Posted by Nancy Hepp in guest commentary.
Tags: asthma, autism, childhood cancer, Down syndrome, endometriosis, penis malformation, toxic exposures
CHE partner Alice Shabecoff, co-author with her husband Philip of the book Poisoned for Profit: How Toxins Are Making Our Children Chronically Ill.
The just-released data on autism shows a count of one in 88 children, up from a rate of one in 100 three years ago, and one in 150 five years ago. With each change, the response remains the same: Oh, that’s because of better detection and broader definitions.
How, then, to account for the sharp increase in childhood asthma—15.7 percent higher today than ten years ago? Or an increase of the same magnitude in preterm births? Or the indisputable fact that childhood cancer has climbed an inexorable one percent, year after year, over the past thirty years? As has Down Syndrome. And among rarer illnesses, too, the rates keep going up and up—from the increase in malformations of the penis among newborn boys, to the doubling in a generation of endometriosis, a deformity of the uterus, among girls.
There is no way that these wildly different childhood illnesses can be chalked up to, and written off as, an increase in detection and/or diagnosis.
(more…)
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What’s really behind the increase in autism rates. May 7, 2012
Posted by Nancy Hepp in guest commentary.Tags: asthma, autism, childhood cancer, Down syndrome, endometriosis, penis malformation, toxic exposures
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CHE partner Alice Shabecoff, co-author with her husband Philip of the book Poisoned for Profit: How Toxins Are Making Our Children Chronically Ill.
The just-released data on autism shows a count of one in 88 children, up from a rate of one in 100 three years ago, and one in 150 five years ago. With each change, the response remains the same: Oh, that’s because of better detection and broader definitions.
How, then, to account for the sharp increase in childhood asthma—15.7 percent higher today than ten years ago? Or an increase of the same magnitude in preterm births? Or the indisputable fact that childhood cancer has climbed an inexorable one percent, year after year, over the past thirty years? As has Down Syndrome. And among rarer illnesses, too, the rates keep going up and up—from the increase in malformations of the penis among newborn boys, to the doubling in a generation of endometriosis, a deformity of the uterus, among girls.
There is no way that these wildly different childhood illnesses can be chalked up to, and written off as, an increase in detection and/or diagnosis.
(more…)