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CounterPunch
September
18, 2002
Cancerous Air
Born Under a Bad Sky
by Jeffrey St. Clair
This is what it has come to: the air in LA is
so toxic that a child born in the city of angels will inhale
a more cancer-causing pollutants in the first two weeks of life
than the EPA (not known for understating risks) considers safe
for a lifetime.
This risk never goes away. They come
with the first breaths a child takes. Being born in urban California
now means that life expectancy is reduced, chances of getting
cancer are elevated. All this before you've inflicted any damage
on yourself through smoking, drinking booze, eating fast food
or watching CNN.
The situation is spelled out in a report
released by the National Environmental Trust titled Toxic Beginnings.
The report pins much of the blame for this situation on so-called
TACs or Toxic Air Contaminants. These are poisons spewed into
the atmosphere from cars, trucks, heavy equipment and factories.
Studies by the EPA and other agencies link exposure to TACs
to cancer, birth defects and other illnesses, such as asthma.
The National Environmental Trust report
examined air quality and exposure to TACs in California's five
most populous basins: Los Angeles, the San Joaquin Valley, the
Sacramento Valley, the San Francisco Bay Area and San Diego.
The findings are chilling.
In Los Angeles the air is so clotted
with 10 cancer-causing chemicals that residents there face a
cancer risk 1,005 times the level considered "safe"
by the EPA. And the most vulnerable to those risks are children,
especially poor and working class children.
Prior to the National Environmental Trust
report, the unique risks faced by children have rarely been
deemed worthy of calculation. The EPA and the California Air
Resources Board, for example, issue an annual report on air
emissions and their consequences to human health. However, those
risks are based solely on calculation made about the amount
of carcinogens inhaled over the lifetime of an average adult.
But recent medical literature shows that
children are much more susceptible to these toxins than adults
and that exposure to toxic air early in life is much more dangerous
than breathing the same foul air for more extended period as
an adult.
This has to do with the physiology of
children. They inhale more air than adults relative to their
body weight. Thus, they are exposed to higher concentrations
of cancer-causing chemicals.
The National Environmental Trust report
took the data on TACs compiled by the Air Review Board and recalculated
it to show the risks to children. It's not a pretty picture.
The EPA (rather arbitrarily) sets a "one million standard"
risk of getting cancer as its acceptable lifetime exposure risk.
Children born and raised in these smog-laden California basins
will far exceed these levels very early in life.
For example, in San Francisco the average
infant will exceed the EPA's lifetime exposure to toxic air
pollutants in 19 days. In LA, it takes only 12 days. By the
time the average LA-born girl reaches her 18th birthday, she
will have breathed enough toxic air to place her 344 times over
what the EPA considers an acceptable lifetime exposure to these
contaminants.
"The potential risk that a child
rapidly accumulates in California for simply breathing will
not go away when the child is older even if the air is cleaner
when the child reaches adulthood," the report warns. "Remarkably,
if the carcinogens in California air were cleaned up to EPA's
level immediately, a child born in California would still exceed
the lifetime acceptable cancer risk by age four and an adult
moving to California would exceed it in seven years."
Generally, these risks accumulate steadily
leading to cancers in adulthood. But there's also evidence that
exposure to toxic air is behind the mounting level of childhood
cancers. "There has been a steady moderate increase in
childhood cancers (ages 0-20) since the 1970s, which has not
been explained by improved diagnostics," cautions a recent
report by the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard
Assessment. "Leukemias, lymphomas and brain tumors are
the most common childhood cancers."
The biggest culprit by far is particulate
matter and chemicals belched out by diesel engines from trucks,
cars and "other mobile sources" such as farm and construction
equipment.
Sue Martinez works at the Children's
Hospital in Oakland and is a witness to the daily toll. "Diesel
is the worst of the air pollutants, which our medical staff
already sees through asthma cases," says Martinez. "In
West Oakland, diesel trucks line up at the Oakland ports from
Saturday night through Sunday with their engines idling. By
the time the ports open for business on Monday, our Emergency
Department has begun receiving asthma emergencies. Asthma is
the number one cause of emergency department admissions at our
hospital."
But there are other sources as well,
including 1,4 Dichlorobenzene (largely from pesticides), benzene
(from oils and industrial greases), methylene chloride (from
paint and paint removers), and formaldehyde (from adhesives
and cleaning products).
The situation is so bad that even adults
who have moved to California are not immune. In fact, the report
reveals that within a year an adult breathing the air in one
of California's major cities will exceed the lifetime exposure
risk by more than a multiple of fifteen. Even if the diesel
emissions were brought under control, exposure to current levels
of these chemicals would cause a child to exceed the EPA's acceptable
cancer risk by age four.
At a time when Bush is railing at Saddam
Hussein for gassing his own people, his administration is coddling
the coterie of oil and chemical companies that turning the LA
basin into a cancerous cauldron and are poisoning infants and
children across urban America. And instead of strengthening
the Clean Act Air to deal with this homegrown problem, Bush
and his cronies from Big Oil want to rip out the few teeth that
remain in the law, a move that will make cancer a birthmark
of being born in California.
If that doesn't make your blood boil
what will?
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September
14 / 15, 2002
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