the book, and even though I am a private person, I found myself saying that I would tell my story however painful, that I would plaster billboards all over town with pictures of Katherine dead if it meant that one child did not suffer what she – and we – have suffered. Parents of children killed in mass shootings have weighed doing just that. Some parents and journalists believe publishing crime-scene photos could trigger change. Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp tried to represent the magnitude of loss by capturing the bedrooms of young victims. Mom Jada Scruggs insisted on her daughter Haillie’s existence, “She was real. She was here.” The Washington Post wrote about the physical aftermath inflicted on children by rampant shootings, fostered in this country by weak gun laws and a violent culture. The article, titled “The Blast Effect: How Bullets from an AR-15 Blow the Body Apart,” demonstrated this not with bloody pictures of what a high-velocity bullet does to a tiny body, but with schematics, detailed descriptions of post-mortems, and accounts from doctors who have had to try to repair the damage. The authors were trying to make it real for people – in hopes that more will call for commonsense gun laws. Already, most Americans support stricter legislation. But the gun industry does not, and so the politicians to whom they contribute revolting amounts of money fail to protect us. Political science research affirms the hunch that most politicians vote not with their constituents, but with their largest donors. While some parents feel ready to share pictures of their dead children, journalists hesitate to publish them. Public images could scar families further. They could motivate trolls to persecute them, as was the case with the notorious Alex Jones-Sandy Hook debacle. They could normalize or even motivate violence. Then why would any parent, why would I think about doing such a horrendous thing? Maybe it’s simple. That is what gets people’s attention. The journalism trope that “if it bleeds, it leads,” is not for nothing. Gaper delays are reliably built into accident management. People are fascinated with others’ suffering, others’ deaths – in stories, movies, and real life. The bloody mangled display of a dead Emmett Till that his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, bravely chose to show to the world was key in the fight against racist violence. Figure 2: Mamie Till-Mobley at Her Son’s Funeral Is viewing photographs like this just voyeurism? Just cathartic release – the relief that at least this time, it’s not me? Not all such displays are viewed like snuff films. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been Catholic all my life and grew up contemplating Christ on the Cross at the front of the church, the agony of Mary gazing up at Jesus suffering, the bleeding sacred heart, but I don’t think so. I remember enduring the out-of-body agony of Katherine’s funeral and gazing upon the cross just to feel connection with some other suffering human – God or mortal almost didn’t matter. I can’t help but wonder if this natural tendency humans have to witness suffering is actually empathy – at least for some. Strange to say, but grotesque tech billionaires like Elon Musk argue that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of Western society,” our Achilles heel. Marc Andreessen argues that introspection is dumb because “it causes emotional disorders.” I am not the person I once was, but I cannot imagine being so far gone that I believed that compassion – one of the greatest of virtues, a feeling rooted in love – could be seen as a flaw. I guess that is the difference between someone who only weighs strength against weakness, not virtue against sin. Whose emptiness can only be filled up by transitory dollar signs and world-destroying wealth. Who believes only in triumph, not in redemption. I would not be that person or envy those riches for anything. Evolutionary theory once posited that altruism in nature was paradoxical. That if creatures actually put others’ good before their own, they would be eliminated in the struggle for life. Therefore, to this way of thinking, all goodness or consideration of others is either an illusion or a fatal weakness to be eliminated. It worries me to hear this in current culture – particularly among the manosphere. More recent science shows that actually, evolutionarily, our empathy, community, and ability to care for one another is our greatest strength – and is the reason for our success, much more than our big brains. Likewise, dogs succeeded not because they had bigger teeth or fiercer dispositions but precisely because they have a talent for love. Wolves in early stages of domestication cooperated with humans, and both humans and dogs have prospered in the process. So coming back to the question of what is right for me to share about my daughter’s suffering: I think there is a balance. To be clear, Katherine’s last wish was to be remembered. Robin agreed not everything would be right for the book, but that more might make for an engaging interview. He thinks people may listen to our story and that of others. The science on environmental health is all there and has been for decades. What has been missing is people witnessing the impacts of losing a child this way. Yes, there are St. Jude’s Commercials, but they are all focused on cures, not causes. There is no whisper that these children might never have become sick if it weren’t for the petrochemical industry poisoning our children. When there is a gory car accident on the road or a bloody shooting in a school, with pitifully shattered bodies piled up on the highways or in the hallways, there is no doubt what caused it. But the more extended, tenuous, hidden chains of causation from slow poisoning can be difficult to register. Our brains were built over eons more to protect us from immediate, visible harms like saber-tooth tigers, less from long-term threats to health. But the infiltration of our entire world with invisible poisons is causing more death than shootings, shark attacks, and accidents combined. Hundreds of millions die every year from cancer, cardiovascular disease, birth defects, autoimmune and metabolic disease, and many other chronic diseases caused by toxic chemicals. Perhaps it would be wrong to share our suffering if it were only to elicit pity, to call upon sympathy and support for years when others need help more in the present. But when cautionary tales can actually motivate people to make things better for all, that is fundamentally different. I will stop sharing our story and others’ once laws are passed that protect our children, once people are aware of the hazards they face going about their ordinary lives. Empathy is not only a human virtue that makes you a better person. It is also protective and adaptive. When you read a story about a person suffering and dying from something – or even witness it first-hand – you may feel compassion, you may extend a hand or a hug. But you may also strive to protect yourself and your own loved ones from those harms. As a literature professor, I have long entered into others’ suffering. What do we get out of this, Aristotle wondered in his Poetics? The answer is not, I would argue, simply catharsis. Empathy develops the ability to exist outside of oneself, in a sphere larger than between our own two ears, behind our own two eyes. It enlarges our experiences and expands our minds. And that has both tangible and intangible benefits. So, whatever it costs me, however much it hurts, I am prepared to share my sorrow and hers in the coming months, in hopes that doing so might change the world just slightly for the better. Thanks for reading. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. -Jean-Marie Kauth How Far Would I Go To Protect Children?

"It has been twenty-four years: How painful it is to write these words. It never gets easier, and it never will – as I always knew and as I now see for certain"

 

Some people call sorrow that lasts more than one year “complicated grief” or “pathological grief.” I call it the price I pay for loving an extraordinary person extraordinarily much. The intensity of sorrow correlates to the intensity of attachment, and most parents who lose children never get over it. We have to live out every bitter moment that should have been sweet.

People often remark on how short life feels, and at 57, I get why they say that. The days fly by, the years evaporate. But imagine having to leave the party at just eight years old. And the worst thing is, she understood all she would be missing. She wanted to finish learning cursive at St. Irene’s School; she wanted to play in the kiddie pool with her friends on a sunny June day; she wanted to be Tinkerbell for Halloween; she wanted to adopt a baby so she could watch it grow. 

She got none of those things, none of the quotidian joys, none of the lifetime landmarks. She told me not to bury her dolls with her – because she did not want that for her children. Can you imagine truly understand you would be rotting in the grave within days at such a young age? She should have been raising children of her own by now.

I am not sure my children will ever have children of their own. They have seen what losing Katherine has done to us, and unfortunately, they know all too well – from me – the perils that await parents and children now.

When I had Katherine, it was not until she was born that I understood what I had done to myself – that I loved her so much that it would destroy me if anything bad ever happened to her. Her first day on Earth, I thought “oh no – what have I done?” – as I fell in love at first sight. Her last day I thought would kill me. I often wish it had.

But mostly, I went into parenthood with serene sanguinity. I thought that the days when so many children died in childhood were behind us – with vaccines and antibiotics conquering communicable disease, with car seats shielding their travel and “back to sleep” guarding their nights. I knew a few children were diagnosed with leukemia, but I thought that was mostly a problem in heavily industrialized areas, and I focused on the fact that many cases of leukemia are now cured. I thought that with effort and intention, I could protect her.

Little did I think that we were poisoning our children from before conception and every day after with every breath they inhale, every sip they take, every bite they eat. Little did I think that even the tender and intimate act of breastfeeding was conveying my lifetime exposure, my body burden of toxic chemicals, right into her rapidly developing self.

Our families, our town, our country, and we ourselves in our ordinary daily habits – things everyone did then, like heating food in plastic, putting a flea collar on the dog, replacing carpet – all participated in her poisoning. We have built our world to poison children. Even those taking drastic steps to avoid it – like eliminating pesticides, eating organic, filtering air and water, and limiting plastics and personal care products – are not free from toxic trespass.

And the petrochemical industry chiefly responsible for poisoning people and planet are marketing their toxic products – especially plastics – harder than ever. They have ruthlessly purchased our politicians – anyone who has ever spoken the words “drill, baby, drill” for starters – and are trying to hold back the necessary transition to renewable energies and cleaner materials. 

They have cruelly sabotaged the Paris Climate Agreement and pitilessly thwarted the UN’s Global Plastics Treaty. The Trump Administration, in thrall to these behemoths, has utterly gutted all the salutary steps towards addressing climate change and toxic contamination that the Biden Administration had taken.

I once thought of politics as something I wasn’t that interested in. I thought my one duty was to show up at election time. Little did I think that decisions made in the halls of power — or more commonly, in the board rooms of corporations – would kill my child, would ruin our lives, would imperil the very planet on which we all dwell.

I am glad I didn’t know how it would turn out. Yet I would give anything to know then what I know now if knowing could have prevented her death. I want every person this side of loss to understand that their everyday decisions and the decisions of those they vote into office are life and death for those they love the most. I hope Poisoning Our Children will play some small part in preventing for others the desolation we ourselves endure.

-Jean-Marie Kauth

"We offer this model for you to make your own and pass along"

As I take a breath this summer, I have been thinking a lot about Ayana Elizabeth’s Johnson’s What If We Get It Right? I am sliding right into the next book project asking a similar question, propelled by the abundant riches of all the interviews I did for Poisoning Our Children. There is more to say than could fit in any one book. One of the most striking parts of Johnson’s book is the Climate Oath, which she appends towards the end of her rich and delightful miscellany. Do No Harm is a motto I have often quoted, particularly in conversations with healthcare providers, and it centers her oath. To the splendid idea of pledging fealty to people and planet, I have added my own thoughts about conscientious objection – something that sprung from a public debate on the aids and ills of AI with a colleague at Benedictine this Spring. The original Hippocratic Oath starts with swearing to the healing gods: we instead choose elements of life on Earth we hold particularly dear. Substitute in those that reverberate deeply with you, those you would be mortified to let down and elated to make proud. We offer this model for you to make your own and pass along: On the majesty of turquoise seas, and fireflies, and aspen trees, On the honor of our parents, our ancestors, and humans-to-come, On the wonders of laughter and sunshine, I make these devotions to climate solutions for my community and for our magnificent planet: First, move from “I” to “we.” We will expand our sense of interdependence. We will rein in our sense of individualism. We will ask, “What should we do, together?” Survival is collective, our fates are intertwined. Second, do no harm. We will restore and heal, not pollute and deplete. We will regenerate ecosystems and our own resolve. We will live lightly, as part of the Earth. Accountability, generosity, and sweetness. Third, less is more. We will expand our creativity and contract our consumerism. We will conserve and distinguish between needing and wanting. We will be gentle with our own imperfections and others’. There is such a thing as enough. Basta. Possibility exists. This is a world of our making. We can remake it, remix it, restore it, rebalance it. The path of least resistance is only one of many paths. I will be part of getting it right. We will be part of getting it right. (Johnson 2024) I will add the following: I am a conscientious objector to · War · Fossil Fuels · Pesticides · Plastics · PFAS · Tobacco · Fast Fashion · Ultra-processed food · AI · Gross Inequality · All industries that seek to mine the Earth, to extract the shared resources of our common home, ecosystem health, and human attention to the detriment of all, just to make more money for the already wealthy. I am a conscientious affirmer of · Truth and Justice · Equality · Thriving Ecosystems · Simple Living · Learning and Wisdom · Human Community and Connection · All those many people who are willing to work for the common good, serve others, and protect the living planet on whom we all depend. All flourishing is mutual. I pledge to try every day to choose the obvious good and leave the obvious bad, in adherence to these values. Reference: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, What If We Get It Right? New York: One World, 2024. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Jean-Marie Kauth is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Jean-Marie Kauth that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments. Pledge your support

Jean-Marie Kauth

 

 

For MAGA Republicans, the Value of Your and Your Child’s Life = $0. No surprise parents are willing to pay (WTP) much more to avoid harm to their children than to themselves

As reported in the New York Times, “Trump’s EPA has put a value on human life: Zero dollars.” In the past, Democratic and Republican administrations alike put valuations on human lives harmed or ended by pollution. Those values might have seemed too low to some, macabre to others, but factoring in those lives at millions of dollars allowed the EPA to pass hallmark legislation like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, saving countless lives. Still today, air pollution kills 8-10 million globally, but these laws were a huge improvement in the face of the plague of industrialization.

Perversely, in the last month, the EPA stopped factoring in the externalized costs of pollution. In other words, the cost of children dying of asthma, fathers dying of heart attacks, and mothers dying of breast cancer because of industry’s effluence is not factored into the cost of doing business. In other words, industry will be allowed to profit off the deaths of our loved ones more than ever. The only cost that will count will be the cost to business of complying with pollution laws.

At the Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee (CHPAC) meeting I attended May 2024, we learned that the Biden EPA was seeking to increase the monetization of child-related adverse health effects. The new system was based on parents’ willingness-to-pay (WTP) to avoid harm to their children, rather than just considering the cost of illness (COI) of a child. It turns out, parents are willing to pay much more to avoid risks to their children than risks to themselves, money that far outweighs the sticker price of treatment. These kinds of calculations may seem cold-blooded, but a change of this kind has the effect of protecting children, as the cost of damage to their health is at least weighed against the cost to curtail pollution.

Although this system was not perfect, under Biden, EPA was also working on gradually lessening the amount of PM2.5 that could be legally emitted, preventing an estimated 4,500 premature deaths.

The vast majority of Americans supported these improvements in the air we breathe – 78% of voters, including 84% of Black voters and 75% of Hispanic voters. Most – 72% -- accurately said the new standards would either have a positive impact on the economy or no impact. They believed “the standards will encourage innovation, job growth and new technology rather than hurt the economy.”

It makes one wonder if voters realized they were voting for dirty air when they voted for Trump. Why would they believe his claims to support clean air when he also asked the fossil fuel industry for a billion dollars to get rid of all regulation? Most likely, regular people didn’t consider environmental health at all.

I have always said that I wonder if it does more damage that people think there is an EPA, an environmental protection agency that protects them from harm, than if there were no such agency. Maybe that explains people’s complacency. Now that the current administration is undermining the agency’s core mission to protect human health and the environment, that question has more basis than ever. Now, coal-burning power plants, refineries, incinerators, and other major polluters will be allowed to kill ever more indiscriminately.

It is OBSCENE that my daughter’s life, your lives, your children’s lives, should count for nothing in the fossil-fuel industry’s Machiavellian calculations. This is not utilitarian ethics; this is murder for profit. This is absolute political corruption. This is utter industry capture of the regulatory process. Even in Anglo-Saxon England, a more primitive society in many ways, wergild, or “man-gold,” legally required perpetrators to compensate the families of those killed, deliberately or inadvertently. Even these early versions of justice recognized that some compensation was required to halt the family of the deceased killing members of the rival clan in a perpetual blood feud. In fact, the entire justice system could be said to be predicated on displacing private justice, private revenge. But for that substitution to work, there must be trust in the system.

Our justice system is meant to make it possible to punish perpetrators and to compensate victims. The petrochemical chemical industry is working very hard to preempt any such mechanism through preemption laws, to make it impossible for victims of their depredations and their families to find some measure of justice. For example, if Bayer succeeds in their case before the Supreme Court, appealing a judgment about people harmed by Round-Up, those harmed will have no recourse going forward.

When systems fail this badly, we can expect to see personal vendettas play out – and unfortunately, many will indeed see this as justice, as with Luigi Mangione, whom the internet mob cheered for killing the head of a healthcare company. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future imagines the wrath of climate victims resulting in sabotage of fossil-fuel infrastructure. Some might equate destruction of pipelines and refineries with the Resistance blowing up train tracks carrying Holocaust victims to their deaths. Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that guerrilla sabotage is a good outcome. I am not fantasizing about blowing things up. Instead, like many, including Bruce Springsteen, I’m inspired by the American tradition of nonviolent resistance. I’m inspired by Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

I will protest with everyone on the side of Good here, No Kings among other groups, because the undemocratic destruction of our ecosystems, communities, and individual bodies are all part of the same thing—the takeover of our government to sustain the dying gasp of decrepit, polluting industries at the expense of the living, breathing planet and all its inhabitants. One reason we are seeing industry capture of our politics is climate change and environmental degradation, as the petrochemical industry anticipates backlash over ecological destruction that causes mass migration.

I don’t think it is time for freedom fighters engaging in ecotage for the planet – yet. But at some point, as democracy increasingly plummets into tyranny, people will and should rebel against a government that deliberately allows industries to profit from the deaths of innocents, from the deaths of their own children, carelessly and indiscriminately slaughtered, from the deaths of all future generations of humans, whom those children justly represent. Hell hath no fury like the parent of a murdered child – and a murdered future.

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-Jean-Marie Kauth

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Photo:  New York City skyline in 1973 and 2013, after the Clean Air Act took effect.

When Is Systemic Poisoning Murder? Did the Petrochemical Industry Murder My Child? -by Jean-Marie Kauth

 

     

Dr. Bruce Lanphear’s latest blog asks a question I raise in my next book, Poisoning Our Children, under development with Johns Hopkins UP: when does the petrochemical industry’s knowing poisoning of the populace, of our children—with the almost complete complicity of our government—become murder?

He lays out the logic of this question: “When a corporation markets or emits a chemical it knows to be harmful, conceals evidence of its toxicity, and delays regulation for decades, what do we call the resulting deaths? Accidents? Tragedies? Externalities? Or something closer to collateral damage—losses quietly absorbed by families, communities, and entire generations so that the gears of the economy can keep turning.” He points out that though the causes of chronic disease seem slow and silent, their results are violent and vicious, on both an individual and a societal scale.    

When Katherine was diagnosed with leukemia, she was already on the brink of death, and indeed we knew of several children who bled out before they could begin treatment. They cut a hole in her sweet immaculate chest and inserted a port. They gave her the needed prednisone, and her face and tummy rounded. Every three weeks, she went for chemo—poison thrust into her veins—like she hadn’t had poison enough. Don’t get me wrong. I treasured; I loved her doctors. But that was all they could do for her. Cut to her eighth year. There was no longer anything anyone could do.

Treatment had failed. I had to try to explain to my darling brilliant daughter how slim her chances were in language that was nevertheless positive: “honey, I hope you will be the third child to survive a second transplant,” delivered with confidence and love.

Imagine having to say good-bye to your eight-year-old child, your magnum opus, your best beloved, your sensitive prodigy. You say, “sweetheart, you have been….” She won’t hear it. You can’t say it. It is so, so wrong. She lays silent and struggling for breath on the pink fairy-strewn cover of what will become her deathbed while you read aloud favorite books, she will never have time to love. You cry silent tears through Little Women, not sure she hears. One morning, very early, you wake and utter these horrific words: “I don’t think she is breathing!” Life is a grey, ashen landscape, bereft of joy and meaning. You must continue on regardless.

I just want everyone who has a child to consider this…. And consider whether that single-use plastic is so essential, whether a weed-free lawn is really worth it, whether they really need to take that vacation to Hawaii or buy that outfit on Shein. Whether we should continue to sponsor the corrupt billionaires who have captured our democracy and are destroying our planet. What would you not give up, I ask my students, to make it less likely your child will die of cancer or some other dread disease?

I personally have no doubt whatever that it was inadvertent exposures to chemicals—chemicals we deliberately strove to protect our children from—that caused my daughter’s death from leukemia. I was an excellent clinician of her insidious exposures and resulting illness. Manslaughter, homicide, murder? The word matters less to me than the carelessness with which we—distracted and diverted by the newest tech toys and Amazon buys—are providing the petrochemical industry complete impunity to kill our loved ones.

It seems to me that we may be on the brink of a rising chorus of such accusations, a rushing torrent of recognition that the emperor has no clothes, that we have been willingly sacrificing the lives of those most precious to us so that the filthy rich can grow ever filthier and ever richer. “How much money do you need? It’s never enough. When you have an empty soul, it is never enough,” UCSF’s Dr. Tracey Woodruff says. Bruce criticizes feeble regulatory efforts: “This is the anatomy of delay: a system designed to look careful while quietly authorizing decades of unnecessary harm….

We treat these [deaths] as genetic defects or private misfortunes. They are not. They are public failures—the predictable result of a regulatory system built to protect the short-term economy, not human health.” Every trace of these meager protections is currently being erased by the Trump administration, elected partly as a result of blatant billion-dollar bribes from the petrochemical and tech sectors.

It is bittersweet but important that someone as well-credentialed as Bruce Lanphear is finally pointing out the obvious: “every death from regulatory delay is a preventable death. Every chronic illness from long-ignored exposures is a form of societal negligence.” Before him came Rachel Carson and Sandra Steingraber, who said that “When carcinogens are deliberately introduced into the environment some number of vulnerable persons are consigned to death.”

I have been seeking a book contract in order to tell our part of this story since 2012, but I don’t think society was then open to hearing that message, especially not about a child. Now, the evidence is more obvious than ever. Most of my students have some story of tragedies wrought by cancer, autism, autoimmune disease, and other environmental illness—or the accelerating onslaught of climate change.

In my forthcoming book, I capture a panoply of voices that tell it like it is, including my daughter Katherine’s—age eight, but clever and clear-sighted enough to see what adults who should have been protecting her apparently did not: we are poisoning our children.

-Jean-Marie Kauth

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Plastics Pose "Urgent Threat" to Children’s Lifelong Health

 

A sweeping new review warns that chemicals in common plastics pose serious and lasting health risks to children, from before birth through adulthood. Published Sept. 21 in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health medical journal, the study examined hundreds of studies involving pregnant women, babies and children. 

Researchers found that plastic additives such as phthalates, bisphenols and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) can disrupt hormones, trigger inflammation and affect brain development, increasing lifelong risks of chronic conditions such as obesity, infertility, asthma, diabetes, cancer and heart disease.

“Our findings point to plastic’s role in the early origins of many chronic diseases that reverberate into adolescence and adulthood,” said lead author Dr. Leonardo Trasande, a professor at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. 

“If we want kids to stay healthy and live longer, then we need to get serious about limiting the use of these materials.”

The report comes amid growing global attention to the relationship of plastics and health, including a recent expert meeting in New York on plastics and human health, as well as the launch of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Plastics, an independent global monitoring effort. It also follows stalled negotiations on the United Nations’ Global Plastics Treaty, primarily due to pressure from the oil industry and U.S. opposition to production limits.

“We need to get serious about limiting the use of these materials.”

Researchers say health risks stretch across the plastic life cycle — from production to disposal. Plastics contain more than 16,000 chemicals, including phthalates, bisphenols (including BPAs), and PFAS (“forever chemicals”), which make plastic more flexible or rigid or more resistant to heat or water. When used, heated or treated (often with ultra-processed foods), they release microplastics (tiny plastic particles less than 5 millimeters in size) and even smaller pieces called nanoparticles.

A recent U.K. study found plastic particles in every hot and cold beverage tested, while researchers for the first time detected nanoparticles in vegetables, underscoring how plastic pollution seeps into the food chain. Microscopic particles have also been found in our blood, bones, brains and organ systems, ranging from reproductive to respiratory, with new research showing how nano-plastics can even disrupt energy metabolism in brain cells.

Trasande and colleagues call evidence for the adverse effects of plastic on children’s health “robust and rapidly accumulating.” In the U.S. alone, they estimate $250 billion in annual health costs from childhood disease and disability linked to plastic chemicals.

A considerable amount of research from multiple studies has shown that phthalates may contribute to preterm birth, the researchers note. Other studies link phthalates, bisphenols and PFAS exposure to higher risks of gestational diabetes and blood sugar problems during pregnancy. “The fact that in-utero PFAS exposure has also been associated with childhood obesity is not surprising,” the researchers said.

Phthalates and bisphenols may also interfere with brain development in the womb by disrupting thyroid or sex hormones, they say. Brain imaging has also revealed significant changes in both structure and function. In an extensive Dutch study, phthalate exposure was linked to reduced brain gray matter, which partially explained decreases in childhood IQ.

The findings are especially complex for pediatric medicine, where plastics have long been indispensable in treating various health conditions, the new study notes. Premature infants depend on plastic ventilators and feeding tubes. Children of all ages with asthma rely on nebulizers with plastic parts to manage their condition. Pill packaging, masks, dialysis machines and protective equipment also rely on plastic components.

At the same time, researchers note that health care systems contribute to the problem through widespread use of non-essential plastics. Phthalates, for example, are commonly found in infusion tubing, blood bags and other flexible plastic devices. Yet safer alternatives exist.

Studies show that substituting phthalate-free devices in neonatal intensive care units reduces exposure. Likewise, hospitals that switched to bisphenol A-free equipment in maternity and pediatric wards documented measurable declines in exposure for patients and staff, Trasande and his co-authors said.

“The health consequences are particularly grave for populations in low-income regions across the globe.”

“We do not impugn the essential uses of plastic for human life. However, the proliferation of non-essential plastic in the environment is increasing prenatal, childhood, and adolescent exposures, with multiple and serious effects reverberating into adulthood,” they said. “The health consequences are particularly grave for populations in low-income regions across the globe, driving disparities in health.”

Calling for systemic reform, the authors argue that current risk assessments fall short of protecting children and fail to consider the effects of newer chemicals. Many countries also lack reliable exposure data, making it impossible to track risks or improvements.

They urge child health providers to support stricter regulation of nonessential plastics, hazard-based criteria to limit chemicals like phthalates and PFAS, along with bans on single-use plastics and endocrine disruptors. 

Regulatory action could be “the most potent and greatest leveler,” the researchers said: “The burden of proof of safety should be firmly placed on manufacturers rather than youth.”

 Study: Plastics Pose ‘Urgent Threat’ to Children’s Lifelong Health - Truthdig

What Are You Spraying on Your Lawn?

The herbicide ingredient used to replace glyphosate in Roundup and other weedkiller products can kill gut bacteria and damage organs in multiple ways, new research shows.   

The ingredient, diquat, is widely employed in the US as a weedkiller in vineyards and orchards and is increasingly sprayed elsewhere as the use of controversial herbicide substances such as glyphosate and paraquat drops in the US.     

But the new piece of data suggests diquat is more toxic than glyphosate, and the substance is banned over its risks in the UK, EU, China and many other countries. Still, the EPA has resisted calls for a ban, and Roundup formulas with the ingredient hit the shelves last year.

“From a human health perspective, this stuff is quite a bit nastier than glyphosate so we’re seeing a regrettable substitution, and the ineffective regulatory structure is allowing it,” said Nathan Donley, science director with the Center for Biological Diversity, which advocates for stricter pesticide regulations but was not involved in the new research. “Regrettable substitution” is a scientific term used to describe the replacement of a toxic substance in a consumer product with an ingredient that is also toxic.

Diquat is also thought to be a neurotoxin, carcinogen and linked to Parkinson’s disease. An October analysis of EPA data by the Friends of the Earth non-profit found it is about 200 times more toxic than glyphosate in terms of chronic exposure.

Bayer, which makes Roundup, faced nearly 175,000 lawsuits alleging that the product’s users were harmed by the product. Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, reformulated Roundup after the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as a possible carcinogen.

The new review of scientific literature in part focuses on the multiple ways in which diquat damages organs and gut bacteria, including by reducing the level of proteins that are key pieces of the gut lining. The weakening can allow toxins and pathogens to move from the stomach into the bloodstream, and trigger inflammation in the intestines and throughout the body. Meanwhile, diquat can inhibit the production of beneficial bacteria that maintain the gut lining. Damage to the lining also inhibits the absorption of nutrients and energy metabolism, the authors said.

The research further scrutinizes how the substance harms the kidneys, lungs and liver. Diquat “causes irreversible structural and functional damage to the kidneys” because it can destroy kidney cells’ membranes and interfere with cell signals. The effects on the liver are similar, and the ingredient causes the production of proteins that inflame the organ.

Meanwhile, it seems to attack the lungs by triggering inflammation that damages the organ’s tissue. More broadly, the inflammation caused by diquat may cause multiple organ dysfunction syndrome, a scenario in which organ systems begin to fail.

The authors note that many of the studies are on rodents and more research on low, long-term exposure is needed. Bayer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Despite the risks amid a rise in diquat’s use, the EPA is not reviewing the chemical, and even non-profits that push for tighter pesticide regulations have largely focused their attention elsewhere.

Donley said that was in part because US pesticide regulations are so weak that advocates are tied up with battles over ingredients like glyphosate, paraquat and chlorpyrifos – substances that are banned elsewhere but still widely used here. Diquat is “overshadowed” by those ingredients.

“Other countries have banned diquat, but in the US we’re still fighting the fights that Europe won 20 years ago,” Donley said. “It hasn’t gotten to the radar of most groups and that really says a lot about the sad and sorry state of pesticides in the US.”

Some advocates have accused the EPA of being captured by industry, and Donley said US pesticide laws were so weak that it was difficult for the agency to ban ingredients, even if the will exists. For example, the agency banned chlorpyrifos in 2022, but a court overturned the decision after industry sued.

Moreover, the EPA’s pesticides office seems to have a philosophy that states that toxic pesticides are a “necessary evil”, Donley said. “When you approach an issue from that lens there’s only so much you will do,” he said.

-The Guardian

 

"How Corporate Greed Harms Children"

Trump & Andrew Liveris 

Bottom of Form

In early 2017, almost immediately after taking office, Trump's first EPA overturned the agency's own determination to ban chlorpyrifos, the organophosphate pesticide we have every reason to believe caused Katherine's leukemia and subsequent relapses. Besides cancer, chlorpyrifos is also robustly tied to lower IQs and neurocognitive disorders.

Trump appointed Andrew Liveris, the CEO of Dow, which manufactures chlorpyrifos, to a White House manufacturing group after Dow wrote a $1 million dollar check for Trump's first inauguration. Dow then pushed back against all the scientific findings showing how dangerous chlorpyrifos is for our children -- and for all of us. I have a cluster of autoimmune diseases that emerged immediately after the acute exposures we believe killed Katherine.

Biden's EPA worked to try to revoke its registration of chlorpyrifos, but those attempts were repeatedly overturned in court.

Despite the MAHA report very clearly identifying pesticides as part of the cause of the declining health of U.S. children, it mentions no cross-agency proposal to ban dangerous chemicals of any kind, nor do we in the field of Children's Environmental Health expect this administration will do so given massive amounts of corruption. 

They have already pulled back proposed bans on PFAS, pre-empting states from doing anything to regulate them, even though those chemicals are highly implicated in the chronic diseases MAHA purports to target. And these chronic conditions are increasingly debilitating our children: "Over 40% of the roughly 73 million children (aged 0-17) in the United States have at least one chronic health condition, according to the CDC, such as asthma, allergies, obesity, autoimmune diseases, or behavioral disorders."

A recent article in Slate gave a very clear diagnosis of the report from a pediatrician's perspective:

The MAHA Commission has accidentally written a landmark conservative admission that the free market doesn’t work in health care—that allowing corporations to operate without regulation corrupts institutions and undermines children’s well-being.

Stunningly, rather than embrace the obvious solution its data demand, the report pivots to blaming “the overmedicalization of our kids.” That is, it claims that doctors like me and our health care system at large are too focused on treating illness and not on preventing it in the first place.

This is where the commission’s logic completely breaks down. It has spent dozens of pages documenting how corporate greed harms children, from selling them ultra-processed foods to exposing them to chemical toxins, creating an environment that leads to obesity, asthma, and other chronic illnesses. Then the group proposes solving this issue by giving those same interests more power while scapegoating the doctors trying to treat the resulting diseases of a system that prioritizes profit over well-being.

I think this is exactly correct.

At a time of historic corruption, while Trump is dismantling the agencies trying to do something to protect human health by cleaning up the environment, it would be the surprise of my life if protections for children were at all strengthened. Most of us in Environmental Public Health instead expect the meager protections we have to be utterly gutted.

 -Prof. Jean-Marie Kauth, Benedictine University, Lisle Illinois

https://substack.com/inbox/post/165438089?r=3id6x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true&triedRedirect=true

Breathing Is Now a Political Act: The GOP Has Made Clean Air a Partisan Weapon. If you want your children to grow up with lungs that work, you better start voting like your life—and theirs—depends on it…

 

Breathing is no longer a basic human right in America: it’s now a political battleground.

Over 156 million Americans are inhaling toxic air today, not because we don’t know how to fix it, but because the Republican Party has decided that clean air is something only Democrats care about. While children gasp through inhalers and wildfires choke entire cities, Trump and his fossil-fueled allies are dismantling environmental protections with surgical cruelty. This isn’t ignorance — it’s policy. It’s profit. It’s war on your lungs, your family, and your future.

The American Lung Association just released a new report documenting how over 156 million Americans are breathing poisonous air. Trump and the Republicans don’t give a damn; if anything, they’re enthusiastic about it.

Fossil fuel billionaires and the industry that made them rich have been major patrons of Republican politicians ever since Ronald Reagan floated into the White House in 1980 on a tsunami of oil and coal money. Donald Trump is no different.

Claiming that climate science research “promotes exaggerated and implausible climate threats, contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety,’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth,” the Trump regime last week cut millions from a Nobel Prize winning scientist’s program’s collaboration between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Princeton University.

Last month they also attacked the Renew America’s Schools program that provides funding for more than 3,400 schools across the country to install heat pumps, insulation, electric school busses, and other efforts to reduce their carbon footprints.

Lost in the news of Trump’s latest stock market pump-and-dump scheme for insiders and his kidnapping legal US citizens for foreign rendition, they also announced last Friday that they were zeroing out funding for the nation’s premiere annual climate change analysis, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and the 13 agencies that collaborate on the National Climate Assessment. The report is mandated by Congress, but Trump is ignoring the law.

This follows by a few weeks EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s announcement that the official position of the US government’s warning of climate change will soon be reversed. As Politico reported on March 12th: “President Donald Trump’s environmental chief announced Wednesday that he will seek to overturn the federal government’s core scientific finding about the dangers of greenhouse gases — along with 30 other key regulatory actions stretching back years or decades.”

The report added that that Zeldin will also be gutting CO2 limits for coal-fired power plants, tailpipe emissions, methane leaks, and ending a program requiring major industries to report their CO2 emissions. In other words, “To hell with the health of our children and our climate; there’s money to be made and campaign contributions to be solicited!”

Tuesday of last week, Trump signed an executive order declaring war on individual state initiatives to dial back carbon emissions, ordering the Department of Justice to “stop the enforcement” of such state laws.

The EO specifically attacked “climate Superfund” programs in Vermont and New York that would have required fossil fuel companies to reimburse those states for damages caused by climate change-fueled storms, as well as going after California’s cap-and-trade carbon credit auctions. Fossil fuel oligarchs are, no doubt, breaking out the champagne. And the dark money for attack ads against Democrats in 2026 and 2028.

This widespread and wholesale destruction of programs intended to research and fight climate change will directly damage the future of young people in America, but Trump and the GOP frankly don’t give a damn. There are, after all, big bucks to be made and campaign contributions to be collected.

This insanity began in its modern form when five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court ruled in their 1978 Bellotti decision (written by Lewis Powell) that money was the same thing as “free speech,” protected by the First Amendment, and that corporations are “persons,” protected by the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. That floated Reagan into office in 1980 on a tsunami of oligarch money, as I noted in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.

Five corrupt Republicans on the Court doubled down on that in 2010 with Citizens United, which led to an absolute explosion of billionaire money in politics. As a result, in 2024 just 150 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion to elect candidates, money that went to the GOP on a more than 2:1 basis.

And now, in a manner demonstrative of a fully corrupt banana republic mindset, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are giving the fossil fuel industry everything they could want. In addition to the outrages listed above, in just the first three months of this regime, they have further gifted the industry by exempting Coal Plants from Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS): 

The Trump administration granted two-year exemptions to 47 coal-fired power plants, allowing them to bypass MATS regulations. This decision increases the risk of mercury pollution, which can cause neurological damage (particularly in children) and respiratory illnesses. ​

— Declaring a National Energy Emergency: Trump declared a national energy emergency to accelerate fossil fuel development, weakening environmental reviews and potentially increasing pollution. ​

— Rolling Back Vehicle Emissions Standards: The administration overturned emissions standards for vehicles, leading to increased air pollution and associated health risks. ​

— Reducing EPA Enforcement: Under Trump, the EPA brought fewer cases against polluters and sought lower penalties, diminishing deterrents against environmental violations. Now Musk and his Doge teenagers are further gutting the EPA itself.

— Weakening Methane Emission Regulations: The administration rolled back rules limiting methane emissions from oil and gas operations, contributing to climate change and air quality issues. ​

— Providing Direct Channels for Pollution Exemptions: Fossil fuel companies were given a direct email line to request exemptions from air pollution regulations, undermining public health protections. ​

— Eliminating Climate and Environmental Justice Webpages: The removal of federal climate and environmental justice webpages hindered public access to crucial information for addressing pollution and climate impacts and served to hide or cover up Trump’s naked corruption. ​

— Reversing the Clean Power Plan: The administration replaced the Clean Power Plan with the Affordable Clean Energy rule, which could lead to thousands of additional premature deaths annually due to increased air pollution. ​

— Cutting Funding for Environmental Protections: Significant budget cuts to the EPA and other environmental programs reduced the capacity to monitor and enforce pollution controls. ​

— Reducing Public Land Protections: The administration reduced the size of national monuments and opened protected lands to fossil fuel extraction, threatening ecosystems and biodiversity. ​

— Rolling Back Clean Water Protections: By narrowing the definition of “protected waters,” the administration allowed more pollutants to enter waterways, affecting drinking water and aquatic life. ​

— Undermining Scientific Research: Policies were enacted to limit the use of scientific studies in policy-making, particularly those related to environmental and public health research. ​

— Reversing the Paris Climate Agreement Commitment: The U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement under Trump signaled a retreat from global efforts to combat climate change. ​

— Promoting Fossil Fuel Exports: The administration lifted restrictions on fossil fuel exports, encouraging increased production and consumption globally, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. ​

— Reducing Air Quality Monitoring: Cuts to air pollution monitoring programs made it more difficult to detect and address harmful emissions, posing risks to public health but increasing the profits and impunity of the fossil fuel industry.

Trump and Republican cronies in his administration and Congress are committed to trading millions of cases of asthma, childhood cancers, and environmental damage — not to mention the thousands who are dying every year from climate-change-related violent weather, floods, and fires — in exchange for blood-money cash.

Republicans refuse to do town halls, refuse to answer questions about this, and hide behind a timid media that’s afraid to even ask serious questions about this criminal corruption of the protective role of government.

Which leaves it up to us.

— Get out in the streets as often as possible.
— Call your representatives, particularly if they’re Republicans (only 4 or 5 Republicans in the House and Senate could change the course of history).
— Make your voice heard on social media, letters to the editor, calling into to talk radio, and sharing messages like these with friends and family.
— Contribute, if you can, to politicians who are taking brave stands against the oligarchy.

This is not just politics — it’s a slow-motion slaughter disguised as deregulation.

Republicans won’t answer for it, won’t debate it, and won’t hold town halls to face the people they’re sacrificing. The media tiptoes. The billionaires cheer. And Trump signs away your children’s futures with a grin and a pen.

But here’s the truth they don’t want us to grasp: If we want our children to grow up with lungs that work, we better start working and voting like our lives — and theirs — depend on it.

This isn’t just about air. It’s about whether democracy itself can breathe.

Tag—you’re it.

-Thom Hartmann

Breathing Is Now a Political Act: The GOP Has Made Clean Air a Partisan Weapon