How Our Toxic Environment Neurologically Damages Fetuses
How Our Toxic Environment Neurologically Damages Fetuses
another reason why we see so much behavior that looks like, or is misdiagnosed as ADHD is because more and more of us are growing up in a neurologically toxic environment.
“In health there is freedom. Health is the first of all liberties. ”
—Henri-Frederic Amiel, 1828-1881
Perhaps another reason why we see so much behavior that looks like, or is misdiagnosed as ADHD is because more and more of us are growing up in a neurologically toxic environment.
In most of the world, lead is still added to gasoline. Only in the past few decades has it been removed from the fuel of the industrialized nations. Lead-contaminated paint can be found in many homes, particularly older ones, more likely to be occupied by low-income people. Children in the inner cities consistently test even today as having high levels of lead in their bloodstream.
This is significant because there’s a direct correlation between lead levels in the bloodstream and the ability to perform well on intelligence tests and in school. While severe lead poisoning can cause profound retardation or other obvious neurological damage, we’ve learned in the past twenty years that even small amounts of lead will have a subtle but measurable effect on the ability to develop and function mentally.
Similarly, at the International Conference on Toxicology held in Hot Springs, Arkansas, researchers reported on 17-year follow-up studies of 2000 residents of central Taiwan. They were exposed to high levels of polychlorinated biphenyl’s (PCBs), a chemical so widely used for the past seven decades for electrical transformers and other applications that it can be found in the blood of nearly every human on earth.
These Taiwanese, from the Yu Cheung area, were exposed to levels of PCB that were, on average, about fifty times that of the average world citizen. Their children, born after the chemical spill in the area, were found to have levels around six times higher than normal. These children exhibited “small but significant delays in attaining normal developmental milestones” in childhood, and the boys performed poorly on reasoning tests. They also found, oddly, that these PCB-exposed children were six times as likely as normal Taiwanese children to suffer from recurrent ear infections, an odd anomaly often noted among ADHD-diagnosed children in the United States.
The neurological effects of toxins may not be limited to exotic and deadly chemicals in our environment. In R. Ridley and H.F Baker’s 1983 paper, “Is there a relationship between social isolation, cognitive inflexibility and behavioral stereotypy? An analysis of the effects of amphetamine in the marmoset,” and in K.A Miczek’s “Ethopharmacology: Primate Models of Neuropsychiatric Disorders,” a case is made that stimulant drugs taken during pregnancy may profoundly affect the developing fetus. Other researchers have wondered out loud whether this may even extend to caffeine, although it’s difficult and politically unwise to try to get research money for studying the effects of that drug.
Thirty years ago no one warned pregnant mothers that alcohol and nicotine could damage their unborn child: now such warnings are commonplace. Fifty years ago DDT was routinely dusted on virtually every food we ate, and sold as a garden powder. Now it’s banned worldwide, but still shows up in the fat of Antarctic seals. Lead was put into gasoline and paint for nearly a century before it was learned that just these two environment sources of lead were reducing IQ scores among city-dwelling children by as much as 10 points.
We must be careful not to fall into the trap of assuming that our current state of knowledge about the toxicity of our environment is the end-state of all knowledge. Yesterday’s health-food fad is often today’s practical reality or EPA law.
It may seem a bit eccentric to shop in the organic produce section, or to insist that our children eat their vegetables. When our houses are not full of junk foods and sugary breakfast cereals, however, it may provide our children with that small edge they’ll need to grow up with a strong nervous system in an increasingly complex and demanding world.