Well, I could. I have a whole list of them here.
First and foremost, there are many heavy metal poisons, such as arsenic, lead, mercury, antimony, molybdenum, chromium, copper, or cesium. There are literally hundreds of them.
One of the most important substances that have come to light and have been studied in recent times are the minute, little particles of ash called nanoparticles. Nanoparticles are a fairly recent discovery. They are little bits of ash that are about one-millionth the size of a pinhead. They are very minute, and you might wonder if they're so minute whether they do much damage. The reason they can do so much damage is precisely that they are so minute.
Our lungs are constructed to prevent foreign bodies from getting through the airways of the lungs and into the blood, but there is a little pore system inside the lungs, which is very, very minute, and it's normally there to allow only oxygen to get through into the blood and to go around in the blood circulation to the various organs, including the brain.
These nanoparticles are so small that they are the size of molecules, and they can get through these little pores that are actually meant to let only oxygen in. They get into the blood. They can get into all the internal organs—the brain, the heart, the lungs, the liver—and they carry with them these highly dangerous poisons I mentioned, including lead, arsenic, mercury, chromium, cadmium, and all the other heavy metal poisons.
The filter systems that incinerators have on them, which these salesmen will tell you filter out all the poisons, cannot do that. There is a massive amount of research on this. There certainly have been improvements. There certainly are fewer emissions now than there were previously. But here's the point: a small amount of these poisons is about as bad as a big amount of these poisons for the following reason. I'm a geneticist, and I have to tell you that this is the most important thing for me. Cancer is the result of a change in what is known as a gene, the genetic material. We all know about DNA these days.
DNA is made into little packages called genes, and these genes are very susceptible to being damaged by various environmental toxins and poisons. A change or damage in the gene or the DNA is called a mutation. It takes one molecule of a poisonous substance to cause a mutation; it does not take a large amount. If you are told—and these people who are trying to sell the incinerators keep telling us—we're going to decrease the amount of poison and it's within the limits that the government sets, that makes absolutely no difference. Even one little minute bit of this poison can cause and does cause mutation, the change of the DNA, which causes cancer.
There is no safe dose. There is absolutely no safe dose for these poisons. No matter how much better these filters are than they used to be, they're still letting these poisons through. The reason governments have so-called guidelines is that they're not zero. The guidelines should be zero, but governments have recognized that there's no way, there are no technologies yet discovered that can totally filter out these poisons. I would like to see guidelines for all these poisons being zero. There's no excuse for them being anything more than zero, because there is no safe limit.
Not only is there no safe limit of these poisons causing mutation and therefore cancer, there's also the issue of so-called bioaccumulation. Bioaccumulation means these little minute bits of poison that get emitted out of the smokestack of an incinerator float through the air, settle down into the lake water, settle down onto the land, settle down onto the crops, gather into the crops. Even if it is only a minute amount every second, it's being pumped out of the incinerator stack in billions of molecules per second. These float around, and a few land here and a few land there onto the crops. They get into the crops that become our vegetables, get into the crops that become the livestock feed, get into the livestock and accumulate gradually in the livestock. Over a few years you get enough into the livers and the muscles—which become the meat that ends up on our dinner tables—into the beef, the sheep, the poultry, and the fish. They accumulate gradually.
Bioaccumulation is a well-studied scientific phenomenon, and it underscores what I said previously about a single molecule causing mutation. Also, these single molecules accumulate.
There are no safe doses for these poisons. There is no way we know of for restricting their emission. There are no such things as filters that can keep them out.