I just found a website that threw me for a loop: It’s called Sailhome (www.sailhome.org).
It was started by a regular guy – a physicist living in San Francisco who was the VP of marketing for a semiconductor intellectual property company – named Ron. Ron’s son, born almost 10 years ago, began to show signs of being developmentally off track by age 2. By age 3, Ron and his wife had three separate diagnoses trying to label his condition – Asperger’s, PDD-NOS, Autism.
Before age 4, he began receiving treatment guided by the DAN! Protocol. DAN! doctors feel that autism is a disorder caused by a combination of lowered immune response, external toxins from vaccines and other sources, and problems caused by certain foods. It includes treatment to reduce toxic loads and pathogens, boost immunity, and heal from the complexities of toxic injury. Some of the major interventions suggested by DAN! practitioners include:
- Nutritional supplements, including certain vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and essential fatty acids
- Special diets totally free of gluten (from wheat, barley, rye, and possibly oats) and free of dairy (milk, ice cream, yogurt, etc.)
- Testing for hidden food allergies, and avoidance of allergenic foods
- Treatment of intestinal bacterial/yeast overgrowth (with pro-biotics, supplements and other non-pharmaceutical medications)
- Detoxification of heavy metals through chelation (a potentially hazardous medical procedure)
There are some who debate about whether this approach is safe, proven, or even “quackery”.
But it’s working for Ron’s son – who is 9 years old in 2010, and largely recovered. Ron says that most people who meet him have no inkling he’s ever been “on the spectrum” – but that successfully navigating through each day’s toxic insults will probably remain a life-long challenge for him.
Sailhome was started by this regular guy, who says he “parked my career for 6+ years in order to help my son recover, make sure my family stayed intact during the ordeal, and to develop this web site.”
The website is an attempt to “connect the dots”, so that we have a better understanding about how easily toxic exposures occur, the types of illness that results, and how to prevail.
It’s divided into three parts under “Concerns”:
- Body Burden
- Excitotoxins
- Vaccines
I want to concentrate on the “Body Burden” section, because among the chemicals often found in our bodies (contributing to our body burden) are those used most often in textile processing.
Body burden refers to the accumulation of synthetic chemicals – found in substances like household cleaners, fabrics, cosmetics, pest repellants, computers, cell phones – which helped “modernize” our lives in the post World War II chemical age and which are now found in our own bodies. When we hear that some chemicals can damage the environment, we have forgotten that we ARE the environment, as David Suzuki reminds us. Whatever is “out there” is also inside us. We live , breathe and eat the products of our modern industrial era, for better or for worse. Think of it as “the pollution inside people”.
You can get tons of information about body burden on Google, and studies litter the landscape with results showing the effects this chemical onslaught is having on us. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is running the National Biomonitoring Program (NBP) started in 1998. Every two years the NBP attempts to assess exposure to environmental chemicals in the general U.S. population. Data covering 2001-2002 found that the average adult American body carried 116 toxic synthetic compounds. In other studies, similar chemicals have been detected in the placenta, umbilical cord blood, bloodstream, and body fat of infants as well as in the human breast milk they drink. In a study sponsored by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), researchers at two major laboratories found an average of 200 industrial chemicals and pollutants in the umbilical cord of newborn babies, indicating that babies are born “pre polluted”. 
Yet many people are not terribly concerned, because the industry and their government tells them that the chemicals found in products are present in such low quantities as to have no effect. And scientists are trained to believe that “the dose makes the poison” – in other words, it’s commonly thought that a little bit won’t hurt you; that large doses always have greater effects than small doses. But that simplistic approach overlooks greater harm that is being found at extremely small doses. If all toxins behaved exactly the same way that might hold true. But the effect of high doses cannot always be extrapolated to predict what happens at extremely low doses.
The effect of a ‘dose’ is not that simple. Factors that must be considered include
• Size of dose
• Length of exposure
• Rate of absorption
• Timing
• Individual metabolism
• State of health and nutrition when exposed
• Concurrent exposure to other toxicants — including order of exposures and any synergies
Here are some of the problems with the assumption that a low dose translates into low risk:
New research is demonstrating that harm can occur at much lower thresholds than previously considered possible. Hormones, for example, play specific roles, at specific moments in time, throughtout a person’s life. If the actions of hormones are prevented, interrupted, or increased then the effects can range from subtle to dramatic.
For example, exposure occurring at a young age can cause a subtle change in how a gene expresses itself. This can set up a low-level progression of conditions that eventually leads to some form of cancer.
In other cases the original disruption might occur at a key moment during development in the womb. The dramatic result might be a birth defect, mental retardation or miscarriage.
The amount of chemical necessary to cause these disruptions does not have to be large. A vanishingly small amount is all it takes — “just enough” to alter an event. The mouse on the left is normal. The mouse on the right was exposed to 1 ppb DES while in the womb. 
For years it was assumed that such low exposure would have no effect — until someone checked.
Toxins are often regulated based on finding the level of exposure that causes no harm. This is known as the ‘no observable adverse effects level’ (NOAEL). But a NOAEL is derived by starting with a high dose and then reducing subsequent doses until no affect is observed misses other harm that can take place (from synergistic reactions with other chemicals in the body) at even lower doses.
These chemicals do not act in a vacuum and the effects cannot be isolated from other variables. Harm can be amplified when chemicals are combined – in other words, toxins can make each other more toxic. For example, a dose of mercury that would kill 1 out of 100 rats, when combined with a dose of lead that would kill 1 out of 1000 rats – kills every rat exposed! This is called synergistic toxicity.
The timing – and order – of toxic exposure plays a much more significant role than previously recognized. Exposures can happen one after the other, or all at once. Combinations of chemicals can produce:
- Consequences that are significantly different than would be expected from individual exposures.
- A range of combined acute and chronic effects.
- Effects that can appear immediately – or sometime later.
- Increased or unexpected harmful effects — including entirely new kinds of effects.
The possible combinations of exposure are huge and knowledge is limited about the effects of mixed exposures. Individual susceptibility adds to the complexity of exposure and resulting outcomes. As a result, current safety standards based on high dose experiments don’t guarantee shelter from toxic levels of exposure.
Genetic susceptibility plays a role in body burden. For instance, a large part of the population, possibly more than 20%, are unable to effectively excrete heavy metals. Their burden accumulates faster. Their illnesses are more obvious. They are the “canaries in a coal mine” in an environment that is increasingly toxic. It’s becoming abundantly clear that both “rare” and “common” illnesses are on the rise, and research is making a connection with body burden. The National Institutes of Health defines a rare disease as one affecting 200,000 or fewer Americans yet:
- 25 million Americans suffer from one of the nearly 6,000 identified rare diseases. That rivals the 40 million Americans with one or more of the three “major” diseases: heart disease, cancer or diabetes.
Viruses, bacteria, yeasts, parasites, and mold aggravate body burden at any stage of life. New research demonstrates that viruses can increase susceptibility to heavy metals; or that they increase the uptake of PBDEs. Beyond the better understood mechanisms of infection, research is revealing that some microorganisms interact directly with chemicals to enhance susceptibility to infection.
A common misconception is that “inactive ingredients will not interact”.
In fact many ingredients do interact, and it is possible for ingredients to change into different chemicals that also interact. A manufacturer may claim a product has been tested and proven to be 100% safe when used as directed. This might be true — there is no requirement to test for synergies.
These are just the highlights of Ron’s eye opening discussion. Please take a few minutes exploring his web site and others, some of which I’ve listed below:
Resources:
For presentation on PBS and hosted by Bill Moyers on our body burden, see http://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/problem/bodyburden.html
For the Centers for Disease Control report: www.cdc.gov/exposurereport
For the EWG/Mount Sinai body burden report: www.ewg.org/reports/bodyburden/index.php
For the EPA study on extent of testing for modern chemicals: www.epa.gov/opptintr/chemtest/hazchem.htm
For ideas on what you can do: “Everybody’s Chemical Burden” by Shayna Cohen in The Green Guide #96 May/June 2003, www.thegreenguide.com
OEcotextiles 