Poisoned for Profit: An Interview with Alice Shabecoff

Powerful, unflinching, and eminently readable, Poisoned for Profit is a wake-up call that is bound to inspire talk and force change.

In a landmark investigation that’s been compared to Silent Spring, two veteran journalists definitively show how, why, and where industrial toxins are causing rates of birth defects, asthma, cancer, and other serious illnesses to soar in children. Philip and Alice Shabecoff reveal that the children of baby boomers—the first to be raised in a truly toxified world—are the first generation to be sicker and have shorter life expectancies than their parents. The culprits, they say, are the companies that profit from producing, using, and selling toxics.

Here’s an interview with coauthor Alice Shabecoff from “Hipsqueek,” the Time Out Chicago kids’ blog:

And my reflex, living in Chicago, is to say, “We need to get out of the city.” But it’s everywhere.
Even the Inuits have toxins in their bodies. At least, with our book, we give them some way to protect their kids, and get them angry enough that they’ll start speaking out. At this point, one in three kids have a chronic illness. That is not a figure we made up. That is a cumulative figure that comes from all of the government statistics. If there are 23 million sick kids, with 23 million mothers and 46 grandmothers, we could make a difference.

The debate over what causes autism, it’s so heated and emotional. Particularly among those who believe vaccines causes it.
I hope those parents are willing to look beyond vaccines. We’re going to talk [at the panel] about what other toxins might cause autism, and it will be interesting to see if those parents are willing to work with environmental health groups outside of just autism.

Did you have concerns about weighing in on such a heated, public debate.
No. The parents are non-hostile people. The only people they attack are the people they think are downplaying the risk to their kids. But whether they’ll be as open to thinking it could be a pesticide causing autism, instead of a vaccine, we’ll find out a the conference.

With emotions so high, you have to be even more cautious and meticulous with your documentation and reporting.

We had a set of advisors, about a dozen scientists around the country. They looked over the book to make sure accurate. Scientifically speaking, there is nothing inaccurate or even overstated in the book. We did get a review from two places where we were called alarmist, and in fact, we are sounding the alarm.

Read the whole article here.

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