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Preserve a Healthy Environment

Jan Schakowsky, U.S. Representative

If you've ever inhaled the fumes of a passing bus or a nearby factory or been unable to drink water straight from your own sink, you understand how much environmental issues affect your daily life. Yet the impact of pollution on the body lasts beyond a momentary gasp for fresh air or a bad-tasting sip of water. In 1970, Congress passed the Clean Air Act to protect the public from the known risks of air pollution, such as increased rates of asthma and premature death from lung cancer and heart disease. Yet 30 years later, more than half of the American population – approximately 160 million people – are still breathing unhealthy air.

The toll of air pollution on a woman's body is particularly high. Environmental factors have a major impact on women's general and reproductive health; they contribute to cancer, respiratory problems, and autoimmune diseases, to name a few consequences. And for those of us who become pregnant, all the toxins in our bodies are directly transferred to our developing fetuses.

Numerous pollutants in our water and air supplies bombard our bodies every day. Mercury, for example, is a particularly toxic pollutant that causes brain damage and interferes with the development of fetuses, babies, and small children. One child in six born in the United States could be at risk for developmental disorders because of mercury exposure in their mothers' wombs – that adds up to 630,000 children each year.

Power plants, the primary uncontrolled source of mercury pollution, contribute about 48 tons of mercury to our air every year. Once mercury is released into the air, it settles into our lakes, streams, and rivers. To date, federal, state, and local officials have found mercury pollution in 12 million acres of lakes, estuaries, and wetlands – 30 percent of the national total – and 473,000 miles of streams, rivers, and coastlines. After mercury enters our water, it travels up the food chain, contaminating tuna, lobster, halibut, sea bass, trout, and crab, among other marine life. It's estimated that as many as 60,000 babies born each year in the United States suffer from neurological damage caused by their mothers' consumption of mercury-contaminated fish.

In 2000, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recognized the huge threat that mercury poses to women and to the general public health. The EPA ruled that power plants must use the best available technology to remove that hazardous substance from our environment. Under the EPA's 2000 ruling, power plants would have reduced their mercury emissions 90 percent by 2008.

Under new leadership, however, the EPA reversed its position in 2004, proposing new power-plant regulations that would require only a 50 to 70 percent reduction by 2018. The EPA's new proposal essentially ignored the agency's own expert analysis and disregarded the recommendations of the panel of stakeholders that the agency appointed to work on this issue. Instead, the new proposal catered to the powerful energy industry lobby, placing a higher value on the industry's profits than on the health of women, children, and our communities.

Environmentalists and public health advocates worked with outraged public officials, including myself, to get citizens to speak out against the proposed regulations. The public outcry succeeded in delaying the final regulations and in convincing the EPA to commit to doing additional analysis on the issue before making any final decisions, extending the deadline for the final rule to March 15, 2005.

We have a right to clean air and water, to good health for ourselves and our families. Our challenge is to fight for strong regulations, force the EPA to enforce these regulations, and require the energy industry to adhere to meaningful and rapid reductions in mercury pollution. We owe it to ourselves and to future generations – for the health and well-being of us all.

Get Health Care for Everyone

Dixie Horning, Executive Director, UCSF National Center of Excellence in Women's Health

Several years ago, I gathered with a group of friends. My dear friend Yolanda, a 35-year-old Latina, was upset that night, having just lost her mother on the heels of giving birth to her second child. Bereft, she went off to lie down and have some private moments of reflection.

A few minutes later, I went to check on her and was shocked to find her in a cold sweat. She complained of feeling dizzy and having pain in her neck and jaw. Even though she wasn't experiencing chest pain, it seemed like a heart attack: I called 911 and rushed back to our friends, some of whom were doctors and nurses. Everyone denied the possibility that Yolanda could be having a heart attack. "She's too young," they said, as well as, "Hispanic women don't have heart conditions" and, "It must be stress or a panic attack." But I couldn't let go of my fears. When the EMTs arrived, they too said it wasn't possible for her to be having a heart attack. After she arrived at the hospital and went through several inconclusive tests, the doctors performed an EKG. Later that night, Yolanda had a quadruple bypass. She almost died, due to an incorrect assumption that a woman of her age and ethnic background couldn't have heart disease. As this story illustrates, the medical community still knows little about the health of women, particularly women of color, largely because the vast majority of health studies and medication trials have been done on white men alone. Put another way, if more health studies and medication trials included diverse groups of women, then doctors, nurses, and consumers would know a lot more about women's health.

Perhaps even more distressing is the fact that if Yolanda hadn't so recently given birth, she would not have had medical coverage that night. Without insurance, she might have received less aggressive care or no care at all.

Uninsured or underinsured women are at higher risk for disease, chronic illness, unintended pregnancy, and other negative conditions, and women with insurance typically have better health outcomes than uninsured women. However, over 15 percent of women under age 65 still lack access to basic health care services, including preventive and prenatal care. The number of uninsured women in the United States has grown faster than the number of men, specifically three times faster, and women of color are more likely to be uninsured than white women.

Women of all ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic groups continue to experience inequities and neglect in health care. So do their families. It is a...