Issues > January/February 2004 (#100) > Ten Women's Health Pioneers

Ten Women's Health Pioneers

To mark The Green Guide's 100th issue, we would like to honor the following 10 women whose dedicated research and advocacy have helped us better understand and protect our environmental health. by Diane di Costanzo

Susana Almanza and Dr. Sylvia Herrera, Ph.D.

Founders, People Organized in Defense of the Earth and Her Resources (PODER)

During the 1920s, according to the Austin, Texas, master plan, the east side of the city was zoned for both industry and for its communities of color. "We call it the 'Yes, Master' Plan," says Susana Almanza. She and Sylvia Herrera were raised and still live in East Austin, where they have seen how industrial, noise and groundwater pollution have sickened generations of Latino and African-American families. In 1991, they founded People Organized in Defense of the Earth and Her Resources (PODER—an acronym meaning "power" in Spanish) and forced the city to shut down a 52-acre fuel-storage facility owned by several international oil corporations.

Ongoing: A new "smart growth" initiative has East Austin slated for renewal, which, for its current residents, could mean "removal," says Herrera. PODER has convinced the city to go slow, showing how a designation of historic status for some houses can increase the valuation of entire neighborhoods so that residents can no longer afford to pay the taxes. "We have to recognize that we need to preserve houses not just for houses' sake but [also for] the culture of the people who live there," Almanza says.

How they do it: "We always tell people, 'Your voice is your vote.' People have a right to speak on issues that affect them, whether or not they have proper documents or have been in prison," says Herrera.

For more information, go to www.poder-texas.org.

Linda S. Birnbaum, Ph.D.

Director, Experimental Toxicology Division, Environmental Protection Agency; Vice-President, Society of Toxicology

Working from Within: Having held senior positions at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the EPA and other governmental organizations for nearly 25 years, Birnbaum has pushed for research that looks at how environmental toxins uniquely affect women. "It used to be that all research was done on men, as if women were simply smaller versions," Birnbaum says.

Birnbaum has also convinced the scientific community to consider how developmental exposure to toxins can cause health conditions later in life. Scientists used to look at in utero exposure in light of only the most immediate consequences. "They'd count to see if all the legs and eyes were there," says Birnbaum. Her dioxin research showed her that early exposure to that toxin "really messed up the breast tissue," so much so that breast cancer might develop decades later. "We know that levels of dioxins reached their peak in the 1960s," she says, adding that this may be a factor in the current incidence of breast cancer among women in their forties.

Looking at how early exposures affect an entire population years later may help explain the sudden rise in learning and other disorders, says Birnbaum. For example, she says, looking at only one child with high blood-lead levels can't show whether I.Q. might have been higher without the exposure. "However, a large-scale drop in I.Q. tells us something."

Theo Colborn, Ph.D.

Founder of the Endocrine Disruptor Exchange (TEDX) website, to debut this year. Coauthor, Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival? A Scientific Detective Story (Plume, 1997)

Colborn, a Colorado resident, says that her first interest was in the water quality of western states. Discovering that fish from the Great Lakes suffered widespread reproductive-system abnormalities, Colborn assembled a team that eventually produced the landmark book Our Stolen Future. "The toxins in

our environment are undermining the development of our children before they are born," Colborn says calmly, but with a conviction born of decades of research into the broad-spectrum effects of pollutants on both animal and human development.

"Endocrine Disruption" Explained: Colborn's mission is to make complicated concepts "understandable for the 10th-grade reader," she says. In simple terms, when the endocrine system of a developing fetus is disrupted by certain chemicals—including PCBs, phthalates and others—the system can cause defects to the brain, immune and metabolic systems. "We're looking at links to learning disabilities, cancers, infertility issues, diabetes"—the very health issues that have seen meteoric increases in recent years, Colborn says.

Where are these chemicals found? "Everywhere," says Colborn. "The very phone I'm speaking into is treated with flame retardants."

For more information: www.ourstolenfuture.org.

Devra Davis, Ph.D., M.P.H.

Visiting professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University; finalist, 2002 National Book Award for When Smoke Ran Like Water (see review and "Prescribing Precaution")

In 1948, when Davis was a two-year-old in the industrial mill town of Donora, Pennsylvania, a black smog of coal and coke fumes, mixed with heavy metals, suffocated the valley for nearly a week. Over a third of the residents fell ill; there were 50 more deaths than average that month-a tragedy that inspired the federal Clean Air Act of 1956 and epidemiologist Davis's lifelong interest in pollution and its effects.

After getting her master's in public health from Johns Hopkins, Davis directed the National Academy of Science (NAS) board on environmental studies and toxicology, where her research resulted in the banning of smoking on airplanes. This "opened the gate for local communities to ban smoking in public places," Davis says, by way of illustrating how policy can, step by step, be changed. Likewise, she notes, a 1991 NAS report on health risks of hazardous waste paved the way for funding the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) to protect public health in Superfund areas and help communities identify other toxic sites. She also worked for the World Resources Institute and in 1994 was appointed by President Clinton to the National Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board.

Goals: Writing her next book and continuing research on avoidable causes of cancer.

For more information: atsdr.cdc.gov; www.whensmokeranlikewater.com.

Lois Gibbs

Founder and executive director, Center for Health, Environment and Justice (CHEJ); author, Dying from Dioxin (South End Press, 1995)

In 1978, Gibbs, a housewife in Love Canal in upstate New York, learned that her community had been built around a capped landfill containing 20,000 tons of hazardous waste. As Love Canal's citizens began experiencing high levels of sickness, birth defects and other health problems, Gibbs organized her neighbors to fight for information—which led to the eventual relocation of over 800 families. Gibbs moved to the Washington, D.C., area and established CHEJ, to help contaminated communities work effectively with authorities to investigate and clean up toxins.

Ongoing Battle: Siting schools and homes near known contaminated areas is still commonplace. CHEJ has recently launched Be Safe, a nationwide campaign urging the "precautionary approach" to preventing harm through use of safer products, practices and technology. This can include preventing school buses from idling in front of school doors, or persuading schools to convert to least-toxic pest control.

Her secret? "Organizing people to fight an environmental threat isn't brain surgery. Start tapping women around you and all of a sudden you're a powerful force."

For more information: www.chej.org.

Lynn R. Goldman, M.D.

Professor of environmental health sciences, health policy and management for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland

As a child growing up on the Gulf Coast in Texas, Goldman developed an appreciation for both the beauty of nature and its fragility in the face of industrial pollutants. Later, as she moved through her pediatric residency, she worked on a study of health impacts on children who lived in Love Canal, only to find that the topic was too controversial to be covered by the mainstream medical and environmental journals.

Working for Change: For the State of California, Goldman researched the impacts of pesticides on agricultural laborers and their children, work that brought her to the EPA, where she led its Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances. There, Goldman promoted pesticide legislation reform, notably the phaseout of nerve-damaging organophosphates, and worked on the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996, the first law requiring measures to protect children from environmental toxins. At the Pew Charitable Trusts, she helped create Health-Track, which identifies cancer clusters.

"My mother had a deep spiritual sense about religion, nature and nurturing others that . . . has helped to sustain me through many rocky times," says Goldman, who has been called one of our most influential public-health physicians. "It is also important to be willing to compromise and to be patient, since the most important changes occur over longer time spans."

For more information: www.health-track.org and www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine.

Frederica ("Ricky") P. Perera, Dr. P.H.

Director, Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health; Professor at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University

Working with colleagues at Columbia and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Perera pioneered "molecular epidemiology," which utilizes biological markers—in human blood, for example—to indicate exposures or susceptibility to toxins as well as risks of disease associated with those toxins. This led to new molecular approaches into research on disease causation and prevention.

Perera's "laboratory" is northern Manhattan and the South Bronx. "These are largely low-income communities of color with urgent environmental health needs," she says. Rates of low birth weight and other developmental problems, in addition to asthma, are high. Perera is a principal investigator on the long-term Mothers & Newborns Study, in which 750 pregnant women wear small backpacks that collect chemicals in the air they breathe. The study continually checks for the mothers (who now number 550) as well as their children up to age five. A similar model is being used for a study looking at in utero growth and development in children of mothers who were exposed to pollutants caused by the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Crossing all boundaries: Perera feels it's important to look at a variety of possible effects, from the children's physical and cognitive development to asthma rates and cancer risks. Her study also takes the broadest view of contributing factors, collecting information on such exposures to air pollutants, household pesticides and even the "psychosocial" stressors associated with living in poverty. "The families' commitment to our study is allowing us to understand how these factors affect all children's health," says Perera.

For more information: go to healthsciences.columbia.edu/dept/sph/ccceh.

Peggy Shepard

Executive Director, West Harlem Environmental Action, Inc. (WE ACT); Co-chair, Northeast Environmental Justice Network

In 1988, Peggy Shepard, chair of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council to the EPA, co-founded WE ACT to protest the poor management of a West Harlem air polluter, the North River Sewage Treatment Plant. The group united diverse but concerned parties to win a $1.1 million settlement used to establish a fund to improve environmental health and quality of life in the area. WE ACT has been active in raising awareness about high levels of particulate matter in the air—an asthma trigger—from dirty diesel buses and bus terminals. For her "pioneering urban activism against enviromental injustice," Shepard won a 2003 Heinz Award for the Environment.

Ongoing challenge: Twenty percent of Harlem children suffer from asthma (as compared with a nationwide figure of about 7 percent and a New York City average of 10 percent). WE ACT is partnering with the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, whose researchers put hard numbers to West Harlem's health problems. Shepard is also a co-investigator for the Columbia Children's Environmental Health Center.

Green Haven: In December, WE ACT paid New York City $1 for a four-story historic house in West Harlem for which the organization is planning a total green renovation. "We see this as a safe place for our offices and youth groups, but also as a gathering place for environmental-justice groups," says Shepard, sounding as proud as any new homeowner.

For more information: www.weact.org.

Gina M. Solomon, M.D., M.P.H.

Senior Scientist, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine, U.C. San Francisco; co-author, Generations at Risk: Reproductive Health and the Environment (MIT Press, 1996) and Healthy Milk, Healthy Baby (NRDC, 2001)

Solomon's eye is trained to figure out where toxins hide—in marine life and human breast milk, for example—after they spill into the environment, with the ultimate goal of getting industries and governments to stop this pollution. In a 2001 NRDC report on chemical pollution in breast milk, Solomon shines a light on polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), the flame-retardant chemicals in some plastics and foam that are found in women's milk, and have been shown in animal studies to disrupt the brain development and thyroid hormone levels of offspring. "There's good reason to suspect that they're cancer-causing as well," says Solomon, who explains that the chemical structure of PBDEs is a cross between dioxins, which are known human carcinogens, and PCBs, which are neurotoxins. "Not a safe intersection," she adds.

But there's good news: Since PBDEs have been banned in Sweden, their levels in Swedish women have dropped "faster than we thought they would," Solomon says, adding that this means a reduction in human health risks in that country.

For more information: www.nrdc.org/breastmilk.