Last week Environmental Health Perspectives published an editorialwritten by Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, director of the CEHC, Dr. Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), and Dr. Luca Lambertini, also of the CEHC. The editorial was accompanied by a list of the top ten chemicals believed to cause autism.

1. Lead
2. Methylmercury
3. PCBs
4. Organophosphate pesticides
5. Organochlorine pesticides
6. Endocrine disruptors
7. Automotive exhaust
8. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PACs)
9. Brominated flame retardants (BFRs)
10. Perfluorinated compounds (PFCs)

The researchers call for increased research into the links between environmental toxins and autism.

If you’re not clued into the latest drama unfolding on TMZ, consider yourself lucky. I’ll admit freely that the TMZ app on my phone is a little guilty pleasure of mine. When perusing the “un-news” last week, I came across the tidbit about the backlash aimed at Kourtney Kardashian for coloring her hair while pregnant. Before you click away from the page for me admitting that, yes, I do read TMZ, let me tell you why I find this controversy so interesting.

For those readers who don’t know me, I’ll give a little introduction. I’m a pretty crunchy mama. I do my best to use the safest products on, in, or around my body and those of my family. My 7-year-old-daughter knows how to find non-toxic nail polish, and shuns strawberries that aren’t organic, and doesn’t eat the frosting on most of her friends’ birthday cakes because it contains food dyes.

That said, however, I’m also a 41-year-old woman who got her first gray hairs at age 25. While I’m pretty crunchy where many things are concerned, my one admitted weakness is in wanting (I know it’s vain, I anticipate the flames) to keep my brown hair brown just a tad longer.

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I was born during the Vietnam War. My mother questioned the wisdom of bringing a child into a world so beleaguered and besieged by greed and violence. Forty years later, I find myself wondering, as my mother had, whether bringing a new life into an unsettled world was the right choice.  I chose to have a baby. And while my little one is now the light of my life, I look around and wonder what kind of world he will grow up in: a place where wars still proliferate, where smart weapons slaughter the innocent, where hunger abounds in the richest nation on earth, where teenagers are shot dead for walking while Black, and where unknown toxins have already invaded his perfect little body.

Somehow in the midst of all the bad news, though, there are signs of life: courageous people are rising up, grassroots movements are afoot, and alternatives to the dying economy are sprouting up through the cracks in the concrete. This is what gives me hope. That somehow, someway, we can turn this ship around. Read the rest of this entry →