🚀 go-pugleaf

Your input is needed to overcome industry opposition to an important
bill to let us know what chemicals are getting into our bodies.
SB 1168 The Healthy Californians Biomonitoring Program, introduced by
California Senator Deborah Ortiz, creates a permanent statewide
biomonitoring program to identify what chemicals are in our bodies,
which allows prioritizing actions to protect public health.

We have programs to monitor toxics in the air, water, and fish.
Isn't it about time we monitored people too?

Let your representatives and the media know what you think about this.
Enter your zipcode at http://www.vote-smart.org to get contact info
on your elected representatives.
Spread the word to friends, relatives, colleagues, etc.

For more info, sample letter, etc, see the California Body Burden Campaign
website:  http://www.breastcancerfund.org/calbbc/

For full text and status of the bill go to
http://info.sen.ca.gov/cgi-bin/postquery?bill_number=sb_1168&sess=CUR&house=B&site=sen

SB 1168 is due to come up in the Senate Appropriations Committee on Monday.
If you don't get this in time for that, please still get the word out
for the next steps that follow.

Health care costs are liable to keep rising until we figure out that
an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  Spending a smaller
amount to identify and reduce toxics will do more good than spending
big bucks to fix people after they have been harmed.
If specific chemicals cause damage then their makers and users
should pay the costs of the damage.
Many of the big chemical companies are also drug companies, so they
have a financial incentive to block progress on this front.

Opponents complain the bill is not based on science.  There are two
reasons this is a specious argument.  First, you can't have science
without data and the purpose of this bill is to collect data, so anyone
genuinely interested in science will welcome this bill.  Blocking
collection of data is a way to prevent the development of good science.
To say we can't collect data unless we have strong science is
circular reasoning.

Second, to act only on what science has proven is to presume that the
present state of science is omniscient - in other words to act only on
science is to live in a fantasy world.
To act in the real world, we must not only on science but also the
precautionary principle, recognizing the objective fact that science does
not and never will have all the answers, so we must have an extra margin
of safety to cover the many things science has not figured out yet.

"Scientific evidence" is a euphemism for "the damage has been done,
it's too late to act to prevent it".  To act only on the basis of science
is like driving while only looking in the rear view mirror.
It took 4 decades for science to wake up to the fact that atrazine is
horribly toxic to amphibians and it's still working on figuring out
the implications for human health.
DDT was hailed as a wonder of modern chemistry when it came out. It took
several decades for science to catch up with the ensuing ecological havoc it
caused, and now, 6 decades after introduction, science is only beginning to
figure out the damage to human health that has been occurring all this time.
It has taken science more than a century after widespread use of fossil fuels
to figure out the implications for the world's climate.
There is no guarantee science will ever figure out more than a small fraction
of the total damage from all causes.

It is irresponsible to wait until science has figured everything out,
during which time untold numbers of people and other species may be harmed.
Only after the fact was it established that a million Americans were killed
by particulate air pollution during the decades that the EPA failed to
act while waiting for the scientific evidence to become conclusive.
[Breath-Taking: Premature Mortality Due to Particulate Air Pollution in
239 American Cities, http://www.nrdc.org/air/pollution/bt/btinx.asp]
That's 300 times more than were killed by the Sept 11 terrorist attacks.

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