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The Toxic Assault on Our Children
Random House
August 2008
On Sale: August 12, 2008
368 pages ISBN: 1400064309 EAN: 9781400064304 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
In this shocking and sobering book, two fearless journalists
directly and definitively link industrial toxins to the
current rise in childhood disease and death. In the
tradition of Silent Spring, Poisoned Profits is a landmark
investigation, an eye-opening account of a country that
prizes money over children’s health. With indisputable data, Philip Shabecoff and Alice Shabecoff
reveal that the children of baby boomers–the first to be
raised in a truly “toxified” world–have higher rates of
birth defects, asthma, cancer, autism, and other serious
illnesses than previous generations. In piercing case
histories, the authors identify the culprit as corporate
pollution. Here are the stories of such places as Dickson,
Tennessee, where babies were born with cleft lips and
palates after landfill chemicals seeped into the water, and
Port Neches, Texas, where so many graduates of a high school
near synthetic rubber and chemical plants contracted cancer
that the school was nicknamed “Leukemia High.” The danger to our children isn’t just in the outside world,
though. The Shabecoffs provide evidence that our homes are
now infested with everything from dangerous flame retardants
in crib mattresses to harmful plastic softeners in teething
rings to antibiotics and arsenic in chicken–additives that
are absorbed by growing and physically vulnerable kids as
well as by pregnant women. Compounding the problem are
chemical corporations that sabotage investigations and
regulations, a government that refuses to police these
companies, and corporate-hired scientists who keep pertinent
secrets massaged with skewed data of their own. Poisoned Profits also demonstrates how people are fighting
back, whether through grassroots parents’ groups putting
pressure on politicians, the rise of “ecotheology” in the
pulpits of formerly indifferent churches, or the new “green
chemistry” being practiced in labs to replace bad elements
with good. The Shabecoffs also include helpful tips on
reducing risks to children in how they eat and play, and in
how parents clean and maintain their homes. Powerful, unflinching, and eminently readable, Poisoned
Profits is a wake-up call that is bound to inspire talk and
force change.
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