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BY SANDRA STEINGRABER
Orion Magazine
WHEN MY HUSBAND AND I SET OUT to find a nursery school for our daughter, Faith, nearly ten years ago we took the decision seriously. I looked at large parent-run cooperatives and visited small home-based operations. Jeff studied the pink towers and chiming bells at the Montessori school on the hill and considered the wonder balls and wooden fairies at the Waldorf school in the valley. In the end, we chose a nursery school that operated out of a community center close to home. There was a frog pond out front and a play structure out back. The trees were full of chickadees and nuthatches. We had weighed many considerations in the decision-making process, and we all, Faith included, were happy about it.
That is, until I discovered that, like many of its kind, the school’s beloved play structure —with its wooden gangway, turrets, and tunnels —was made out of pressure-treated lumber, which, at the time, contained arsenic, a carcinogen. A bladder carcinogen, in fact. I am a bladder cancer survivor. I am familiar with this particular disease and all the ongoing medical surveillance it requires. So, after a lot of research and discussion, we eventually decided to move our daughter to a different nursery school. The risk of doing nothing just seemed too high.
Seven years later, the Environmental Protection Agency released its final risk assessment for children who regularly contact wood impregnated with chromated copper arsenate. The conclusion: children who play frequently on pressure-treated play sets and decks (we had one of those, too) experience, over their lifetimes, elevated cancer risks. Ergo, our precautionary decision as parents to disenroll our daughter had been a wise one. And yet, because the EPA stopped short of recalling pre-existing play structures and decks when it outlawed arsenic-treated lumber for residential use in 2004, the old play structure at our old nursery school still stands.
ARSENIC, AS IT TURNS OUT, is not only a carcinogen but a developmental neurotoxicant as well — one of a family of substances that impair the growth of the brain in ways that interfere with learning. They take many forms, according to a major review of the evidence published in 2006 in the British medical journal The Lancet. Some of them are heavy metals, such as lead and methylmercury. Some are long-outlawed compounds that still linger among us (PCBs). One common one is used to strip paint, turn crude oil into gasoline, extract natural gas from shale, and suspend pigment in some nail polishes (toluene). Another two hundred chemicals are known to act as neurological poisons in human adults and are likely toxic to the developing brains of infants and children as well — animal studies strongly suggest that any neurotoxic chemical is likely also a neurodevelopmental toxicant —but scientific confirmation awaits.
Current laws do not require the systematic screening of chemicals for their ability to cause brain damage or alter the pathways of brain growth, and only about 20 percent of the three thousand chemicals produced in high volume in the United States have been tested for developmental toxicity of any kind. The Lancet paper is one of the most comprehensive summaries available to date (though the EPA is preparing to release its own list of developmental neurotoxicants in early 2011). Parents struggling to pay tutors, tuition bills, and school taxes—who are, right now, clearing off a spot on the kitchen counter to sit down and offer help with homework—might consider taking a look at this compilation, particularly the review’s central conclusion: “The combined evidence suggests that neurodevelopmental disorders caused by industrial chemicals have created a silent pandemic in modern society.”
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