Part four of a four-part series on health and the environment
Robin Savage is worried about her son Jarret. He can hardly read. He can barely write. And math? Forget about it. But worst of all: he’s almost 12 years old.
“He’s in grade six—but he’s really at a grade two level. It’s heartbreaking,” says Savage, whose son has severe Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and a number of other learning and behavioural problems. “He’s very aggressive. He’s been suspended more times than I can count.”
Her son’s problems have been “a huge financial burden,” she says. Before she had a health plan, Savage was forking out $400 a month for his antipsychotic medication.
“But my biggest concern isn’t what happens today; it’s what happens when he’s 18,” says Savage, who works at a correctional facility. “I work with men who were diagnosed with childhood ADHD. Young offenders have all the things Jarrett has.”
Sadly, Jarret’s problems are not unique. About 10 per cent of Canadian children have some kind of learning disability, and another 20 per cent have some kind of behavioural problem. This is more than just a headache for their parents. Children who fall behind in school are at risk for unemployment and crime later on. Mental health problems are estimated to cost the Canadian economy around $50 billion a year; even a one-point drop in our average IQ costs us $6 billion a year.
Mental disabilities can be inherited. But there is little doubt that environmental factors—namely, dangerous chemicals in industrial pollution and in consumer products, which Canadians are exposed to every single day—can damage the fragile, developing brains of children.
Between the 1920s and 1980s, lead was required to be added to gasoline—leaving Canada blanketed in millions of tons of the metal, which will never break down. It was also widely used in food cans, plumbing, and children’s toys. Lead was also added to paint for many years. Based on Statistics Canada estimates, about one in five children in Canada live in pre-1960s homes and are at risk of exposure to old paint. And smelters are still a big source: Canadian industry released more than 3.5 million kilograms of lead in 2003 alone.
Today we know that for every increase of four micrograms of lead per decilitre of blood, children suffer a one-point drop in IQ. The “safe” limit for lead has been set at 10 micrograms per decilitre. But in the 1970s, almost 90 per cent of American children had blood lead levels above this level.
Dr. Herbert Needleman, a Pittsburgh physician, made history in 1979 when he reported that children with higher blood lead levels have lower IQs. Then in 1996, Dr. Needleman reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that 12-year-old boys with higher lead levels were more likely to have behavioural problems, like bullying, vandalism, shoplifting, and arson.
Thanks to the ban on leaded gasoline, blood lead levels have fallen by about 80 per cent since the 1970s. But lead is still a massive problem. A 2002 study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP) estimated that lead poisoning costs the American economy $43.4 billion a year—compared to $2 billion for asthma, a problem we hear much more about. More than a million American children still have blood lead levels that exceed the “safe” limit [good lead statistics are not available for Canada].
And that “safe” limit should be revised. A 2003 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that even below 10 micrograms per decilitre, children still suffered IQ deficits, leading most experts to conclude that there is no safe level for lead.
“I believe that we don’t know how smart our kids can be,” says Dr. Needleman. “I am angry that we are so stupid about this.”
Lead is just one of many “heavy” metals that we release into our environment that are harmful to our brains: cadmium, manganese, arsenic, copper, nickel, zinc, and mercury are all routinely detected in Canadian produce.
In high doses, children exposed to mercury in the womb reap cerebral palsy, seizures, deafness, blindness, and retardation. Low doses result in brain damage and IQ loss. Mercury is mainly used in electronics, then leaches from landfills when old computers are thrown out. Metal smelters and waste incinerators release it into the air. By far, however, the largest source of mercury in North America is coal-fired power stations. Altogether, Canadian smokestacks released more than 112,000 kilograms of mercury in 2003.
In the United States, it is estimated that one in six babies are born with mercury levels exceeding the “safe” limit [as with lead, Canadian population estimates are not available]. Children most at risk for mercury poisoning eat sport-caught fish, because the metal can “magnify” up the food chain.
Mercury is not the only brain-damaging chemical that concentrates in meat eaters. Polybrominated diphenylethers (PBDEs), a type of flame retardant chemicals, have made headlines in recent years as scientists have found astounding concentrations in fish, birds, grizzlies, seals, orca and beluga whales, polar bears, and (of course) humans.
PBDEs are used to stop fire-prone products from igniting, like electronics, airplanes, carpets, curtains, and furniture. Some products contain as much as 30 per cent PBDEs by weight. PBDEs have never been made in Canada, but about 1.3 million kilograms of the chemicals were imported from the US in 2000 to be added to consumer products here (and that doesn’t include imports laced with PBDEs).
Safety concerns prompted Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden to restrict these chemicals in the 1980s. But Canada and the US did not, and a 20-year love affair with them has left Canadian women with 10 times more PBDEs in their breast milk than European women.
Although good research on the impacts of PBDEs on humans is lacking, results from animal studies are disconcerting. Mice exposed in the womb to even just a few parts per billion PBDEs suffer brain damage—hampering their attention, learning, memory, motor skills, and behaviour (dubbed by many scientists as “ADHD-like”).
Pesticides—often linked to cancer—can also damage the mind, and the research is disturbing.
Dr. Elizabeth Guillette, an anthropologist at the University of Florida, travelled to the Yaqui Valley in Mexico in the late 1990s. One agricultural town in the valley had used pesticides intensely since the 1950s, while another town in the foothills had shunned them. What she discovered shocked her and everyone who read her 1998 paper in EHP.
When she asked the valley children to draw a person for her, they drew bizarre figures of sticks and circles that didn’t look like anything—and especially not like a person. “This blew my mind,” she says. “At first I thought the drawings might have been some kind of a tribal symbol, but they weren’t. The kids actually saw this as reality.”
The biggest sources of heavy metals in the country, aside from coal-fired power plants, are the large metal smelters in Ontario and Quebec, like Alcan, Stelco, and Alcoa. Alcan ranks as the top producer of developmental toxicants in the entire country. It owns the bulk of the top 10 producers as ranked by Pollution Watch, using government data.
It is, however, possible for a metal smelter to lessen its impact. Dofasco cut its releases of developmental toxicants by more than 234,000 kilograms between 1998 and 2002 at its Hamilton plant. According to Bill Gair, a spokeman for Dofasco, the company was able to cut its releases of heavy metals by sending its hazardous waste to a US recycling facility instead of a landfill.
The top releasers of lead and mercury in Canada are both recyclers: Stablex Canada’s facility in Blainville, PQ, released more than 32,000 kilograms of mercury in 2004; and Zalev Brothers Co., a recycler outside of Windsor, ON, pumped out more than 3.8 million kilograms of lead that year. It is, of course, hard to point the finger at them. They’re only disposing of what we throw away.
Some recyclers, however, do go the extra mile. Noranda Recycling in Brampton, ON, is considered to be the only one of its kind in Canada. The facility processes more than a million pounds a month of old electronics, before shredding employees first remove parts containing heavy metals. Then, during shredding, the dust itself gets sucked up and recycled, instead of being vented outside. “We are imposing more costs on ourselves, but we want to exceed government standards,” says Kelly McCaig for Noranda. “We are zero landfill and we participate in no export to developing countries, unlike most recyclers.”
Although old electronics are still full of heavy metals and PBDEs, many of the big names are eliminating hazardous materials from their products. Around the world, lead-tin solder is being phased out. Giants like Apple, Philips, Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell have all eliminated all PBDEs from their products, often using phosphorus-based flame inhibitors instead.
Ikea [due in part that the company is based in Sweden, which banned all PBDEs many years ago] has also banned PBDEs. None of its children’s mattresses have contained any PBDEs for 15 years.
Although the environmental records of both the Liberals and Conservatives are by no means impressive, the government has taken some important steps towards protecting the health of Canadians recently.
In December 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and then-Environment Minister Rona Ambrose announced that Health and Environment Canada scientists had completed a review of 23,000 chemicals in use in Canada, and a new plan had been drafted to regulate them. This announcement was made with much fanfare and backslapping. Of course, none of our politicians mentioned that the review began seven years ago because the law required improvements to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.
Then Ambrose announced that carmakers and steel mills will now be required to remove mercury switches from all vehicles before they are recycled. This is good—but a long time coming.
Then the government announced the creation of a StatsCan biomonitoring program: a sampling of the chemicals and metals in the blood of 5,000 Canadians, to be completed by 2009. This will finally give us good estimates on things like lead and mercury levels. Experts have been asking for this program for years [the US has done large-scale biomonitoring at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since the 1990s, and has had a comprehensive testing program since 2001].
Nevertheless, provincial and federal governments still have a lot to work on.
The government needs to curb heavy-metal pollution. According to a 2005 analysis from the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, Canadian facilities emit 13 times more lead than their American counterparts. Coal-fired plants, and the mercury pollution they spawn, are still chugging away, especially in eastern Canada. The Ontario government broke its promise to close the province’s coal-fired plants by 2007.
Moreover, the federal government recently decided not to regulate lead in cheap costume jewelry. “It’s a situation of trade trumping health—costume jewellery is all imported junk,” says Kathy Cooper, senior researcher with the Canadian Environmental Law Association.
And, contrary to what the government claims, they are doing nothing to prevent the flow of PBDEs into Canadians. The government proudly announced in the fall of 2006 that they had classified PBDEs as toxic, and would ban them. Despite its claims that it is protecting Canadians, the government has actually done nothing, and is deliberately misleading the public.
Here’s why: PBDEs come in three forms: penta-, octa-, and deca-. Penta- and octa-, which are considered far more dangerous than deca-, have already been phased out almost everywhere in the world; the vast majority of PBDEs used in Canada are deca. Industry contends that deca- is safe, and that it does not break down into the more dangerous octa- and penta-. But recent studies show that deca- is itself toxic and that it does break down.
The proposed regulations ban penta- and octa-, but not deca-. So the government is prohibiting the two kinds of PBDEs that aren’t used anymore, and they aren’t regulating the one that is. “Under law the government is obliged to ban this chemical,” says Lisa Gue, environmental health policy analyst for the David Suzuki Foundation, which has legally challenged the new PBDE regulations.
One of the most important and overlooked problems of children’s exposure to brain-damaging chemicals is the fact that children who are already disadvantaged are the most exposed. Children who live in poverty, who already suffer from poor nutrition, and are more at risk of dropping out of school tend to live in older homes with lead paint; they tend to eat sport-caught fish, live with old, crumbling foam furniture, and be exposed to insecticides in derelict urban housing (to control rats and roaches).
“This isn’t just a health issue; this is a social justice issue,” says Cooper.