Panelists Link Environment and Health

Nearly 100 people attended an panel discussion on "Women's Health and the Environment" yesterday-- and they were the ones applauded.

U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.) thanked the ARCO Forum audience for their efforts in supporting and lobbying for health research, especially for cancer.

She also urged them to "come together, to insist on regulation so that we can find the answers. We will not take no for an answer."

"Without outside mobilization [our past success] would have been impossible," Pelosi added. "Know thy power."

Pelosi and the rest of the panel called for an approach to women's health that combined the efforts of government environmental agencies with private health laboratories.

"There is a chasm between health people and environmental health," said Richard Jackson, director of the government's National Center for Environmental Health. "The connections have got to start at a local level."

According to Jackson, 87 percent of Americans said they consider the environment important to human health.

The speakers cited the work of pioneering environmental activist Rachel Carson. They said Carson was able to bridge the gap between science and public perception.

Two of the panel members brought their own copies of Silent Spring, Carson's 1962 expose of the harms caused by the pesticide DDT.

Julia Brody, executive director of the Silent Spring Institute--a Cape Cod non-profit organization that studies breast cancer--gave a brief overview of Carson's book.

Carson, she said, made remote environmental health issues personal by relating them to the breast cancer she suffered.

Today, Brody said, the dangerous levels of mercury in all of New England's freshwater sources require the type of action Carson advocated.

"We now have a picture of where cancer lives," Brody said. "[The next step is to ask] why we see the patterns we do."

Jackson said that breast milk poses dangers of which few mothers are cognizant.

"Half the human milk would be unsaleable according to government regulations" were it to be sold, Jackson said.

Mothers need not stop breast-feeding, he said, but they ought to become more aware of their body's dangerous chemicals.

According to Bev Baccelli, president of the Massachusetts Breast Cancer Coalition, the U.S. has an "unhealthy does of mass denial."

The panel closed as it began, with a call to action.

"We are at war," Baccelli said. "If we're to succeed, we can't do this alone."