i was going to ask if there 's a doctor in the house
the most commonly used preservative in baby care products mimics estrogen when it gets into the human body now it 's very easy actually to get a chemicalcompound from products into the human body through the skin and these preservatives had been found in breast cancer tumors
that was the start of my journey to make this film toxic baby and it doesn 't take much time to discover some really astonishingstatistics with this issue one is that you and i all have
between thirty to fifty thousand chemicals in our bodies that our grandparents didn 't have
and many of these chemicals are now linked to the skyrocketing incidents of chronicchildhood disease that we 're seeing across industrialized nations i 'll show you some statistics
so for example in the united kingdom the incidence of childhood leukemia has risen by twenty percent just in a generation very similar statistic for childhoodcancer in the u s in canada we 're now looking at one in ten canadian children with asthma that 's a four fold increase again similar story around the world
in the united states probably the most astonishing statistic is a six hundred percent increase in autism and autistic spectrum disorders and other learning disabilities again we 're seeing that trend across europe across north america
and in europe there 's certain parts of europe where we 're seeing a four fold increase in certain genital birth defects interestingly one of those birth defects has seen a two hundred percent increase in the u s
so a real skyrocketing of chronicchildhood disease that includes other things like obesity and juvenile diabetes premature puberty
so it 's interesting for me when i 'm looking for someone who can really talk to me and talk to an audience about these things that probably one of the most important people in the world who can discuss toxicity in babies is expert in frogs
in fact my involvement in the whole pesticide issue was sort of a surprise as well when i was approached by the largest chemical company in the world and they asked me if i would evaluate how atrazine affected amphibians or my frogs
in two thousand and three after my studies it was banned in the european union but in that same year the united states epa re registered the compound
we were a bit surprised when we found out that when we exposed frogs to very low levels of atrazine zero point one parts per billion that it produced animals that look like this these are the dissected gonads of an animal that has two testes two ovaries another large testis more ovaries which is not normal
even for amphibians in some cases another species like the north american leopard frog showed that males exposed to atrazine grew eggs in their testes and you can see these large yolked up eggs bursting through the surface of this male 's testes now my wife tells me and i 'm sure penelope can as well that there 's nothing more painful than childbirth which
what we proposed and what we 've now generated support for is that what atrazine is doing is wreaking havoc causing a hormone imbalance normally the testes should make testosterone the male hormone
but what atrazine does is it turns on an enzyme the machinery if you will aromatase that converts testosterone into estrogen
and as a result these exposed males lose their testosterone they 're chemically castrated and they 're subsequently feminized because now they 're making the female hormone now this is what brought me to the human related issues because it turns out that the number one cancer in women
breast cancer is regulated by estrogen and by this enzyme aromatase
so when you develop a cancerous cell in your breast aromatase converts androgens into estrogens and that estrogen turns on or promotes the growth of that cancer so that it turns into a tumor and spreads
in fact this aromatase is so important in breast cancer that the
latest treatment for breast cancer is a chemical called letrozole which blocks aromatase blocks estrogen
so that if you developed a mutated cell it doesn 't grow into a tumor now what 's interesting is of course that we 're still using eighty million pounds of atrazine the number one contaminant in drinking water that does the opposite turns on aromatase increases estrogen and promotes tumors in rats and is associated with tumors breast cancer in humans
what 's interesting is in fact the same company that sold us eighty million pounds of atrazine the breast cancerpromoter now sells us the blocker the exact same company and so i find it interesting that instead of
treating this disease by preventing exposure to the chemicals that promote it we simply respond by putting more chemicals into the environment
which has been in the news recently it 's a plasticizer it 's a compound that 's found in polycarbonate plastic
which is what baby bottles are made out of and what 's interesting about bpa is that it 's such a potent estrogen that it was actually once considered for use as a synthetic estrogen in hormone placement therapy
and there have been many many many studies that have shown that bpa leaches from babies bottles into the formula into the milk and therefore into the babies so we 're dosing our babies our newborns our infants
with a synthetic estrogen now two weeks ago or so the european union passed a law banning the use of bpa in babies bottles and sippy cups and for those of you who are not parents sippy cups are those little plastic things that your child graduates to after using bottles
but just two weeks before that the u s senate refused to even debate the banning of bpa in babies bottles
that stands between chemicals
and our children the baby bottle scenario proves that we can prevent unnecessary exposure however
and what penelope says here is even more true
for those of you who don 't know we 're in the middle of the sixth mass extinction scientists agree
in part amphibians are good indicators and more sensitive because they don 't have protection from contaminants in the water no eggshells no membranes and no placenta in fact our invention by our i mean we mammals
one of our big inventions was the placenta but we also start out as aquatic organisms but it turns out that this ancient structure that separates us from other animals the placenta
cannot evolve or adapt fast enough because of the rate that we 're generating new chemicals that it 's never seen before
the evidence of that is that studies in rats again with atrazine show that the hormone imbalance atrazine generates causes abortion
because maintaining a pregnancy is dependent on hormones of those rats that don 't abort atrazine causes prostate disease in the pups so the sons are born with an old man 's disease of those that don 't abort atrazine causes impaired mammary or breast development in the exposed daughters in utero so that their breast don 't develop properly
and as a result when those rats grow up their pups experience retarded growth and development because they can 't make enough milk to nourish their pups so the pup you see on the bottom is affected by atrazine that its grandmother was exposed
years dozens of years that means that we right now are affecting the health of our grandchildren 's grandchildren by things that we 're putting into the environment
today and this is not just philosophical it 's already known that chemicals like diethylstilbestrol and estrogen pcbs ddt cross the placenta and effectively determine the likelihood of developing breast cancer and obesity and diabetes already when the baby 's in the womb
in addition to that after the baby 's born our other uniqueinvention as mammals is that we nourish our offspring after they 're born we already know that chemicals like ddt and des and atrazine can also pass over into milk again affecting our babies even after their born
and neither had i actually before i started making this film and so when you realize that chemicals can pass the placenta and go into your unborn child it made me start to think what would my fetus say to me what would our unborn children say to us
polluting our children
and this was something that was really brought home to me a year ago when i found out i was pregnant
and the second scan revealed no heartbeat
so my child 's death my baby 's death really brought home the resonance of what i was trying to make in this film and it 's sometimes a weird place when the communicator becomes part of the story which is not what you originally intend and so when
tyrone talks about
and that 's something that
the truth is women you 've had our back on this issue for a very long time starting with rachel carson 's silent spring to theo colborn 's our stolen future to sandra steingraber 's books living downstream and having faith and perhaps it 's the connection
to our next generation like my wife and my beautiful daughter here about thirteen years ago perhaps it 's that connection that makes women activists in this particular area
but for the men here i want to say it 's not just women and children that are at risk and the frogs that are exposed to atrazine the testes are full of holes and spaces because the hormone imbalance instead of allowing sperm to be generated such as in the testis here
the testicular tubules end up empty and fertility goes down by as much as fifty percent
it 's not just my work in amphibians but similar work has been shown in fish in europe holes in the testes and absence of sperm in reptiles in a group from south america and in rats an absence of sperm in the testicular tubules as well and of course we don 't do these experiments in humans but just by coincidence
my colleague has shown that men who have low sperm count low semen quality have significantly more atrazine in their urine these are just men who live in an agricultural community
men who actually work in agriculture have much higher levels of atrazine and the men who actually apply atrazine have even more atrazine in their urine up to levels that are twenty four thousand times what we know to be active are present in the urine of these men
of course most of them ninety percent are mexican mexican american and it 's not just atrazine they 're exposed to they 're exposed to chemicals like chloropicrin which was originally used as a nerve gas and many of these workers have life expectancies of only fifty
it shouldn 't come to any surprise that the things that happen in wildlife are also a warning to us just like rachel carson and others have warned as evident in this slide from lake nabugabo in uganda the agricultural runoff from this crop
which goes into these buckets is the sole source of drinking cooking and bathing water for this village
now if i told the men in this village that the frogs have pour immune function and eggs developing in their testes the connection between environmental health and public health would be clear you would not drink water that you knew was having this kind of impact on the wildlife that lived in it the problem is in my village oakland
and i kept thinking over and over again this question
being here to know that
as we women move forward as the communicators of this but also as the ones who carry that burden of carrying the children bearing the children we hold most of the buying power in the household is that it 's going to be us moving
forward to carry the work of tyrone and other scientists around the world and my urging is that when we think about environmental issues
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