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scrub jay at my feeder

Saturday, September 21, 2024

Cancer Rising

I have to think that there is not a single person on this earth who has not lost a close friend or family member to that dreaded scourge cancer. The disease does not discriminate. The pain of my brother's loss will be with me forever.

Leslie and I have lost two friends in the past week to cancer and have another friend that is seriously ill. It is tough, comes up so fast and sometimes by the time it is detected it is sadly too late to do anything.

I found my own cancer in 1985, which occurred in various places in my body. It comes back again and again. That means I have been dealing with it, in one way or another, for thirty nine years or so. According to the doctors, my cancer was benzene related owing to some of the solvents and chemicals in my sign shop.

I made a decision early on to forego as many chemicals in my life as I could. Because I don't trust the manufacturers to play it straight and I don't trust the government that is supposed to regulate them.

A couple stories in the news that caught my eyes the last couple days:

Hazardous chemicals in food packaging can also be found in people

This one is not so earth shattering, all of our bodies are now coursing with forever chemicals but at least our frying pans don't stick!

But the next story really bothers me:

EPA Scientists Said They Were Pressured to Downplay Harms From Chemicals. A Watchdog Found They Were Retaliated Against.

During the Trump administration, these scientists had findings suppressed and were ultimately retaliated against.

More than three years ago, a small group of government scientists came forward with disturbing allegations.

During President Donald Trump’s administration, they said, their managers at the Environmental Protection Agency began pressuring them to make new chemicals they were vetting seem safer than they really were. They were encouraged to delete evidence of chemicals’ harms, including cancer, miscarriage and neurological problems, from their reports — and in some cases, they said, their managers deleted the information themselves.

After the scientists pushed back, they received negative performance reviews and three of them were removed from their positions in the EPA’s division of new chemicals and reassigned to jobs elsewhere in the agency.

This in itself is not too surprising. Republican administrations and EPA administrators, with the exception of Whitman, have always favored industry over the health of the American public. 

In one case, someone had deleted a report he had written that noted that a chemical caused miscarriages and birth defects in rats and replaced it with another report that omitted this critical information. After Phillips asked that the original report be restored, he was removed from his position within the EPA’s division of new chemicals and assigned a job elsewhere in the agency.

“I was turned into a pariah,” Phillips told ProPublica about the almost yearlong period when he was sparring with his managers in the new chemical’s division. “I lost sleep. I dreaded going to work. I was worried every time I had to meet with my supervisor or other members of the team. It made me question whether I wanted to continue in my job.”

This is what got under my craw:

The inspector general’s reports said supervisors defended their actions, claiming that the whistleblowers took an overly conservative approach in their assessments and that, in some cases, criticisms the supervisors had relayed from the companies that submitted the chemicals were valid. One supervisor said scientists “were expected to make compromises to complete the new chemicals assessments.”

Research scientists should not be making compromises with chemical companies. They should be concerned with accurate, unvarnished data and nothing else. Another reason to fear a new Trump administration.

Bennett said she was particularly concerned about how the outcome of the upcoming presidential election could affect the whistleblowers. “If there is another Trump administration, I will be petrified for them,” she said.

If Trump fulfills even some of the promises made in Project 2025, job security for the whistleblowers — and all EPA scientists — will become much more tenuous. Project 2025 specifically calls for new chemicals to be approved quickly and proposes that all employees whose work touches on policy in federal agencies would become at-will workers, allowing them to be fired more easily.

Although Trump has attempted to distance himself from the effort, saying, “I don’t know what the hell it is,” reporting by ProPublica showed that 29 out of 36 speakers in Project 2025 training videos worked for him in some capacity.

The Department of Energy Promised This Tribal Nation a $32 Million Solar Grant. It’s Nearly Impossible to Access.

All three scientists who were found to have been the victims of retaliation said they worry that the underlying problems they raised have not been adequately addressed and might worsen.

The scientists said they were still concerned about industry pressure on the EPA’s chemical approval process.

“It’s been four years since we first started raising concerns about what was happening, and we haven’t seen a resolution yet,” Gallagher said. “We haven’t gotten assurance that the concerns we’ve been raising will be fixed.”

Cancer diagnoses are rising globally and I am sure that our widespread exposure to chemicals is a great contributing factor. Cancer cases in people under 50, also known as early-onset cancer, are increasing globally. In the United States, the American Cancer Society (ACS) reports that the demographics of cancer patients are shifting from older to middle-aged people. The US is expected to have more than 2 million new cases of cancer this year, which is almost 5,500 diagnoses per day. 

The number of new cases of six of the 10 most common cancers is increasing, including breast, prostate, endometrial, pancreatic, kidney, and melanoma. In 2024, the US is projected to have over 611,000 cancer deaths, which is more than 1,600 deaths per day. 

If you care about cancer and your loved ones you need to care about the environment and what we are exposing our bodies to. And vote responsibly.

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