Paxety Pages

Thanks to Lileks, we now know that Bill Moyers is working hard to rescue us from at least part of our racist plague.  He and a bunch of damnyankees (as my Anglo grandmother taught me to spell and say it) from New York. Here's the situation.

A federal program, idiotically called CHEER, is studying the possible effects of pesticides on children here in Duval County in coordination with the county health department. The agency is giving the parents a video camera to record their children's behavior, $970 and a T-shirt for participating.  They want to know how pesticides may affect children. I would suppose that because palmetto bugs can grow quite large in Florida, and have deleterious health effects, it would be a good thing to study.  The families simply use whatever pesticides they normally use - whether it's something they would apply themselves, such as Raid, or something they would hire an exterminator for.

WJXT-TV (local Channel 4) reported last year , however, that a group from New York, the Children's Campaign for the Environment finds the study racist.

Channel 4 Investigator Jim Piggott spoke with the group's executive director, Adrienne Esposito, by phone.

"Did they go into a rich, white community? No, they went into an area of a community where 62 percent of all mothers received an elementary education. They did not go into the highly educated communities. Why is that?" asked Esposito.

Why, indeed.  Could it be because the palmetto bugs are racist, too?  Johns Hopkins did a study a decade ago that shows African Americans are far more likely than white folks to develop asthma due to sensitivity to cockroaches.

 In a recent study of more than 80 Baltimore youth, the researchers found that an African-American child was 16.4 times more likely than a Caucasian child to be sensitive to allergens left behind by cockroach droppings and saliva. And poor children or those from out of cities were 11.9 times more likely to be affected by roach infestation than those from middle or high income families.

The study in the June issue of The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology is also the first to report that children in the most infested homes are the most sensitive to the allergens, a clear indication of dose responsiveness, the researchers say.

"We honestly don't know why race plays a role independent of poverty," says Peyton Eggleston, M.D., professor of pediatrics and co-author of the study. Eggleston speculates that racially based genetic differences, important in the regulation of immune responses, hold a clue.

Health officials tell WJXT there's a good reason for their study.

 "It's a great opportunity for Jacksonville to find what level of pesticide children have been exposed to in our community. We know that across the state there is a high use of pesticide indoors and outdoors," said Dr. Aaron Hilliard, who is conducting research in the study.

But the complainers at organicconsumers.org find a conspiracy of the Bush Administration:

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), led by Bush appointees, is seeking input on a new proposed study in which infants in participating low income families will be monitored for health impacts as they undergo exposure to known toxic chemicals over the course of two years. The study entitled Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study (CHEERS) will look at how chemicals can be ingested, inhaled or absorbed by children ranging from babies to 3 years old.

Interestingly, the article is accompanied by a photograph of two white children. It goes on -

In October, the EPA received $2.1 million to do the study from the American Chemistry Council, a chemical industry front group that includes members such as Dow, Exxon, and Monsanto (see full list of members on sidebar of this page). Critics of the research, including some EPA scientists, claim the study's funders guarantee the results will be biased in favor of the chemical industry, at the expense of the health of the impoverished children serving as test subjects.

So, organicconsumers.org has already concluded that the pesticides are toxic - a conclusion that's not obvious by mere observation.  But asthma is obvious - the illness and deaths caused by the disease are real.  Here's the question for you environmentalists - what do we do about the racist palmetto bugs? Just let the asthmatic children lie in their roach filled beds?

Go read Lileks. He writes better than I do - even if he is a yankeeboy - or should that be damnyankeeboy.