Jane Houlihan on Chemicals

Jane Houlihan, creator of the EWG and correlated Skin Deep database of personal care products had a fantastic lecture on the circumstance of toxicity in the world today for the University of Maryland School of Nursing. Her talk was interesting for many reasons, and her startling statistics are what really got to me.

Qualitative and quantitative data tend to be antagonists in describing a problem. Upon reading the EWG's website and learning about Jane, I was left with an good sense of the qualitative data she has been able to accumulate and describe. What her lecture did for me was put some depressing, but surprising statistics on what these levels of toxicity are doing to humans. I wanted to share some of my favorite findings below:

• 216 chemicals have been associated with mammary gland tumors
• girls who begin their period before the age of 12 have a 50% increased risk of cancer compared to girls at 16
• 300 compounds have been found in newborn babies through the placenta
• 150 neurotoxins were found in the umbilical cord

What she does a great job of is introducing the problem by illustrating the problem, and then providing examples of sicknesses that we have a hard time explaining origins for. For example, she illuminates that 1 in 110 children today are born with Autism, 1 in 6 with some developmental disability and 1 in 10 have asthma. Girls today are experiencing puberty much earlier than in previous generations. On the surface level this doesn't sound like that big of an issue, but she does a fantastic job of illustrating the complicated correlations here (i.e. early development for girls increases the risk of breast cancer, and the level of estrogen in everybody resulting from toxic personal care products is a huge instigator of early development). These diseases are more prevalent than they have ever been before, and its hard to ignore the waves of quantitative data Jane shares. 

She describes this overall circumstance as a "silent pandemic". It provides a perfect depiction of the problem because this is EVERYWHERE, and we're seeing countless symptoms without any real evidence of their inception.