We Are Not Alone by Alice Shabecoff
With each generation since the mid-1940s, the rates of autism climb higher and higher. And so do the rates of other serious illnesses, from childhood cancer to life-threatening asthma and birth defects. By now, one out of every three American child suffers from a chronic illness. This terrible trend started with our nationﾒs unremitting, unexamined foray into ﾑBetter Living through Chemicals and unregulated, intensely-polluting industrialization, including nuclear power.
Alice will provide an overview of the rates and growth of childhood illnesses over these decades, and an overview of the sources of increased pollution in our childrenﾒs daily lives that, science now shows, trigger these illnesses. She will focus on the threats that all the childhood disorders face in common.
Today we are in the midst of a scientific revolution equal to Pasteurﾒs discovery of germs: Alice offer a laymanﾒs understanding of the key discoveries of this new science. In particular, she will discuss endocrine disruption and its connection to autism as well as other neurodevelopmental disorders. She will discuss what science knows today about cause-and-effect, and why some children become ill while others do not.
Are there solutions to this devastating advance of disease and disability? Alice will examine the reasons that most American parents remain in the dark about the scale of this devastation and potential danger to their children. She will examine some of reasons that hold parents back from attacking this threat. She will call upon the parents and researchers in this conference to forge alliances with others who are fighting for the lives of their children no matter what the illness.
Alice Shabecoff is co-author with her husband Philip of Poisoned for Profit, just released in paperback by Chelsea Green publishing company - published in paperback in 2008 as Poisoned Profits: The Toxic Assault on our Children. Alice now writes blog articles on children's environmental health for MomsRising.org, HealthSentinel.org, and the Environmental Working Group. She is a member of the board of directors of Birth Defects Research Center. She served in the 1970s as executive director of the National Consumers League, the country's oldest consumer organization, and in the 1980s as founder and executive director of the national nonprofit Community Information Exchange, an information service for the community development sector. As a freelance journalist focusing on family and consumer topics, her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, the International Herald Tribune, and many international publications.
