http://www.stopcancer.org/conf_ec/ssvideo/synop.html
ending of speech in URL above by Dr. Sandra Steingraber
I'm going to conclude here by saying that the reason
that I'm not there
with you in person is because I am a new mother and
it's a much more
overwhelming job then I ever imagined and it's also
an ecstatic one. It's
also, I want to say, a very powerful thing, for a
person like myself who's
had [bladder] cancer to become a parent. We who've
had cancer become very
accustomed to not looking too far into the future and
having a child is a
very long commitment. My daughter's name is Faith -
and I'm learning
what all parents must learn as I go through every
week with her, it's a
new kind of love, it's a love that is more than an
emotion or a feeling,
it's a deep physical craving, almost like hunger or
thirst. It's a realization
that I would lay down my life for this little person
without a second
thought. When you're a parent you discover these
feelings that you'd
never had, that you'd pick up arms for your child.
You would empty your
bank account. It's kind of love without boundaries
and, you know, if this
love were directed toward another adult, it would be
completely
inappropriate. It would be a fatal attraction. And a
couple of my friends
have suggested that, maybe, when directed at babies
we should call this
love 'natal attraction'. So I say this to remind all
of us what's at stake
here. If we're willing to die or kill for our
children, wouldn't we do
anything to keep toxins out of their food supply,
particularly since we
know that infants and embryos and children do exist
in this world of
exquisite sensitivity to carcinogens. And since
dioxin is such an issue in
Hamilton, let me just talk about that for a second.
Dioxin is found the breast milk of all nursing
mothers in Canada and the
US right now. And of all human food, human breast
milk is the most
contaminated with dioxin than any food you could
possibly choose to talk
about. And that's because it's one rung up on the
food chain higher than
the foods that we adults eat. Dioxin concentrates as
it moves up the
food chain so it's distilled one more step in my body
before it goes into
my breast. So my breast milk is ten to a hundred
times more
contaminated with dioxin than is cow's milk, cheese,
meat, eggs, fish,
etc. which would be the next highest contaminated
group of foods, those
made from animal flesh. This is why a breast infant
receives its "safe",
quote-unquote, lifetime level of dioxin within the
first six months of
drinking breast milk. And now that Faith is six
months old, I can look at
her and say, now I've filled you up completely with
dioxin to a point that
you're not supposed to be exposed to any more dioxin
for the whole rest
of your life. And I think about that every now and
then when I'm breast
feeding.
Dioxin is manufactured in a way that's not
deliberate. Nobody makes
dioxin. It's a by-product of burning plastic and
that's how Hamilton,
Ontario is being contaminated, that's how New England
has been
contaminated. It's primarily through incineration.
There are some other
ways of making dioxin but that's the main one. But
even though it's an
air pollutant, our route of exposure is not by
breathing the air, it is
through eating food. So the food that I have eaten is
concentrated into
my breasts and goes into the milk. Nothing I can do
now in my lifestyle
as a mother, as much as I want to protect my child,
which is my most
deep desire now, nothing I can do with my lifestyle
can change that.
Because it's not the dioxin I eat every day in my
food - I could try to eat
lower on the food chain and I do, to lower the amount
of dioxin coming
into my body - but this is dioxin that is laid down
over my lifetime.
Because when breast milk is manufactured, it's
manufactured from fat
globules all over my body, you know, in the liver,
the fat apron around
the intestines, etc. etc. The globules are carried
into the breast and
dioxin, pesticide residues or PCBs are in there,
carried into the breast.
So chemicals I was exposed to when I was a child,
when I was a fetus,
are now being mobilized and brought into the breast
and into the mouth
of my daughter. There's nothing I can do about that.
When we burn trash in New England and we burn plastic
in it, especially
PVC, poly-vinyl chloride, which is the most heavily
chlorinated of our
plastics, dioxin comes out of the stack, it drifts in
the wind, it attaches
to dust particles, those sift down and coat plants,
plants are fed to
animals and that is how it enters the food chain. The
fat globules that
then move into my breast are under the direction of
pituitary hormones
called prolactin, those are made into human milk.
There's another
pituitary hormone called oxytosin which carries that
milk from the back of
my chest wall into the sinuses, the milk-holding
reservoirs right behind
my nipple, and during the process called letdown,
which is a kind of an
amazing process in which milk is released from the
breast and goes out
into the mouth of the breast-feeding infant. That's
how the process
works. So, in other words, here's the connection. My
milk contains dioxin
from old vinyl siding, from discarded window blinds,
from junked toys,
from used IV bags, from plastic parts of buildings
that have burned down
accidentally, these have all found their way into my
breasts and there's
nothing I can do about this.
But let me tell you something else I have learned
about breast feeding.
It's an ecstatic experience. The same hormone, called
oxytosin, that
allows milk to flow from the back of the chest wall
into the nipple, also
controls female orgasm. So the so-called letdown
reflex is not an
unpleasant experience. It's probably nature's way of
making sure you
remember to feed your baby. When the letdown reflex
fills my breast
with milk, it makes it feel like it's fizzing, like
my breasts were a shaken
up bottle of coke. And it's through the ecstatic
dance of an infant
suckling and this hormonal dance inside the mother
that the breast-fed
infant receives not just calories, but also
antibodies. The immune
system is developed through the process of
breast-feeding, which is why
breast-fed infants have fewer bouts of infectious
diseases than
bottle-fed infants. In fact, all of the milk produced
in the first few days
after a baby is born is almost all immunological in
function. This milk is
called colostrum. It doesn't only have antibodies, it
has living cells
drawn from my lymph system, that are swarming around
in this milk. It
also has laxatives to help the baby secrete all of
the waste products. It
has special sugars that actually guide the neurons in
the brain for
special and important brain development. So what I'm
saying here is
that breast feeding is a sacrament. It is not a
lifestyle choice - and by
poisoning breast milk, we have committed not a
problem with lifestyle,
but a problem with a human right.
And if there's ever a need to invoke the
precautionary principle, it is here
inside the chest walls of nursing mothers where
capillaries carry fat
globules into the milk-producing lobes of the breast.
Breast feeding is a
sacred act and I think it's a holy thing. And to talk
about breast feeding
versus bottle feeding - to weigh the known risks of
infectious diseases
against the possible risks of childhood or adult
cancers, I think is an
obscene argument. And those of us who are advocates
for not only
breast cancer and women's health, but also for
children and those of us
who are parents of any kind, need to become advocates
for
uncontaminated breast milk. A woman's body is the
first environment.
Whatever contaminants are in a woman's body finds
their way into the
next generation. And I think there is no better
argument for the
precautionary principle than that. And that is where
activism and science
meet...
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