The book required for this class is Protecting New Jersey's Environment. Chapter 1 discusses "The War on Cancer" between the time of the 1970s up to the end of the 1990s. It all started in the 70s when President Nixon declared this "war". The Program on Environmental Cancer and Toxic Substances (PECTS) among others began to fight this war which is still on going to this day. I have people in my own family that have been diagnosed with cancer and it seems like most of my friends also know of someone or are close to someone who has passed from cancer or is thankfully in remission. Cancer is a very hard disease to treat and fight and can even be hard to diagnose sometimes. Sometimes 10 or more years can go by between the time a person was exposed to the carcinogens up to the time of the actual diagnosis. At the time this book was written, there were 246 substances with supportable scientific evidence for carcinogenicity. These include ultraviolet radiation (e.g., sun and tanning beds), viruses (e.g., human papilliomavirus), ionizing radiation (e.g., radon), pesticides (e.g., DDT), solvents (e.g., paint, dry cleaning), benzene (e.g., gaso- line and tobacco smoke), fibers (e.g., asbestos, exposure to which accounts for the largest percentage of occupational cancers), dioxins (e.g., paper manu- facturing and smelting), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (e.g., burning fossil fuels), and heavy metals (e.g., arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, lead, and nickel) (12). I'm sure this list has increased to this day. Just about everything can cause cancer! Even things that are supposed to be good for you like use of toothpaste and deodorant! It is absolutely insane. In the state of California they have a law which requires them to label if something can cause cancer (just about everything). Even if the actual object isn't proven to cause cancer (such as a pair of shoes for example), if those shoes were made in a factory with chemicals around or could have been exposed to the exhaust fumes of the truck it was delivered in - then it must have that label.
"The New Jersey Department of Health calculated geostatistical spatial distributions of cancer mortality in New Jersey and the factors associated with any increased risk of cancer mortality in the New York City–New Jersey–Philadelphia metropolitan region. The study con- firmed that this region did indeed have excessively high childhood leukemia, young adult Hodgkin’s disease, and lymphoma cancer mortality rates com- pared with the United States as a whole" (11). Children's bodies are more at risk because they are still developing making them more susceptible to toxic and carcinogenic exposures. And its not just fumes and chemicals from factories, but even our food and ground water is effected. Pesticides sprayed on our food can cause cancer and it is not as simple as washing the food, but it can seep into the pores of the plant and be consumed that way. Groundwater can also contain pesticides or metals that can cause cancer. When the pesticides are sprayed onto the plants they seep into the soil as well and into our water supply. This is somewhat similar to the Flint water crisis when their water was contaminated and they were in great need for clean water. People were getting sick and the government was working at a very slow pace to help and even tried to get their supply from another place that was only less containment, but not healthy.
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Gabriella Brycea Junior at Seton Hall University studying Elementary and Special education with Environmental Studies. Archives
April 2018
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