Throughout recorded history, humans have encountered horrific, large-scale tragedies ending in the loss or maiming of hundreds of millions of people. Plagues and other bacterial and viral infections, wars, famine, natural disasters, and mass exterminations have wiped out entire generations, cultures, and families who couldn’t have imagined such devastation. Most of them were innocent bystanders who happened to be swept up and out of existence in the whirlwinds of human happenstance or design. It comes, and then goes, leaving a trail of destruction behind. As we consider history, we engage our ingenuity, trying to improve what we can, hoping to avoid similar disasters in the future.
Over the course of the last three hundred years, mankind has faced challenges of a different kind: challenges brought on in the name of progress. The Industrial Revolution, for starters, birthed in Great Britain around 1760, marked a turning point in history. Almost every aspect of human life was influenced in some way by the emerging industrial technologies. This was a time in history when there was a mass exodus of people from the quaint countryside into the city in hopes of finding work opportunities in the new world of urban mechanization.
The workplaces and housing conditions of the urban poor were deplorable and there were no health or safety codes. Men and women worked twelve-to-sixteen- hour workdays. Children either roamed the streets while their parents worked, or they were coerced into child labor by parents or unscrupulous factory and mill owners. Their work frequently involved dangerous and demoralizing activities for up to eighteen hours a day. Entire cities like New York were surrounded by garbage dumps and shantytowns where animals including hogs, horses, and dogs roamed the streets.
Human and animal excrement were everywhere. Runoff from raw sewage mixed readily with sources of drinking water. Carcasses of dead and diseased animals found in the streets were used to make sausage that was sold to the unsuspecting public. Rats infested the cities of Boston and New York, causing widespread and severe public health problems. Infectious diseases were spreading. Tuberculosis, Cholera, Typhoid fever, Dysentery, Diphtheria, Measles, Smallpox, and Pertussis were rampant at varying times in overcrowded, nutritionally deficient communities with no clean running water and no concept of hygiene or basic sanitation practices.
What made all these diseases subside? After Louis Pasteur and others promoted the idea of The Germ Theory of Disease, it was thought that infections could develop mostly from poor nutrition and hygiene, and inadequate living conditions. These infections also typically run their course and historically subside on their own. Improving living conditions, including clean and running city water treated with chlorine as a disinfectant, better nutrition, water closets (toilets), health and hygiene education, and time, were the main factors contributing to the decline in these diseases. While the search was on to develop antibiotics, antitoxins, toxoids, and vaccines, essentially all of these diseases were declining or nearly gone by the time the medications were made available to the public.
Now, in the last one hundred years, there have been new threats to human health, arguably more dreadful than any disease we have faced in the past. And, as profound as it may seem, indicators reflect the overall health of Americans is declining so rapidly, there is a very real possibility that we will never recover. Chronic diseases, genetic mutations, and the poisoning of every known person and animal on the face of the Earth is a result of this threat. The cause is not a viral or bacterial plague, nor some strange mutation that threatens our survival. Its face and effects are much more sinister and covert. And it is not just you who is being targeted - the damage that slowly ravishes the body is after your family and friends and can be passed down for generations to come.
What are these threats to our very existence? Toxic, man-made chemicals, and they are everywhere. They’re in the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the soil we use to grow our food, personal care products that we put on our bodies and in our mouths, the household products we use in our homes, yards, gardens, and the environment, and medications. Our food, water, and air are being systematically poisoned with harmful chemicals. Over time, the toxic burden of these chemicals builds up and accumulates in our brains and other organ systems, affecting how we feel, function, think, perform, and look. Infants, children, babies in-utero, and pregnant women are especially vulnerable to toxic chemicals, which are passed from the mother to child through the umbilical cord and breast milk.
These chemicals are literally poisoning the entire world’s population, from humans to wildlife to insects. There are more than 80,000 chemicals registered for use today, most of which (approximately 60,000) have not been studied for safety by any government agency, nor have they been studied for toxicity in synergy with each other. Research and testing have shown that many of these chemicals are indeed harmful, and are known to kill, maim, and otherwise destroy the lives of innocent people, causing cancer, birth defects, and the vast majority of chronic diseases, including mental health disorders. Dr. Paula Baillie-Hamilton, an Oxford educated physician in Britain and one of the leading authorities on food borne toxins, states, “We are so contaminated that if we were cannibals, our meat would be banned for human consumption.”
The killing fields in which we walk, talk, and have our existence, are saturated with observable evidence of harm and devastation, primarily at the hands of the industrial and pharmaceutical profiteers who develop toxic designer industrial chemicals, medications, and unsafe vaccines. Some chemicals are openly and heavily marketed to the general public in food, cleaning, and personal care products. Some are marketed to a specific industry like pest control, and still others make their way into our lives hidden in the recesses of everyday products, in the air, and in our drinking water though the guise of trade secrets (the fragrance industry is a great example of this).
Not unlike the people who lived in the deplorable conditions in the 1800s, we are surrounded by toxic refuse - invisible synthetic chemicals - and our bodies absorb them until we are overloaded, and our organ systems begin to fail. They affect every sector of our lives, harming our children and us in the most appalling and permanent ways. The resulting physical, emotional, environmental, and economic damage over the past century is incalculable, and the alarms that should move us to take note and do something are ringing loudly. No one is immune. Not even wildlife in the most environmentally pristine places on Earth - which says a lot about what is happening to the rest of us.
You can read more in the Killing Fields Chapter of my new book, Your Health Has Been Hijacked. You can order a signed copy on this website.
Another interesting article written about the environmental chemicals that are stealing the health of children especially, causing permanent neuro-developmental damage can be found in:
Project TENDR: Targeting Environmental Neuro-Developmental Risks. The TENDR Consensus Statement: