Mr. Chairman, thank you very much.
My name is Ken Cook. I'm president of the Environmental Working Group, a non-profit research and advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. I'm delighted and honoured to be able to testify before you today, and I very much appreciate this opportunity to do so.
As I mentioned, my organization uses research to bring issues to light in the public realm. In Canada, we may be best known for a database we prepared and put on the website that lists the names and the amount of money that all the subsidy recipients for agriculture in the United States receive. This website is enormously popular with Canadian farmers.
Not long ago, my organization commissioned the most extensive laboratory tests ever undertaken to examine the extent to which toxic industrial chemicals, pesticides, and pollutants end up in people. Scientists have been studying pollution in air, water, and land for decades of course, but it's only relatively recently that we've turned attention to the types of pollutants that get into all of us.
We sent blood samples from 10 Americans to a Canadian laboratory in British Columbia and analysed them for over 400 toxic chemicals--synthetic industrial compounds, pesticides, and other pollutants. In just those 10 people, we found over 287 industrial toxins, with an average of about 200 in each. If we had invested more than the $10,000 we spent per sample, we undoubtedly would have found many more contaminants in these people.
We found the notorious dioxins and furans, highly carcinogenic compounds, which are the products of industrial waste combustion and vinyl production. We found long-lasting flame retardants, which have been observed to impair attention, memory, and nervous system functions at extraordinarily low levels in animal studies. We found chemicals that have been used for decades to repel stains and convey waterproof capacity to fabrics and carpets, and that interestingly enough seem never to break down in the environment, unlike even dioxin or DDT or PCBs. We also found DDT breakdown products and PCB breakdown products, even though these compounds of course have been banned for decades in the United States. We found heavy metals, such as mercury and lead, which can cause devastating irreversible damage to the brain and nervous system at very low levels. In fact, the more we study them, we're concerned that lower and lower levels can still cause damage.
We don't know very much about these 10 Americans. They were anonymous donors. We received the blood samples through the research program of the American Red Cross. We do know they were not industrial workers. We are certain they were not exposed while working on the farm. We know they were not exposed by virtue of any consumer products they purchased, by the water they'd consumed, or by any exposure that might have been related to where they chose to live.
The only thing we really know for sure about these 10 people is that they were born in August and September of 2004. You see, we found these 287 chemical pollutants in the umbilical cord blood of newborn babies.
While the exposures were occurring, they looked something like this. I brought posters depicting this imagery to the United States capital when we released our report there and I was stopped by the Capitol Hill guards who told me that protest materials of this nature were forbidden. We had to have an escort from representative Louise Slaughter, a senior member of Congress, bring us into the building. Since I'm not familiar with Canadian custom--although I know you're known to be very polite--I brought it on computer today.
In America, industrial pollution begins in the womb. Our distinguished colleagues--and I'm proud to be here on the panel with them--from the chemical industry could not begin to tell you which of the chemicals produced by the companies they represent end up in the cord blood of Canadian babies. They couldn't begin.
The amount of these toxins in cord blood of course is quite low--sometimes in the parts per billion range--but over the past few decades we've learned in toxicology and analytical chemistry that even very low levels of compounds, if the dose is administered at the wrong time in the development of a baby, for example, can cause severe damage. So don't let anyone tell you that the dose makes the poison until they make it clear also that the timing of the dose and the person or the subject that is receiving the dose and their genetic vulnerabilities are also not important.
The real question, I think, at this stage is, why is it that we are only now learning such rudimentary things decades into the chemical revolution, such as the types and amounts of pollutants to which even babies are exposed in the womb? Why is that so new, decades later? Why do we lack even basic information about the safety of those exposures to individual toxins? Why do we have next to no information about the potential risks faced by those exposed, even in the womb, to multiple carcinogens, which we found in this study; multiple neurotoxins, which we found in this study; multiple agents that can affect the hormone system? Why is that the case? Then, of course, there is the big question that all the panellists have touched upon: why have we exposed babies in the womb to industrial chemicals before we are certain that those exposures are safe?
All those questions cause us to commend our colleagues at Environmental Defence Canada for the bio-monitoring studies they have been conducting--and I know they have more in the works--in their Toxic Nation series of reports. They underscore the need to protect vulnerable populations, notably the most vulnerable, who are also least able to protect themselves: babies in their mother's womb, infants, and young children.
Environmental Defence's work and ours also makes clear the need to have effective timelines for regulatory action to place the burden on industry to demonstrate the safety of chemicals, not on the government to demonstrate their harm decades after we have them come onto the market. In that regard, I would encourage you to look at legislation that was introduced last year in the United States that mirrors the 1996 law that reformed our pesticide policies. It's called the Child, Worker, and Consumer-Safe Chemicals Act.
The main point I would make about this law--and I'll close then, Mr. Chairman--is that there are chemical companies in the United States that make pesticides and make industrial chemicals for all kinds of purposes, the very same company. On one side of the building, if you will, these companies are required to conduct over 100 health and safety studies before the pesticide is allowed on the market, because we know they will be consumed by people in food or inhaled if they're used in the home or in the garden or on the farm. So those studies are conducted. On the other side of the hall, in these very same companies, there's virtually no requirement for significant pre-market testing of industrial compounds that our study--as well as many others that are now beginning to appear--of umbilical cord blood, belatedly, and other human populations shows end up in people, and yet we have very little information about their safety.
So I would encourage you to see these proceedings certainly as I see them, as a historic opportunity to modernize science, to bring it up to date and make it protective of public health. We're certainly looking for Canada to lead the world in this exercise.
Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for your time.