Drug Medical Information

CLEANING UP YOUR ACT

WASHINGTON'S MOST POPULAR MONUMENTS IN LOSING BATTLE WITH TOXIC ENVIRONMENT
Washington Post, April 9, 1990
If the 68-year old Lincoln Memorial and the 47-year old Jefferson Monument are crumbling because the capital's toxic environment is mutilating the venerable cement and steel structures, imagine what effect the area's foul air is having on like-aged human bodies.
Is there something unusually noxious about Washington's atmosphere? Except for the hot air discharged by resident politicos, the region is relatively free of industrial pollution. Think how much worse it must be in smoke-stack choked areas.
There is no question but intolerable levels of air-born poisons are daily bombarding millions of Americans. One documented result: environmental super-sensitivity, the so- called "ecological illness" that Rachel Carson predicted in her book Silent Spring thirty years ago, has reached epidemic proportions. As our planet becomes increasingly polluted, individuals with weaker constitutions - those Dr. Alan Gaby has called the "human canaries" - fall ill, signaling grave danger ahead to the rest of us, just as the birds miners took with them into mines gave early warning of noxious gases or insufficient oxygen to sustain life. Infectious and allergic diseases, commonly associated with immunological breakdown, are now the fifth leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for thirty percent of visits to physicians' offices. A growing number of Americans react so badly to almost everything around them, they've had to abandon civilization to take up residence in the wilds.
The rest of us watch with horror as diseases unheard of -or exceedingly rare - a decade ago, escalate into modern plagues. Herpes, Candida, chronic fatigue syndrome, lupus, and of course, AIDS, all appear to have one thing in common: they afflict the once hardy whose immune systems have crumbled under constant bombardment by environmental pollutants.

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