I am not a physician.

I am not a scientist.

I don't pretend to be an expert about much of anything in life.

So, why am I here?
Because I have been an investigative reporter for 36 years and I am trained to identify experts, to interview those experts, and to detect patterns in masses of data and from seemingly unconnected events.

First, let me acknowledge that you are doing great work in finding ways to combat aging and to extend our lifespans. But you are swimming against cross currents that threaten to undermine your work. That is why I was invited to speak to you today.

I am going to describe for you some of those cross currents and the patterns at work in our lives that may call into question the reproductive future of our entire species.These are patterns that paint a disturbing picture for our health, our longevity, and our quality of life.

Much of what is in my book, The Hundred Year Lie, was verified just this
month in the American Chemical Society's journal, Environmental Science & Technology, which devoted its entire December issue to 40 science studies documenting the emerging chemical threats to people and our planet. I invite you to read these studies if you have doubts about what I am going to tell you.

For some of you, what I am about to say will be about as welcome as a skunk stinking up the air at a Sunday picnic. So I apologize in advance if I raise your blood pressure. I only ask that you try to keep an openmind, but not so open, of course, that your brains fall out.

My book, The Hundred Year Lie, is about a belief system. I call it the synthetics belief system. For one hundred years we have been promised better living through chemistry.

We have been reassured by food processors, by the pharmaceutical industry, and by governments, that the synthetic chemicals being added to our foods and medicines and consumer products are safe for human consumption. Implicit in this belief system is the idea that synthetic chemicals created in a laboratory are equal to, or even superior to, the foods and medicines produced by Nature.

That, to put it bluntly, is the lie we have been telling ourselves for a century! The truth is that we are all guinea pigs in a vast chemical experiment
that is modern civilization. It is a chemistry experiment without an instruction manual.

Food processors and chemical companies and the drug industry do NOT really know what is safe for human consumption, certainly not in the longterm. In the short term, we only know with certainty that a substance is harmful when people sicken and die.

In the longterm, when the cumulative impact of toxic chemical trace levels take their toll on human bodies, most people will try to dismiss it as natural aging.

Health statistics tell part of the story. Since 1950, the age-adjusted rate
for the incidence of all types of cancer has increased by 85 percent. The fastest growing rate of cancer for any age group during this period has been among children, who cannot be accused of having smoked or partied or worked or stressed themselves into a diseased state.

Other health statistics since 1950 reveal similar patterns. Male sperm
counts have fallen by 50 percent, women's tubal pregnancies increased by
400 percent, girls 8-year-old and younger began experiencing puberty.
These are trends that some physicians are defining as 'normal.'

The incidence of death from Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and motor neuron disorders has more than tripled in Western countries. Diabetes has gone from
less than five percent of the US population to nearly 20 percent. Simultaneous with these health developments, the production of synthetic chemicals of all types since 1950 has shown a corresponding increase.

We have gone from 50 billion pounds a year being introduced into our lives a half-century ago, to more than 500 billion pounds annually today. Is it merely coincidence that health problems have multiplied as synthetic chemical production has multiplied? I think not!

Consider another measure of our collective health. Starting in 1999, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began widespread blood testing of average people from all age groups to determine their body burden of synthetic chemical contamination. The testing has been limited because out of
more than 100,000 chemicals in the marketplace, we only have the technology to test for the presence of a few thousand.

Despite that handicap, the Disease Centers have tested more than 10,000 people for the presence of less than 1,000 chemicals.Every single person was found to carry hundreds of these chemicals in their blood and body fat. These chemicals were absorbed from air, water, foods, medicines, and everyday consumer products.

In 2004, the environment ministers from 13 European Union countries had their blood tested. All 13 were horrified to discover they were contaminated with a range of synthetic chemicals, including chemicals used
in fast food packaging, plastics, pesticides, fragrances, and many others.
At least 26 chemicals banned in Europe since the 1970s still turned up in the blood samples of these government officials.

Synthetic chemical toxins migrate. They respect no boundaries. Many that are found in human bodies are also being detected in polar bears at the Arctic Circle. Modern chemistry has created virtually indestructible chemicals that live onin the environment and persist inside our bodies.

This reality led me to investigate the extent to which many of the assumptions that underly our public health systems are fatally flawed.

As I describe in the book, we face three major problem areas. First, animal studies have been used for decades to test whether chemicals are safe for human health. We now know that animal studies are not reliable predictors of harm to human health.Earlier this year revelations emerged that the soy added to animal feed and fed to lab animals for decades may have created
hormonal imbalances in the animals that skewed the experimental results
of thousands of lab studies. In addition to that, animal studies cannot duplicate the real life situation that humans face every day as we absorb dozens if not hundreds of chemicals that affect our metabolisms and our immune systems.

Animal studies are suggestive of impacts on human health, not predictive. And that is an often fatal flaw.

A second flaw in our public health systems is also related to safety testing standards. Of 100,000 synthetic chemicals in use, less than 15,000 have ever been tested individually for their impacts on human health, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But that is only part of the problem. I know of few chemicals that are being tested for their cumulative or additive impacts onhuman health during the course of a lifetime of absorbing these chemicals.

Bear in mind that most of these chemicals have been created since World War II, so the human body has had very little time to biologically adapt to them or to generate easily discernible patterns of illness and disease related to their use.

An even greater threat to health exists as a result of chemical synergies. Synergy is a principle of life and Nature. Yet, manufacturers and public health authorities have been reluctant to accept that this principle should be applied to the chemicals added to our foods and medicines and consumer products. Their reluctance is understandable. With more than 100,000 chemicals in use worldwide, to test all of the many millions of synergistic combinations of chemicals would take an effort equal to the Manhattan Project that created the first atomic bomb.

Neither corporations nor governments can afford that kind of expenditure under present budgetary circumstances. But can we really afford NOT to undertake such an effort? We are adding more than 1,000 new chemicals to our planetary environment every year with unpredictable consequences for human health.

Late last year at the University of Liverpool in Britain, an experiment was
conducted with grave implications for the health of our children. Four chemicals
commonly found in junk food marketed to children were combined in a
laboratory. These chemicals were aspartame, the synthetic sweetener, MSG, the flavor enhancer, and two common food colorings. These chemicals combined into a synergy with the potential to create nerve damage in humans. Is it any wonder that we are seeing an upsurge in the incidence of attention deficit disorder and behavioral problems in children?

The third problem concerns our wastewater treatment plants and water
purification plants. They are NOT technologically sophisticated enough to remove many synthetic chemicals. That is why U.S. Geological Survey testing
of groundwater throughout the United States is finding increasing levels of Prozac, Ritalin, and other pharmaceutical drugs along with chemicals used in personal care products and pesticides. We humans are excreting these
chemicals into the environment and thenrecycling them back through our bodies by eating fish, or ingesting tap water, or even by taking hot showers and inhaling the tap water fumes.

Here is a recent example of this phenomenon. The U.S. Geological Survey reported this past summer that 80 percent of the fish examined in the rivers and river tributaries surrounding Washington, D.C. possessed both male and female sex organs. The males were growing eggs. Since 2003, when these abnormalities in fish were first discovered in the upper Potomac River and in West Virginia, the incidence of intersex births has spread rapidly and widely.
Hormone disrupting chemicals released by wastewater treatment plants were identified as the probable causes of these abnormalities. According to the Geological Survey, the problem may be "a result of several pollutants acting in combination."

In other words, chemical synergies may be producing these mutant fish.

These rivers where mutant fish were found provide the drinking and bathing water for several million residents of Washington, D.C. And suburban Virginia and Maryland. As for the possible threat to human health that exposure to tap water may pose, a spokesman for the area's water utility confessed that they have no idea whether water purification plants can remove the chemicals before humans ingest the water.

"We don't even know if we are analyzing the water to look for the right
things," revealed Charles Murray, general manager of the Fairfax (Virginia) Water utility.

Even though the U.S. Congress directed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1996 to develop a screening program to identify which chemicals are causing abnormalities, a decade later NOT A SINGLE CHEMICAL has been tested by the EPA. Officials with the EPA claim that the technological complexity of testing the water for all of these chemicals is too overwhelming.

THE REMAINDER OF MY SPEECH WILL CONTINUE IN MY NEXT BLOG ENTRY.