Children

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

At Christmas time we celebrate the birth of a Divine Child - who never grows up. If he did, the cycle of creation and the pageant of evolution would end. Contemplating the future of our children in the face of our current environmental problems, a crib in a manger two thousand years ago in Roman-occupied Israel seems like an excellent deal compared to the world into which children are born now.

Some years ago, at a conference, a scientist presented a computer model showing that if current trends of pollution continue, the human race would go extinct in about 500 years (about 1,500 generations). The process would be as in the currently threatened loon: the eggs can’t hatch, and when they do, the creature is genetically compromised and can’t survive long enough to reproduce. Indeed, in Europe about 25% of people under the age of 25 are infertile, and human sperm count is 50% down since the early 1960’s - following which pesticides and synthetic chemicals began to saturate air, water, soil, food and medicines, almost always detrimentally.

Children comprise 30% of the world’s population and 100% of humanity’s future. The World Health Organization informs us that more than 40% of the total global burden of disease, known to be caused by environmental factors, is borne by the world’s children under the age of five (www.who.int 2002 WHO fact sheet). This statistic does not include the effect of environmental toxins on the developing fetus and young children in determining the onset of chronic disease later in life. Studying this research curiously makes it hard to find the exact boundaries between past, present and future; they are inextricably intertwined, and causes and effects form a circle. This highlights the very essence of children.

Margaret Somerville of McGill University’s Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law observed in her famous book, The Ethical Canary: Science, Society and the Human Spirit (2001), that science, law, the economy, and social policy do not travel at the same speed because each has its own priorities which develop from different experiences. “Nature time” travels at speeds generally at odds with human concerns, but “nature time” is ultimately in charge. Nature moves at geological speeds of no personal relevance to human concerns, as well as at rapid biological speeds totally unpredictable and potentially disastrous when humans disregard ecological imperatives and genetic dynamics. “Business time” (which wants profits and growth in quarterly annual instalments), “science time” (which wants no limits set to its curiosity), and “social policy time” (which always reacts after the fact) are all on a collision course with “nature time” which cares nothing for profit and theoretical curiosity and is unforgiving of tardy social policy. All it cares for is life itself. The Divine Child teaches us to adjust our priorities.

The Past In The Present

One can always startle doctors, politicians and the general public with the information that all diseases have a known history. The medical profession is astonished because this means there must have been a cause for everything and so-called “idiopathic” diseases are a myth. Politicians understand that rational public health policies are in theory possible. The anthropology of disease (my academic specialty before I climbed on this soap box of medical science writing) is the other side of a coin which reads “The Precautionary Principle”.

This principle, first enunciated in the 1970’s when it became part of Germany’s environmental laws, asserts in its 1992 Earth Summit formulation: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.” For ecologist Sandra Steingraber this is what “prompts us to buckle seat belts, get out of the pool when lightning flashes, and throw away mysterious leftovers discovered in the back of the refrigerator. It’s why we keep plastic bags and book matches away from young children.” Current knowledge of how disease is caused and physical degeneration evolves is so vast, we have all we need to justify the Precautionary Principle.

The classic 1989 study by Mark Nathan Cohen, Health And The Rise of Civilization, provides a magisterial survey of the evolution and origins of infectious disease to chronic illnesses. That history spans about 2 million years of unconscious behavior that had unknowable detrimental effects that remained with us until today. Some 100,000 years ago the Neanderthals had no way of knowing that their diet was the cause of the appearance of arthritis. The first experiments with agriculture 10,000 years ago reduced food diversity to reliance on just a few staples resulting in those foods becoming less nutritious through domestication and osteoporosis followed. The trend to living in villages, instead of roaming the earth, gave cancer and all infectious disease a chance to evolve.

The myth of the Garden of Eden is usefully turned on its head: we unknowingly have almost destroyed that garden, but we now know how to create it. For example, in the recent past we have the astounding results of three lines of research. First, the work of the dentist Weston A. Price in the 1930’s compared the development of teeth and facial bone structure over several generations in peoples all over the world by looking at their diets. This study is generally considered the beginning of nutritional medicine as a science. Dr. Price’s research identified for the first time what constitutes essential nutrients in the diets of those “primitives” who were totally healthy. He also showed (in the 1930’s before pesticides!) that all those societies which had adopted the refined carbohydrate diet (today called SAD - Standard American Diet) showed high prevalence of bad teeth and those chronic illnesses which we now conveniently call “idiopathic”, or worse: genetic. They never were part of the genetic program – now they are. We put them there.

The second study was begun in 1983 by Cornell University and lasted 25 years. It compared the disease burden of the Chinese and American peoples based on a large number of measures, most of them nutritional (www.newcenturynutrition.com). The results show that the “diseases of affluence” are cancer, leukemia, diabetes, and coronary disease – all based on nutrients refined out of the food. The “diseases of poverty” are infectious diseases, tuberculosis, and parasites due to malnutrition caused by over-all caloric and protein reduction. As in the earlier research of Dr. Price, the results also show that when food was adequate, health depends on the same set of essential nutrients, and disease is associated with our denatured SAD (see also monograph no. 150 from www.worldwatch.org).

Finally, we need to consider a conference held this May at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York co-hosted by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Researchers examined the so-called “Barker Hypothesis” named after a British physician who noticed that “exposures and risk factors encountered early in life can predispose an individual to the development of disease later in life” chief among them Parkinson’s, cancer and Alzheimer’s (see www.som.soton.ac.uk/research/foad/barker.asp). These “are now thought to arise through a series of stages that require years and even decades to evolve.” Just as toxicology now is based on the understanding that small, frequent amounts of a toxin will have large, unpredictable, often irreversible effects later on, so too developmental phases provide windows of opportunity for disease and genetic defects.

While normal aging involves some inevitable loss of brain cells, when a fetus or a young child is exposed to environmental neurotoxins (e.g. pesticides, solvents) “silent damage is inflicted” on the brain which during normal aging becomes expressed and much later causes overwhelming damage. The development of Parkinson’s depends on “postnatal exposures to pesticides alone” which diminish the number of neurons (messenger molecules) that maintain appropriate levels of dopamine responsible for all fine-motor movement. If re-exposed later in life to even low levels of pesticides, the entire dopamine production runs down. Think about that the next time your toddler walks with you through a park or accompanies you while spraying the roses. Other presentations showed the same process at work in predisposing children to heart disease through the mother’s exposure to various toxins in the environment and her diet. The overall conclusion was that environmental toxins “induce effects that can be transgenerational” because “exposure to environmental agents in the womb can alter gene expression in the developing fetus”.
(See www.niehs.nih.gov/dert/home.htm ).

The power the past has over the present suggests that “a pill for every ill” is a totally inappropriate paradigm for the practice of medicine, as Dr. Stephen Davis, the editor of the Journal of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine (no. 5, 1995) observed. Health and disease are dependent upon time, and genetic expression is not a fixed pre-determined program, but is exquisitely dependent on the right protection and the right nutrients at the right time.

The Future In The Present:

If there are to be children 500 years from now, the information medical science provides today demands action. The Sept. 12, 2003, article by Hauser et al in Environmental Health Perspectives shows that the chlorine’s damaging effect starts with the sperm. Similarly, maternal exposure to DDT (banned in North America since the 1970’s, but part of our diet through foods coming from Asia and Africa) continues its damaging effect across generations by causing neurological damage to the offspring of their daughters. A fetus exposed via the mother to plasticizers (phthalates) can due to its estrogenic effect shorten pregnancy, thereby priming the low-weight premature baby to various known health risks throughout life (EHP Nov. 14, 2003). Commercial flame retardants used in electric appliances and building materials are highly carcinogenic and found in the breast milk of North American women at a 37% higher rate than anywhere else – thereby setting up the nursing child for cancer later in life
(both from www.ehpnet1.niehs.nih.gov/docs/2003). Because children’s immune systems mature over the first few years, exposure to all pesticides adversely affects that development and sets them up for all kinds of immune diseases later on (World Resources Institute Study by R. Repetto, 2000).

What all of this does to the development of the brain is graphically illustrated by the drawings of children studied by Elizabeth Guillette over two decades. She observed the development of Mexican children born and raised in a village where pesticides were used liberally and compared them with children in a foothills area where no pesticides were ever used. The perceptual and mental skills of the valley children not only lagged dramatically behind those of the foothills children, but were beyond repair (EHP June 1998).

This study has staggering implications for the future of humanity, as Dr. Landrigan at the above-mentioned conference pointed out: even a 5 point shift in the average IQ of a population (via pre-natal exposure to pesticides) almost doubles the number of retarded children and cuts in half the number of gifted ones. But repair of such generational damage appears to be possible over time. Nature is stubbornly creative and produces excellence if we don’t interfere: In a 10 year study on many generations of cats, Dr. Pottenger showed in the 1930’s the following: healthy cats fed a diet similar to our SAD produced offspring with chronic illnesses in the second generation; the third greneration was mostly infertile. However, those few who were able to reproduce, had perfectly healthy cats by the third generation – if all three generations had a nutrient-rich diet.

So what can we do? We have choices and we have the knowledge to make good ones. Consider the results of a National Institutes of Health study (EHP Oct. 31, 2002) showing that by just feeding children organic food, all those neurotoxic and carcinogenic pesticides were dramatically reduced in body fluids and tissues. “Honey, let me have that match box” should become “Honey, eat this organic apple and let’s chuck that super market toxic one.”

Life survives our most enormous stupidities, misjudgments, and appalling acts of arrogance - at a horrendous cost, yet unstoppably so. We may take comfort in Nature’s determined intelligence. The great 19th century religious poet Gerrard Manley Hopkins put it best: “And for all this, nature’s never spent/ There lives the dearest freshness deep down in things … Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and ah! bright wings.”


	Children:

	Autism - Causes Known and Cures Possible A Primer On Kids' Health On Children

	AUTISM Causes Known and Cures Possible Vitality May 2003 by Helke Ferrie, Some thirty years ago we had a foster child who was profoundly autistic. She came to us on an emergency basis from an orphanage. Her body was covered in scars that had been made by cigarettes. At that time, the famous Austrian psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim had shown that it was sometimes possible to cure autistic children, provided the brain was not damaged. I took training at his famous Orthogenic School in Chicago in order to help her, but she had banged her head for years against cement floors. The escalating anxiety in her was unstoppable, even with drugs, until the damage she did to herself was so terrible, only an institution could handle her. It was a horrific, soul-numbing mystery to observe autism unfold at its worst. It was then beyond imagining that the causes of, leave alone cures for this horrible affliction could ever be known. Yet, this has come to pass: on June 21 and 22 the Autism Canada Foundation is hosting a conference for parents of autistic children in Toronto at which international experts on autism are offering real hope and real solutions. Top History Autism was first described in the 1940’s. Often mental retardation is involved, but so-called “idiot savants” like Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rainman, are also among them. Autistics cannot relate or communicate, are often self-destructive, suffer from night blindness, usually are extreme in their inability to pay attention or carry out a task and are fixated on repetitive rituals. When these children were first observed, it was noted that most were born to educated and more affluent families which gave rise to then prevalent psychoanalytic views that these kids had become autistic due to emotional neglect (today it seems more likely, that those families were able to afford vaccines and mercury-amalgam dental care). The terrible grain of truth came from the meticulously documented psychiatric information on victims of Nazi concentration camps. Child psychiatrist Dr. Bettelheim had observed as a prisoner in Auschwitz how severely abused people, who had given up all hope, became classic autistics. When he later opened his practice in Chicago he researched case histories of institutionalized autistic children. Wherever he found serious neglect and physical abuse, he proceeded to remove them from their mental hospitals and treated them in an environment of painstaking care. For some of them it worked dramatically. Top Dr. Bettelheim’s observation that autism can indeed stem from severe and prolonged emotional stress, today is part of psycho-neuroimmunology. The spectacular recovery of Barry Neil Kaufman’s autistic son made through a program of intensive emotional support is documented in his wonderful book “Son Rise”. Equally astounding is the fabulous autobiography of the autistic Donna Williams, “Nobody Nowhere”; her treatment combined intensive psychotherapy to overcome her childhood abuse - with vitamins. Both cases show how treating mind and body can heal both. However, the great shift in medical theory over the past 50 years is away from the old doctrine of “one cause – one disease”, going back to the Middle Ages. Nothing is simple anymore in medicine. Just as a headache can be caused by a blow to the head, it can also come from a brain tumor, a drug reaction or emotional stress. Top Causes Today, autism is a catastrophic epidemic with an increase of 1,500% in the UK in the last decade. In California one in 150 children is autistic – a 54% increase in just 2001/2! The primary causes of autism now known come from vaccines, maternal overexposure to heavy metals and antibiotics, heavy metals from industry pollution of the air and water, and the chemicals used in the electronics industry. Significantly, the first cases of autism were described in the US shortly after the vaccines for whopping cough were introduced in the 1940’s. The sudden increase in the UK began with the introduction in 1990 of the triple vaccine MMR against mumps, measles and rubella. In California, the greatest increase is clustered in Silicon Valley where people are exposed to more than 700 chemicals almost all of which are neurotoxic, especially to newborn babies with immature immune systems. (www.secretsofsiliconvalley.org) Top At day 1 a child is automatically given a hepatitis B shot containing 12 micrograms of mercury - 30 times the safe level set by the World Health Organization. By age four months, a second hepatitis B shot and the DPTP vaccination (against diptheria, whooping cough, tetanus and polio) give your child 60 times the safe limit of mercury in addition to the first assault. The shot given at age six months contains mercury at 78 times the safe limit. By the time you get to the MMR vaccine, your child gets another 31 times the safe amount of mercury; if given as an intramuscular shot the toxicity of mercury is increased by an additional 30 times because it crosses the blood-brain barrier at once. By age 2 your child has been given at least 237 micrograms of mercury. The EPA recognizes as safe only a one-time exposure to 0.1 microgram! According to the best available evidence in the mainstream literature, autism becomes an extremely high risk at levels of merely 62 micrograms of mercury. Top Unlike the slow assault of the developing fetus’ brain through pesticides in the mother’s blood stream and interstitial fluids, autism appears to be brought on by the sudden assault on the new baby by heavy metals – especially mercury, cadmium, and lead – used as preservatives in vaccines which then cause inflammation of the brain and deregulate also gastro-intestinal and immune function and development. The preservative used in standard vaccines, thiomersal, contains mercury. Vaccine expert Dr. Neal Halsey at Johns Hopkins Medical School told the FDA and the public in January that this preservative was accidentally tripled when the vaccines for mumps, measles and rubella were made into a single combination (MMR). McGill University’s epidemiologists Dr. Walter Spitzer and Dr. Victor Goldbloom urged the Quebec government to study this connection seriously, as now one in 300 children in Quebec is autistic (Medical Post April 17, 2001). Top Genetic theories are of no help. Genes are always involved in every living process, but nothing is fixed in life. A BBC program of July 17, 2002, pointed out that with nine children per day being diagnosed as autistic, a genetic explanation becomes absurd. Epidemics are by definition environmentally mediated events. Genes are not only vulnerable to toxic insult, but also respond to curative intervention. Nothing is fixed in nature and that is the message of hope. Top Autism expert Dr. Mary Norfleet Megson in testimony on April 6, 2000, before a US congressional committee explained how at least one genetic interaction with environmental toxins causes autism. When a baby is given the MMR vaccine at 15 months and the DPT at 18 months the mercury-based preservative “causes uncontrolled cell-growth differentiation of the G Alpha signals in the G proteins which upgrade and downgrade signals in sensory organs that regulate touch, taste, smell, hearing and vision" – all classic deficiencies in autism. The child sees “only color and shape, except for a box in the middle of their visual field. Children try to make sense of the world by lining up toys, sorting by color. Their avoidance of eye contact is an attempt to get light to land off center in the retina where they have some normal visual function; their mother’s touch feels like sandpaper on their skin. Common sounds become like nails scraped on a blackboard.” Top Another well understood path to autism proceeds by mercury causing encephalitis and then general inflammation which becomes chronic and deregulates several bodily systems. Many autistic children also are found to have some fixated (“locked”) cranial bones, presumably also due to developmental disruptions. These kids bang their heads with incredible force, causing outright brain damage, in an effort to loosen up the tension inside. Top Politics In 1998 one of the world’s leading medical journals, Britain’s Lancet, was the first to take seriously the vaccination connection in a study written by Dr. Andrew Wakefield of the medical school of London’s Royal Free and University College. He proposed identifying autism as an autoimmune illness and implicated primarily vaccines as the cause (The Medical Post, May 8, 2001). Harvard Medical School agreed and by February of this year proposed, on the basis of their own research as well as Wakefield’s, that treatment protocols should address autism as a brain-gut disease because, among other things, harmful gut bacteria such as candida literally thrive in a mercury-saturated environment and join forces with that heavy metal in escalating neurotoxicity. Top That hit the pharmaceutical giants GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Wyeth and Eli Lilly like a bad dream. Eli Lilly, also the world’s leading producer of biological warfare materials, has the corner on vaccine production. In March 2002, when class-action suits by parents of children made autistic by vaccines, began to be registered throughout the US, the law firm Waters & Kraus introduced in court evidence showing that Eli Lilly knew since the 1930’s, when vaccines began to be developed, that the use of mercury as a preservative was bad news especially for children. Top It comes as no surprise, that Dr. Wakefield found himself suddenly fired because his “research was no longer in line with [his employers’] strategy” – understandably so, as that university is heavily financially supported by those pharmaceutical giants. However, higher powers must have been looking out for autistic children, and Dr. Wakefield was immediately hired by Dr. Jeff Bradstreet at the International Child Development Resource Center in Florida. You can meet and hear Dr. Bradstreet, parent to an autistic child himself, this June. It is Wakefield’s, Bradstreet’s and other researchers whose successful treatment of autism you can learn about directly at this conference designed for parents. Top Unable to stop the research community from pursing the vaccine connection, Eli Lilly’s CEO, a personal friend of President George W. Bush, decided a bigger gun was needed. Calculations had shown that if even a small number of the currently registered class action suits succeeded, the payments then ordered would exceed Lilly’s current net worth. President Bush obligingly tacked on to the first Homeland Security Act – a bill supposedly focused on protection from terrorism – a little clause which immunized (pardon the pun) Lilly from any payouts exceeding $ 250,000. Republican congressman Dan Burton is the grandfather of a child made autistic by MMR vaccine. He had chaired the hearings at which Dr. Wakefield and Dr. Megson had testified. Burton noticed and all hell broke loose. The tacked-on rider went down in flames. Top A twist to the politics of medicine came from Prime Minister Tony Blair. In February 2002 he exhorted his fellow Brits not to turn away from “life-saving vaccines” - as is the case by now in unprecedented numbers. When asked if he had permitted his 20-months old son to be vaccinated, Blair refused to answer, citing the need for privacy. Top The ongoing usual skullduggery includes vaccine manufacturers refusing to share raw data with medical scientists investigating their products, protocols doctored by obliging industry scientists to achieve results contradicting Wakefield’s studies, and the usual conflict of interest scene: the US government’s Center for Disease Control is both charged with promoting vaccine use as well as evaluating their safety. (The Medical Post May 8, 2001). However, some of the CDC scientists leaked the secret report on the relationship between vaccines and autism to the public. Visit www.mercola.com. This report shows, that not only is the mercury preservative part of the problem, but so vaccination itself may be equally serious an assault on a baby’s immature immune system, even without any preservatives. Top Prevention and Cure Prevention is easy. Only vaccinate your child if absolutely necessary, do so only when your child is older and insist on single-dose preservative-free vaccines. Phone Health Canada and tell them what you want. The law guarantees you the right to informed consent and safety from harm. Such vaccines are available. As for the cure, attend this conference and use the resources provided below. Top The tests that have been developed are exceedingly refined. They allow the doctor to assess toxicity levels, identify the toxins involved, and what the nutritional imbalances are as a result of this assault. Hair analysis provides long-term information, biological terrain and mineralization assessments, as well as fecal and urine analysis, show current processes in your child’s body. The PH balance tests show how alkaline or acidic the body is and foods to avoid or increase. Additionally, due to the fact that autism is a gut-brain illness, many allergies need to be identified. Treatment requires removal of the toxins which have accumulated and can never be metabolized, while at the same time doing the needful to protect the organs of elimination (kidneys especially) as the toxins begin to be eliminated. International protocols have been worked out for these procedures, such as the DAN protocol (“Defeat Autism Now”). In most cases the use of the hormone secretin is essential to achieve improvement and outright cures at the level of about 50%. All of this is available through Canadian labs and physicians. How I wish I could turn back time and give Melanie what this conference is sure to offer. Top Addendum: On April 8th the United States Senate voted unanimously to instruct the Department of Health to seek ways and means immediately to stop the use of mercury or any other potentially harmful preservatives from being used in vaccines. The Senators who initiated this bill have children who became autistic when given their MMR vaccinations. Top

	Sources and Resources:

	Autism Canada Foundation, P.O. Box 1998, Burlington, Ontario, L7R 4L8, 905-332-4766, or 905-331-4480 and at www.autismcanada.org . For the conference June 21-22, 2003 be sure to mention this Vitality article as your source to receive the early registration discount. Dr. J. Bradstreet’s institute can be reached via www.icdrc.org . Also visit www.autismresearchinstitute.com DG Medical Corporation in London , Ontario, carries an excellent oral detox system for heavy metals. Call: 1-866-560-3834 International Center for Metabolic Testing in Ottawa provides the nutritional status, toxic load and urine peptide tests for doctors treating autistic children according to the protocols discussed in this article. Call for info and names of doctors 1-888-591-4124 For doctors trained to work with autistic children in Canada and the USA call American Academy of Environmental Medicine 316-684-5500, visit www.AAEM.com The Holistic Alternative (see ads in Vitality) provides access to oral detox methods and especially all the tests discussed in this article: 416-318-8871 For up-to-date information on vaccine damage visit www.909shot.com and join the free e-mail list of the National Vaccine Information Center News www.909shot.com Best source for comprehensive overview of all issues relating to autism is www.mercola.com Bettelheim, B., Surviving, Vintage Books, 1980 Coulter, H.L. & Fisher, B.L., A Shot In The Dark, Avery, 1991 Cave, S., MD, What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Children’s Vaccinations, Warner, 2001 DeVita, C., “Attention Deficit Disorders, Autism, and Heavy Metal Toxicity”, Whole Life Expo lecture Nov. 2002; order through Audiotree 905-665-9000 Kaufman, B.N., Son Rise, Warner Books, 1976 Williams, D., Nobody Nowhere: Autobiography of an Autistic, Doubleday, 1992 Top

	A Primer On Kids' Health Vitality Dec. 2002/Jan. 2003 By Helke Ferrie The disciples came unto Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And Jesus called a little child unto him and set him in the midst of them, and said ….”whoso offends one of these little ones…. it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” Matthew 18:1-6 Top Imagine if baby Jesus had arrived - not in a stable among oxen, sheep, and camels - but in a modern Canadian subdivision. Imagine again Jesus being raised on soya formula and baby food from plastic jars instead of mother’s milk and then being bundled off to the doctor for his vaccination shots. Finally, imagine Jesus growing up in the pristine toxicity of a modern chemically-saturated home and school, also spending much of his waking time in front of a TV, nourished by French fries, hamburgers, pizza and milk shakes. What would the chances have been of Jesus having grown up to be Jesus? The answers provided by current research into the hazards developing children face routinely indicate that the chances are very slim for any child today to grow up sufficiently healthy and with a properly functioning brain. As for the capability of receiving divine inspiration, even God cannot speak through a mind and body that don’t function in accordance with nature’s basic design. Endangering our children’s development means actively working against the future of humankind. Top At the bottom of the annual celebratory chaos of Christmas is that great hope that life will renew itself again and again. The birth of that Divine Child stands for all children and for the future itself. It has been said, that the birth of every child provides proof that God has not yet given up on us. Thirty years ago, when I began raising my 13 adopted and 3 biological children, I would never have believed that the cold, determined rage of Jesus’ words quoted above and the spirit of Christmas would within a quarter of a century come to be mutually necessary. Today, nothing less will do than Jesus’ powerful image invoking a roaring “Stop this destruction of the innocent!” The scientific and epidemiological evidence is way, way past posturing and academic debate. Indeed, the World Wildlife Fund’s recent report on the future of plants, animals and humans, over the coming century, indicates that we are racing into suicide. The evidence of runaway extinction-in-the-making is not just in declining elephants, birds and plants, but in our children. But we are only doomed if we don’t act. That action starts at home with your child, my grandchildren, and in our communities. In the end, politicians follow where we lead them – not the other way around. Top So, do we love money more than children? In the September 9th issue of The New Yorker is a cartoon by Mankoff showing a CEO addressing shareholders saying: “And so, while the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors, we believe that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit.” This awful joke is echoed by Cambridge University’s Martin Jenkins, the senior advisor to the World Conservation Monitoring Center, who said, specifically referring to humans, “Things are getting worse faster than possibly ever before. Never has one single species had such an overwhelming influence. We are entering uncharted territory.” Since 1970, fully one third of the natural world has been destroyed by humans and freshwater ecosystems have shrunk by 55%. Our Great Lakes may be deserts like the Aral Sea within 200 years. We must change our ways, or find at least two more habitable planets within 50 years, the report concludes. There being no such planets anywhere within a reasonable number of light years away, we have no choice. The good news is that this is within the realm of the possible. Top The depletion of life-supporting resources is half the problem. The other half concerns pollution. While our politicians spout nonsense about the Kyoto treaty’s dangers to business, childcare workers from across Canada recently reported to provincial premiers that air pollution has increased so dramatically, that “… twenty-two years ago we did not administer puffers to children under the age of four. Now it is not uncommon for us to do so for children aged three months.” (Shellie Bird of CUPE, Toronto.) The Ontario Medical Association reported that air pollution costs Ontario more than $ 1 billion annually in medical care. Mr. Romanow’s idea that we just need more money is absurd. There isn’t enough money to pay for the escalating asthma epidemic in children alone, leave alone for all the other environmentally caused and nutritionally-mediated diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and all the autoimmune diseases which can no longer be attributed to genetics – except by scientists fantasizing on behalf of Big Tobacco, Bid Pharma and Big Agriculture. Top The US medical researcher Philip Landrigan, who in the 1990’s managed to make child health issues of central political importance, now published an astounding article in Environmental Health Perspectives (July 2002), published by the prestigious National Institutes of Health. Landrigan’s team studied the full range of available government data from which his research team estimated the health-care costs to society from children poisoned by lead (paints, gasoline fumes), asthma (all air pollution combined), cancer (primarily pesticides), and developmental disabilities (fetal exposure to environmental toxicants and the standard grossly nutrient-deficient North American diet). They left out calculations on all the other diseases children also get from polluted environments and bad nutrition, nor did they consider the long-term effects (for example: mercury amalgam in a 10-year old translates into auto-immune disease or Alzheimer’s in mid-life; a diet based on transfatty acids and refined sugars translates into a stroke, heart disease and diabetes even before mid-life). Top The cost, if present trends are allowed to continue, is US $ 54.9 – 64.9 billion annually. Since this figure reflects current costs, the mind boggles at the costs yet to come. The article ends with a whopping understatement which rings out like a judgement on the Industrial Era: “Most important, increased investment is needed to prevent pollution.” Top Is prevention possible? Can parents protect their children? You bet you they can – and help change the world while they are at it. Humankind is, in the final analysis, a large crowd of individuals capable of making intelligent decisions at the personal level, thereby affecting the whole human family in a steady and inexorable ripple effect. You don’t have to wait till Health Canada issues guidelines: those, like most standard medical tests, tend to state the obvious when it is usually already too late. Top To protect your child requires understanding clearly what it is that endangers your son or daughter, such as air, diet, vaccines, television, dentistry, the home and school environments. The air is not only dependent on signing the Kyoto treaty. The books cited in the resource section below give you practical information on how you can fix your child’s world. I have a free-standing air purifier in my home which greatly relieves my 11-year old granddaughter’s sensitivity to perfumes and animal dander. Excellent systems exist also for forced-air heating, and since 1988 all such measures are fully tax-deductible if prescribed by a physician. Schools expose children to toxicants, but returning to clean air at home allows the immune systems to recover every day from assaults beyond your control. Top The information on the deleterious effect of long-term exposure to television on children is overwhelming (see websites provided below). The World Health Organization has published several volumes on this issue. The exposure to the electromagnet fields generated by television and certain types of computers inhibits the growth of the brain. The content of the tv shows is well known to affect behavior through its continuous exposure to violence. Top Last year in March, CBC’s David Suzuki aired “Effects of Pesticides on Human Development”. The research by Elizabeth Guillette in South America was featured showing the developmental differences between children raised in a pesticide-free environment to those exposed to agricultural pesticides from fetus to school age. The pesticide-exposed group was unable to develop properly resulting in an entire generation of mildly retarded children. At the Eco Summit in Ottawa in May 2000, researchers reported to the Canadian federal government that the increase in such borderline retarded children, if present trends continue, would be financially unsustainable. Why? Because there wouldn’t be enough people born of normal intelligence. Top If the child has escaped injury from pesticides during its fetal stage, thousands of chemicals assault the developing brain and nervous system through the carpets, paints, dry-cleaned clothes and disinfectants during the toddler stage. David Suzuki’s “Up Close and Toxic” aired by CBC in October this year described how on average a toddler puts something into his mouth 76 times per hour. Most of those things outgas neurotoxic plastics or chemicals designed to protect us from creatures in whose presence our Neanderthal ancestors thrived. Pesticides in cleaning materials, home, and garden merely further the adaptive powers of the roaches and bugs, because their genetic adaptability far exceed ours, being short-lived creatures. Top The food our kids eat is not fit for life – if it is processed. It isn’t even wholly adequate when it is organic. In a startling move the American Medical Association published in their journal (June 19th 2002) that everybody needs nutritional supplements (especially vitamins C, E, folic acid, and magnesium) because no diet, not even organically grown food, meets basic nutritional requirements. Your regular super-market potato, once the main source of potassium, now has zero potassium if conventionally grown. Dead food is no longer a metaphor. Top In Appleton, Wisconsin an experiment was initiated in 1997. The Central Alternative High School there was notorious for discipline problems and low academic achievement. Principal LuAnn Coenen brought in a group called “Natural Ovens” which began a whole-fresh-food lunch program without fries, shakes, burgers and the rest of the transfatty junk, threw out the vending machines (pop and candy), and brought in purified water. Within less than a year there was no more truancy, academic achievement increased in all grades, and expulsions, vandalism, drug abuse, suicides, weapons in school and drop-outs went to ZERO! Most interestingly: no more ADHD! The whole spectrum of learning disabilities - of which ADHD is one - is well known to be mediated through essential fatty acid deficiency characteristic of all the stuff that Wisconsin school threw out. The same experiment was conducted by Oxford University in UK prisons and reported in the British Journal of Psychiatry (June 2002). The changed diet brought violence down by a whopping 40%! Top The Australian Medical Association has begun a campaign to teach parents to restrict junk food intake because the general allergic response to processed foods, called obesity, is the trigger for juvenile diabetes and asthma, all epidemic now (obesity in adults is at 61%, in children 13% in North America). In the US, the same law firms that brought Big Tobacco to its knees are now working to prepare class action suits against the food industry for knowingly depleting essential nutrients in foods in the interest of increasing shelf life. (British Medical Journal June 15, 2002). Top The worst assault a child can suffer is vaccine injury. Most people don’t know that you have the right to refuse vaccination, nor that about a third of all children don’t get vaccinated ever because the parents consciously decided against the risk. Most doctors don’t read the data safety sheets the vaccine’s manufacturer must provide. These inform of the unacceptable risks involved. The overwhelming evidence supports the observation that most autism is caused by vaccines (up in the UK by 1,500% since the MMR vaccine was introduced; up by 300% in California over the past decade where vaccination is pushed the most vigorously). Diabetes and cerebral palsy are the other frequently resulting conditions. Sixty-eight lawsuits were launched against Eli Lilly by thousands of parents for providing vaccines the company knew, since the 1940’s, to be neurotoxic. Lilly, also the world’s top manufacturer of biological warfare materials, managed to get a clause tagged onto the recent Homeland Security Bill in the US, protecting Lilly from liability for vaccine injury. Top Johns Hopkins Medical School vaccine expert Neal Halsey reported that the problem is a lack of arithmetic: when single-disease vaccines became combined into triple-disease immunization, the amount of mercury added as a preservative tripled also since the 1930’s. (New York Times Nov. 9, 2002) Most astonishing is the research showing that throughout the world all of the diseases we get vaccinated against declined or totally disappeared, often decades before vaccines were developed for them! Disease-causing organisms are dependent upon poor nutrition and poor sanitation. Dr. Zoltan Rona’s little book on vaccination is a must-read for all Canadian parents. Jennet Grover of the Etoma Research Center (jennet@frii.com) writes:”If you were intending to purchase a dietary supplement, and the label offered this warning: ‘May contain traces of formaldehyde, thimerosal, phenol, ethylene glycol [carcinogens and neurotoxins all] and animal cells.” Would you buy it?” Top The spirit of Christmas speaks to us of protecting the vulnerable future. No better way to celebrate Christmas than to resolve to do so at home with our own children. Top

	Sources and Resources:

	Alison, K. & Raymon d, K., How to Stay Healthy and Still Eat Chocolate, Artemis House, 2002 Berksen, D.L., Hormone Deception: How Everyday Foods and Products Are Disrupting Your Hormones and How to Protect Yourself and Your Family, Contemporary Books, 2000 Breggin, P., MD, Talking Back to Ritalin, Common Courage Press, 1998 Diodati, C., Immunization: History, Ethics, Law and the Health, Integral Aspects, 1999 Duffy, W., Sugar Blues, Time Warner, 1975 (the classic that inspired the health revolution) Erasmus, U., Fats that Heal and Fats that Kill, Alive Books, 2nd ed., 1997 Fallon, S., Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats, New Trends, 1999 Firshein, R., Reversing Asthma, Time Warner Books, 1996 Strauts, Z., MD, Turning Lead into Gold: How Heavy Metal Poisoning Can Affect Your Child and How to Prevent and Treat it, New Star Books, Vancouver, 1995 Kropp, J., MD, Healing the Planet One Patient At A Time: A Primer in Environmental Medicine, KOS Publishing Inc., 2002 Rapp, D., MD, Is This Your Child’s World? How You Can Fix the Schools and Homes that are Making Your Children Sick, Bantam, 1996 Rona, Z., MD, Natural Alternatives to Vaccination, ALIVE Books, 2001 Simontacchi, C., Crazy Makers: How the Food Industry is Destroying Our Brains and Harming Our Children, Tarcher-Putnam, 2000 Suzuki, D., “The Nature of Things” program of October 2002: “Up Close and Toxic”, and of March 2001: “Effects of Pesticides on Human Development”, text: call Bowdens Fulfillment Services 416-750-2220 Walker, M., Elements of Danger: Protect Yourself Against the Hazards of Modern Dentistry, Hampton Roads, 2000 Werbach, M.R., MD, Textbook of Nutritional Medicine, Third Line Press, 1999 To subscribe to the Children’s Environmental Health Network (CEHN) e-mail cehncommunity-on@cehn.org On heavy metals and prevention of vaccine injury: www.mercurypolicy.org www.safeminds.org To see the international conference on vaccine safety: www.c-span.org/watch/cspan2.asp. and explore many other health issues: www.mercola.com On vaccine safety: Vaccination Risk Awareness Network Inc. at www.vran.org or e-mail to info@vran.org For air purification systems two excellent sources are: The Allergy Shop, Ottawa, 613-737-5183 Pure Air Plus, 519-941-5213 On TV, computers etc. and health: www.aap/advocacy/archives/augdis.htm www.parentsoup.com www.altc.org/resources www.growsmartbrains.com To subscribe to “Touch the Future” e-mail TTFuture@aol.com Top

	On Children Vitality Dec. 2003 By Helke Ferrie Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton At Christmas time we celebrate the birth of a Divine Child - who never grows up. If he did, the cycle of creation and the pageant of evolution would end. Contemplating the future of our children in the face of our current environmental problems, a crib in a manger two thousand years ago in Roman-occupied Israel seems like an excellent deal compared to the world into which children are born now. Top Some years ago, at a conference, a scientist presented a computer model showing that if current trends of pollution continue, the human race would go extinct in about 500 years (about 1,500 generations). The process would be as in the currently threatened loon: the eggs can’t hatch, and when they do, the creature is genetically compromised and can’t survive long enough to reproduce. Indeed, in Europe about 25% of people under the age of 25 are infertile, and human sperm count is 50% down since the early 1960’s - following which pesticides and synthetic chemicals began to saturate air, water, soil, food and medicines, almost always detrimentally. Top Children comprise 30% of the world’s population and 100% of humanity’s future. The World Health Organization informs us that more than 40% of the total global burden of disease, known to be caused by environmental factors, is borne by the world’s children under the age of five (www.who.int 2002 WHO fact sheet). This statistic does not include the effect of environmental toxins on the developing fetus and young children in determining the onset of chronic disease later in life. Studying this research curiously makes it hard to find the exact boundaries between past, present and future; they are inextricably intertwined, and causes and effects form a circle. This highlights the very essence of children. Top Margaret Somerville of McGill University’s Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law observed in her famous book, The Ethical Canary: Science, Society and the Human Spirit (2001), that science, law, the economy, and social policy do not travel at the same speed because each has its own priorities which develop from different experiences. “Nature time” travels at speeds generally at odds with human concerns, but “nature time” is ultimately in charge. Nature moves at geological speeds of no personal relevance to human concerns, as well as at rapid biological speeds totally unpredictable and potentially disastrous when humans disregard ecological imperatives and genetic dynamics. “Business time” (which wants profits and growth in quarterly annual instalments), “science time” (which wants no limits set to its curiosity), and “social policy time” (which always reacts after the fact) are all on a collision course with “nature time” which cares nothing for profit and theoretical curiosity and is unforgiving of tardy social policy. All it cares for is life itself. The Divine Child teaches us to adjust our priorities. Top The Past In The Present One can always startle doctors, politicians and the general public with the information that all diseases have a known history. The medical profession is astonished because this means there must have been a cause for everything and so-called “idiopathic” diseases are a myth. Politicians understand that rational public health policies are in theory possible. The anthropology of disease (my academic specialty before I climbed on this soap box of medical science writing) is the other side of a coin which reads “The Precautionary Principle”. Top This principle, first enunciated in the 1970’s when it became part of Germany’s environmental laws, asserts in its 1992 Earth Summit formulation: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.” For ecologist Sandra Steingraber this is what “prompts us to buckle seat belts, get out of the pool when lightning flashes, and throw away mysterious leftovers discovered in the back of the refrigerator. It’s why we keep plastic bags and book matches away from young children.” Current knowledge of how disease is caused and physical degeneration evolves is so vast, we have all we need to justify the Precautionary Principle. Top The classic 1989 study by Mark Nathan Cohen, Health And The Rise of Civilization, provides a magisterial survey of the evolution and origins of infectious disease to chronic illnesses. That history spans about 2 million years of unconscious behavior that had unknowable detrimental effects that remained with us until today. Some 100,000 years ago the Neanderthals had no way of knowing that their diet was the cause of the appearance of arthritis. The first experiments with agriculture 10,000 years ago reduced food diversity to reliance on just a few staples resulting in those foods becoming less nutritious through domestication and osteoporosis followed. The trend to living in villages, instead of roaming the earth, gave cancer and all infectious disease a chance to evolve. Top The myth of the Garden of Eden is usefully turned on its head: we unknowingly have almost destroyed that garden, but we now know how to create it. For example, in the recent past we have the astounding results of three lines of research. First, the work of the dentist Weston A. Price in the 1930’s compared the development of teeth and facial bone structure over several generations in peoples all over the world by looking at their diets. This study is generally considered the beginning of nutritional medicine as a science. Dr. Price’s research identified for the first time what constitutes essential nutrients in the diets of those “primitives” who were totally healthy. He also showed (in the 1930’s before pesticides!) that all those societies which had adopted the refined carbohydrate diet (today called SAD - Standard American Diet) showed high prevalence of bad teeth and those chronic illnesses which we now conveniently call “idiopathic”, or worse: genetic. They never were part of the genetic program – now they are. We put them there. Top The second study was begun in 1983 by Cornell University and lasted 25 years. It compared the disease burden of the Chinese and American peoples based on a large number of measures, most of them nutritional (www.newcenturynutrition.com). The results show that the “diseases of affluence” are cancer, leukemia, diabetes, and coronary disease – all based on nutrients refined out of the food. The “diseases of poverty” are infectious diseases, tuberculosis, and parasites due to malnutrition caused by over-all caloric and protein reduction. As in the earlier research of Dr. Price, the results also show that when food was adequate, health depends on the same set of essential nutrients, and disease is associated with our denatured SAD (see also monograph no. 150 from www.worldwatch.org). Top Finally, we need to consider a conference held this May at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York co-hosted by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Researchers examined the so-called “Barker Hypothesis” named after a British physician who noticed that “exposures and risk factors encountered early in life can predispose an individual to the development of disease later in life” chief among them Parkinson’s, cancer and Alzheimer’s (see www.som.soton.ac.uk/research/foad/barker.asp). These “are now thought to arise through a series of stages that require years and even decades to evolve.” Just as toxicology now is based on the understanding that small, frequent amounts of a toxin will have large, unpredictable, often irreversible effects later on, so too developmental phases provide windows of opportunity for disease and genetic defects. Top While normal aging involves some inevitable loss of brain cells, when a fetus or a young child is exposed to environmental neurotoxins (e.g. pesticides, solvents) “silent damage is inflicted” on the brain which during normal aging becomes expressed and much later causes overwhelming damage. The development of Parkinson’s depends on “postnatal exposures to pesticides alone” which diminish the number of neurons (messenger molecules) that maintain appropriate levels of dopamine responsible for all fine-motor movement. If re-exposed later in life to even low levels of pesticides, the entire dopamine production runs down. Think about that the next time your toddler walks with you through a park or accompanies you while spraying the roses. Other presentations showed the same process at work in predisposing children to heart disease through the mother’s exposure to various toxins in the environment and her diet. The overall conclusion was that environmental toxins “induce effects that can be transgenerational” because “exposure to environmental agents in the womb can alter gene expression in the developing fetus”. (See www.niehs.nih.gov/dert/home.htm ). Top The power the past has over the present suggests that “a pill for every ill” is a totally inappropriate paradigm for the practice of medicine, as Dr. Stephen Davis, the editor of the Journal of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine (no. 5, 1995) observed. Health and disease are dependent upon time, and genetic expression is not a fixed pre-determined program, but is exquisitely dependent on the right protection and the right nutrients at the right time. Top The Future In The Present: If there are to be children 500 years from now, the information medical science provides today demands action. The Sept. 12, 2003, article by Hauser et al in Environmental Health Perspectives shows that the chlorine’s damaging effect starts with the sperm. Similarly, maternal exposure to DDT (banned in North America since the 1970’s, but part of our diet through foods coming from Asia and Africa) continues its damaging effect across generations by causing neurological damage to the offspring of their daughters. A fetus exposed via the mother to plasticizers (phthalates) can due to its estrogenic effect shorten pregnancy, thereby priming the low-weight premature baby to various known health risks throughout life (EHP Nov. 14, 2003). Commercial flame retardants used in electric appliances and building materials are highly carcinogenic and found in the breast milk of North American women at a 37% higher rate than anywhere else – thereby setting up the nursing child for cancer later in life (both from www.ehpnet1.niehs.nih.gov/docs/2003). Because children’s immune systems mature over the first few years, exposure to all pesticides adversely affects that development and sets them up for all kinds of immune diseases later on (World Resources Institute Study by R. Repetto, 2000). Top What all of this does to the development of the brain is graphically illustrated by the drawings of children studied by Elizabeth Guillette over two decades. She observed the development of Mexican children born and raised in a village where pesticides were used liberally and compared them with children in a foothills area where no pesticides were ever used. The perceptual and mental skills of the valley children not only lagged dramatically behind those of the foothills children, but were beyond repair (EHP June 1998). Top This study has staggering implications for the future of humanity, as Dr. Landrigan at the above-mentioned conference pointed out: even a 5 point shift in the average IQ of a population (via pre-natal exposure to pesticides) almost doubles the number of retarded children and cuts in half the number of gifted ones. But repair of such generational damage appears to be possible over time. Nature is stubbornly creative and produces excellence if we don’t interfere: In a 10 year study on many generations of cats, Dr. Pottenger showed in the 1930’s the following: healthy cats fed a diet similar to our SAD produced offspring with chronic illnesses in the second generation; the third greneration was mostly infertile. However, those few who were able to reproduce, had perfectly healthy cats by the third generation – if all three generations had a nutrient-rich diet. Top So what can we do? We have choices and we have the knowledge to make good ones. Consider the results of a National Institutes of Health study (EHP Oct. 31, 2002) showing that by just feeding children organic food, all those neurotoxic and carcinogenic pesticides were dramatically reduced in body fluids and tissues. “Honey, let me have that match box” should become “Honey, eat this organic apple and let’s chuck that super market toxic one.” Top If you are planning on having a baby, take plenty of folic acid, stay away from pesticides, eat organic. It prevents not only neural tube defects, but also childhood cancer by conferring protective developmental potential (Medical Post Nov. 4, 2003). Avoid carcinogenic benzene-containing perfumed toilet articles, and ensure that toothpaste does not contain neurotoxic and thyroid-damaging fluoride and phenols. Use cornstarch-based powders, vinegar in the laundry instead of artificial softeners and fresheners (all of which contain neurotoxic additives!). Baby food is now available made from organics, bottled in glass instead of plastic, fortified with essential fatty acids and B vitamins, devoid of hydrogenated vegetable oils – and keep that diet up for life. Protect against future diabetes by cutting out the colas and the refined sugars – as the World Health Organization guidelines of April 2003 urge. Make sure your dentist does not put carcinogenic and neurotoxic mercury amalgam into your child’s mouth – have them removed if they are in there! Demand your doctor uses single-dose vaccines free of mercury and antibiotic preservatives. They are now available. Get radical: organize mothers into making the school environment safe from toxic chemicals (for practical tools see www.epa.gov/iag/schools). Top Life survives our most enormous stupidities, misjudgments, and appalling acts of arrogance - at a horrendous cost, yet unstoppably so. We may take comfort in Nature’s determined intelligence. The great 19th century religious poet Gerrard Manley Hopkins put it best: “And for all this, nature’s never spent/ There lives the dearest freshness deep down in things … Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and ah! bright wings.” Top

	Sources and Resources:

	Alison, K. & Raymond, K. How To Stay Healthy and Still Eat Chocolate. Artemis, 2002 Breiner, M. DDS. Whole Body Dentistry, Quantum Health Press, 1999 Breggin, P. MD. Talking Back to Ritalin, Common Courage, 1998 Cave, S. MD. What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Children’s Vaccinations, Warner Books, 2001 Fallon, S. Nourshing Traditions, New Trends, 1999 (the ultimate cookbook!) Price, W.A. DDS. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Keats, 50th Anniv. Ed. 1989 Rapp, D. MD. Is This Your Child’s World? Bantam, 1996 Tickner, J.A. ed. Environmental Science and Preventive Public Policy, Island Press, 2003. Simontacchi, C. The Crazy Makers: How the Food Industry Is Destroying Our Brains and Harming Our Children. Tarcher, 2000 Steingraber, S. Having Faith; An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, Perseus, 2001 Autism, neurological disorders and vaccines: http://www.autismcanada.org/home.htm Nutrition: www.price-pottenger.org or 619-462-7600 Doctors against junk-food: http://www.pcrm.org To fight pesticide use: ECO PRAXIS: Research and Resources Center. 905-465-0667 or epi@web.net On fluoride: www.fluoride.org for an information package to fight your local municaplity with www.hans.org or call 604-435-0512 Top