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THE POLITICAL SUDDENLY BECOMES PERSONALWHEN THEY MESS WITH OUR KIDS
This is my very first Diary entry so I guess I should share that I’m an ordinary middle-aged person who worked for years in property management and administrative work for a hospital owned by Johns Hopkins.
My only quasi-credential - other than being certified as a Personal Coach (and, oh yeah, a graduate of a wildlife landscaping course) is that I hold a Bachelors of Science degree with honors from the University of Maryland. And even though I’m not a scientist, my fondest leisure pursuit is studying what things impact upon human health.
Go ahead and call me a nerd if you’d like. Because while other, more “normal” women I know read fiction novels for fun? I rather enjoy studying scientific research in order to find out exactly what happens to our bodies when we do not treat them properly.
And based on everything I’ve been able to gather from my studies so far? I can tell you with great certainty that Honey, your health woes and those of the people you love – your diabetes, your mother’s cancer, your sister’s chronic fatigue syndrome, and your better half’s heart problems are not all caused by so-called poor “lifestyle choices” alone.
Why, of course, that is what we are led to believe. If you are sick, it’s clearly all your fault. Do not look to the Environmental Protection Agency or to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for answers because they’ll tell you to go hop on your treadmill, eat a grapefruit, and leave them the heck alone.
If I’m not a scientist, then what am I doing, reading this medical stuff all the time? I’m just an average suburban mom living in a suburb in the Baltimore-DC area, surrounded by defense contractors who design all sorts of weapons and other life-destroying technology for our federal government. Unlike many in this pro-war area, however, I think a great deal about the long-term implications of what militarization is doing to our planet – and to the health of our kids and their kids for umpteen future generations to follow.
My friend who knows I study the health effects of Depleted Uranium and other toxics sent me the following video clip this morning on American kids who have chromosomal damages. I wanted to make just a few comments on this important short film.
In this brief news video about children born with chromosomal abnormalities,http://tinyurl.com/28qa4b the narrator states: “Scientists believe as many as 1 in 100 humans carry some sort of genetic variation from their parents’ DNA.”
So here’s the question of the day, folks! If our kids are carrying around genetic variations and mutations that don’t come from their parents’ genetic material, then why in the world are our kids’ genes screwed up?
What in our environment could be causing this? Researcher Wendy Chung, MD, PhD, Director of Clinical Genetics at Columbia University Medical Center, a researcher of genetic disorders, asks a beautiful question about these chromosomal abnormalities, “Are those variations associated with any of the common diseases that all of us have? Asthma, heart disease, cancer… Does that have anything to do with any of those diseases to increase our susceptibility, or protect us from some of those diseases?”
I then remembered that Dr. Chris Busby, Scientific Advisor to the Low Level Radiation Campaign (www.llrc.org ) had made a comment on DU and chromosomal damage in a paper titled, “WRITTEN EVIDENCE TO THE US CONGRESSIONAL SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY, VETERAN’S AFFAIRS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS HEARING,” http://tinyurl.com/22jjul delivered in London on June 18, 2002.
Dr. Busby’s testimony contained data involving a study of veterans from the United Kingdom which showed damage to the veterans’ chromosomes from their exposure to Depleted Uranium in Iraq during the first Gulf War. This damaged chromosome material from the DU-poisoned vets was remarkably comparable to chromosomal aberrations found in the victims of the radiological fallout of Chernobyl.
So, based on my own conservative calculation, at least 450 tons of Depleted Uranium has been used inside the US on just our military bases and national weapons laboratories outdoor test sites alone. It suddenly becomes crystal clear that birth defects we’ve been noticing in the past several decades coincides with outdoor radioactive “testing” using Depleted Uranium which began in America over 45 years ago.
So as we ponder chromosomal abnormalities in our offspring, I ask you to think with me about how we, just ordinary parents and grand parents, aunts and uncles, can continue to stand by silently while our kids and grand kids silently breathe in these radioactive aerosols that wreck our precious little ones’ DNA and genetic material forevermore?
I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments. I like to think, but I sure as heck don’t have all the answers.
Cathy Garger
