Of Pollution and Women

People are in the midst of a vast, unplanned experiment. During the past century the industry has created tens of thousands of chemicals that previously existed nowhere on Earth. With them business tycoons have intentionally transformed the material world, creating countless useful products that are now hard to imagine life without. But these chemicals are also changing the world in ways that extend well beyond their intended design.

A great many, it has been discovered, are capable of altering life's most fundamental biological building blocks and interfering with genes, hormones, and cellular receptors in ways that can adversely affect the body's most vital systems.

Given the complexity of these biological systems and the multitude of chemicals to which people are now exposed - even before birth - it remains difficult to pinpoint precise causes and effects of exposure at a population level. But there is now substantial evidence that environmental pollutants play an important role in most complex human diseases and disorders.

Important signals are being picked up about the coincidence of common and chronic health disorders and chemical toxicology. But pollution risks are worse for developing world women.

Women in the developing world (like women everywhere) have a special set of vulnerabilities to environmental contaminants because their bodies are more sensitive to pollutants that can cause allergies, immune disorders and reproductive and neurological problems triggered by exposure to some synthetic chemicals.

"Research shows that environmental factors are responsible for 23% of our overall global disease burden," says Maria Neira, director of Public Health and Environment for the World Health Organization (WHO), in Geneva. She estimates that addressing this pollution will prevent the deaths of 6 million women per year.

A recent Lancet study found that globally, two-thirds of the 2.6 million annual deaths from air pollution stem from indoor contamination or people inhaling carbon monoxide and fine particles from open fires and wood-burning stoves.

Women are also under increased threat from the 100,000 synthetic substances used in industrial production across the globe. "The female hormonal system is especially sensitive to toxic chemicals in the environment."

Some of these chemicals are "endocrine disrupiors," substances that interfere with hormone signaling, such as the pesticide atrazine, used more heavily in developing countries than in developed ones. Others are "persistent organic pollutants," or POPs, organic compounds that resist breakdown and include polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, found in the auto exhaust that pollutes cities in developing countries.

When women come into contact with these substances in polluted soil, air and water, toxic chemicals can pass through their skin, nostrils or mucus membranes and into their bloodstreams, their body fat and the umbilical cords that nourish their unborn children.
An estimated 19% of cancer, a leading cause of female fatality worldwide, and on the rise in developing countries, can be attributed to environmental causes, reports WHO.

For one thing compared to women in the industrialized world, those in developing countries face a greater risk of health problems that can be attributed to the linked issues of more pollution and less regulation.

Worker safety standards may be shoddy or nonexistent in most developing countries. Even China is no exception.

In February 2013, China acknowledged for the first time that pollution within its borders had created "cancer villages," places where contaminated water and soil have contributed to an 80% spike in the country's cancer rate since 1970 (including higher-than-ever-rates of breast cancer). China pledged to track its use of 58 toxic chemicals and stop industrial production of some known carcinogens. [contributed]

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 52, Jul 7- 13, 2013

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