Born Under a Bad Sky
by Jeffrey St.
Clair
Dissident Voice
September 20,
2002
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?
Jeffrey St. Clair is the
co-author of Five Days that Shook The World: The Battle For Seattle and
Beyond with Alexander Cockburn, and is a co-editor of Counterpunch, the nation’s best muckraking newsletter. Email: counterpunch@counterpunch.org