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Although the summer months may be the time of year we most want to be outside, they may be the worst time of year to do so since air pollution and “bad air” days can occur more frequently in many parts of the U.S. this time of year. Kirstin McPolin tells us what to look out for during these dog days of summer.

First in our new series of personal profiles, read this inspiring portrait about advocacy and how Louise Kuo Habakus, author of Vaccine Epidemic, became involved in her work as an author, advocate, and speaker.

Another fabulous installment from Camille Sowinski, one of our board members and a pioneer in the Green School movement in California. You too can take advantage of the green momentum by starting small and offering to be the green classroom parent.

For these stories and more, check out Real Mama’s Summer 2011 E-newsletter below.

And don’t forget to get your reusable veggie bags and help to support Real Mama at the same time!

Recognizing that families and caregivers are short on time and that environmental issues and actions can be complex, Real Mama researches and reviews some of the latest environmental topics and concerns for today’s busy families.

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Most teachers hand out a list of supplies needed for class during the first few days of school.  Ask your child’s teacher if you can create a green supply list and hand it out during back-to-school night (on recycled paper of course).  Eco-friendly school supplies can be found in mainstream markets and are priced competitively with similar products.  Staples offers eco-friendly notebooks, composition books, writing pads and sticky notes made from 80 percent sugar cane waste.  They also carry pencils made from recycled tires, crayons made from solar energy, and pens made from recycled plastic.  Just about any item on a traditional list can be found in an affordable, eco-friendly version.  Visit one of the large supply stores near your school, take notes, and share your finds.

Extra Credit: Help teacher set up a website where supply list can be posted as well as all the other traditional handouts.  Getting information online saves paper.

Party Responsibly

Start the year off with a durable party goods drive.  Instead of asking for parents to bring in disposable plates, forks, and napkins for each holiday party, request that each family donate one durable place setting for the teacher to keep with her classroom.  Purchase a large plastic Rubbermaid type bin for storage and let it double as a washtub.  In our classrooms, we assign student helpers to clean the dishes and explain that by doing so they are helping to conserve natural resources.  Allow the teacher to keep the durable goods for the years to come and remind parents and students that they have created a stewardship program that will last for years.

Extra Credit: Teach kids to conserve water and energy while washing dishes.  Fill tub with soapy cold water, scrub each item then turn water on and quickly and rinse.  Do not let water run the entire time and by using cold water you save the energy it would take to heat it.

Take on Trash

One of the least controversial environmental issues in which a parent can engage students is the ubiquitous presence of trash.  In the lower grades at my school we spend much of the year brainstorming on ways we can reduce trash around our campus.  Since we live near the ocean, the trash that is scattered around our school eventually will make its way down the storm drain and harm marine wildlife.  In areas that are not near the ocean, students can learn about how birds mistake small pieces of trash as food and ingest it.  As a classroom volunteer there are a number of opportunities to get kids thinking about this issue.

Suggest that students take a walk around campus with you and supply each child with their own paper bag.  Have students collect some debris around the campus or bring some clean trash from home (bottle caps, granola bar wrappers, juice box straws) and instruct kids to create a self-portrait with the trash.  We provide each kid with an 8×10 piece of cardboard and some glue.  The students see first hand how much trash ends up on the ground and then create something interesting with it.

Extra Credit: Use picked up trash to make a “keep our campus clean” mural and hang it someplace where the whole school can see it.

Trash Patrol

Kindergarteners are the perfect group to encourage good stewardship practices.  They are old enough to understand the harm trash presents to the environment but not too old to feel burdened by a task like keeping the campus clean.  Purchase a supply of latex-free gloves and small trash bags and carve out an hour every week for Kindergarteners to scour the campus for unwanted trash.  Ask your school’s administrator for a visible spot in our library where the results of the weekly cleanups can be posted in pounds.  Kindergarteners will learn about scales and weight measurements while feeling a sense of pride because the results are prominently displayed.

Extra Credit: Report the year-end results to your local paper with a photo of your trash patrol group and celebrate the amount of waste that was not able to harm any wildlife.

Waste Free Class

Challenge students and their parents to see if you can create a waste-free classroom.  Make sure your classroom has several recycling containers.  One for paper waste, one for plastic items and aluminum cans and large box labeled “scratch paper” for students to put all papers used on only one side.  Have students take paper from “scratch” box when doodling or working on less formal projects.  If recycling is done properly, true waste products should be minimal.

Extra Credit: Help students carry the waste-free mantra into the lunchroom.  Offer suggestions to parents on how to pack lunch items in durable containers rather than using paper bags and plastic baggies.

The Quick Facts:

The Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) is charged with protecting human health and the environment including the regulation of air pollution from fossil fuel, such as coal or oil, burning power plants.  Air pollution can have negative impacts on health ranging from premature mortality to aggravated asthma.  Those people most vulnerable to air pollution are sensitive populations, particularly children. See also Real Mama’s article “Smog Season Safety: How to Help Your Kids Enjoy the Outdoors While Reducing Risk from Harmful Air Pollution” by Special Contributor to Real Mama, Inc. Rebecca Watts Hull.

In addition, air pollution can contribute to global climate change as well as more regional impacts on the environment such as acid rain.  Acid rain occurs when air pollution is brought down from the atmosphere by rain and causes acidification of lakes and streams making them uninhabitable by plants and animals – basically the plants and animals can’t breath.  In addition, acid rain causes damage to trees, crops, historic buildings, and statues.

EPA has established national air quality standards to protect public health for five major air pollutants regulated by the Clean Air Act, ground-level ozone, particle pollution (also known as particulate matter), carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide.  EPA requires industries that emit such pollution to comply with various regulations aimed at reducing air pollution and protecting the population and environment.

The new EPA Cross-State Air Pollution Rule requires 27 states to significantly improve air quality by reducing power plant emissions that contribute to ozone and/or fine particulate pollution in other states.  Air pollution can certainly be local, but it can also be global and/or regional.  Particularly in the eastern United States, prevailing winds blow from west to east so the pollution coming from one state can significantly impact another.  Think of the weather map from your local news station.  On the East coast, people are often concerned about what is happening in the middle of the country as a precursor to weather coming down the line.  Similarly, air pollution from other states travels in much the same way.  EPA’s new Rule is designed to account for that.

Specifically, the EPA rule requires a reduction by power plants of sulfur dioxide emissions by 73 percent by 2014 and nitrogen oxide emissions by 54 percent by 2014, from 2005 levels.  Sulfur dioxide is primarily release from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal or oil to generate electricity at power plants.  Sulfur dioxide, at high concentrations, can affect breathing, is the primary contributor to acid rain, and contributes to limited visibility in large parts of the country.  Nitrogen oxides, or NOx, react in the atmosphere to create ozone and acid rain.  Power plants will have to start cutting their sulfur dioxide emissions as early as January 2012 and nitrogen oxide emissions by May 2012.

In another regulatory action, EPA also issued a supplemental notice of proposed rulemaking to require six states – Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin – to make summertime reductions in nitrogen oxide under the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule ozone-season control program.  If finalized, this rule along with the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule are aimed at making sure that ozone-season nitrogen oxide emissions meet the 1997 8-hour Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standard or what EPA has determined to be a “safe” level.

Impacts

According to EPA, the projected amount to be spent by power plants, and others impacted, is $800 million in 2014 and the projected benefits will yield $120-280 billion in annual health and environmental benefits in 2014, including the value of avoiding 13,000 to 34,000 premature deaths.

Ways to Protect Your Family From Exposure to Air Pollution

- Keep kids inside on days when air quality is bad.  Check the website http://www.airnow.gov to get real-time air quality reports for over 300 cities across the U.S.

- Reduce energy consumption because the less power required to be generated means the less fossil fuels required to be burned.

- Plant trees to help absorb particulates and improve air quality.

- Avoid being outside when lawnmowers, leaf-blowers, and other outdoor equipment are being used to protect kids from exhaust fumes as well as noise.

Information used in this article was found at the following sources, which you can visit if you want to find out more about this topic:

http://www.airnow.gov/ (AIRNow Website developed by the U.S. EPA, NOAA, NPS, tribal, state, and local agencies to provide the public with easy access to national air quality information. The Web site offers daily AQI forecasts as well as real-time AQI conditions for over 300 cities across the US, and provides links to more detailed State and local air quality Web site).

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/07/us-usa-epa-smog-idUSTRE7664GD20110707 (Article entitled, EPA rule aims to cut smog, soot from coal plants, July 7, 2011, by Timothy Gardner and Tom Doggett)

http://www.epa.gov/airtransport/ (EPA’s Final Cross State Air Pollution Rule, issued July 6, 2011, requires 27 states to significantly improve air quality by reducing power plant emissions that contribute to ozone and/or fine particulate pollution in other states)

Special contributor to Real Mama, Inc.

The Quick Facts: What follows is intended to be an inspiring portrait for women and caregivers about advocacy and how the author of Vaccine Epidemic, Louise Kuo Habakus, became involved in her work as an author, advocate, and speaker.

Louise is not “anti-vaccine.”  She states that “vaccines are an option that people have when contemplating how to protect against disease, and people should have access to them but they are by no means foolproof, or safe for all who receive them.  Vaccines are not the only tool in the health, wellness, and disease prevention tool box.”

Louise Kuo Habakus is currently the executive director and co-founder of the Center for Personal Rights.  She formerly ran corporate marketing operations for two of the world’s largest financial firms: Putnam Investments and Prudential Financial, and was a consultant with Bain & Company.  She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University, where she also received a graduate degree in international policy studies.

Real Mama:  How did you come to be on this path?

Most importantly, like your readers, I’m a Real Mama. I am the mother of two young children who experienced adverse reactions after vaccination.  Quite frankly, I am devastated by the chronically ill and neurologically damaged kids that I see, everywhere. Our government can pinpoint the precise source of food poisoning (i.e., ground turkey) that killed one person and made 76 people sick, and identify each one of them in 25 different states across the country.  However, our government can’t tell us the cause of asthma, affecting 1 in 9 children, ADHD 1 in 10 children, food allergies 1 in 12 children, and autism, now 1 in 110 children?  I’m outraged.  It’s time to be taking a very hard look at the prime suspects. There is no legitimate reason that vaccines should not be included among them.

Increasingly, parents of young children are realizing that there are more vaccines, and more doses of them, than ever before.  There has been a three-fold increase in just the twenty-five years.  New doses are often added, and almost never removed.  In 2011, the federal government recommends that children receive 70 doses of 16 vaccines by 18 years of age.  Some people believe that parents who allow their children to receive just a few or no vaccines are, well, crazy.  However, if you stop and really think about it, the fact that 90 to 95% of children are vaccinated is what’s truly extraordinary.  Most parents allow their children to get so many vaccines without really understanding what they are, how they work, what’s in them, what the unintended consequences might be.  The extent of vaccination today is unprecedented in human history.

The other big influence that placed me on this path is that I used to be a senior corporate executive. I understand how big companies operate, including the varied ways they can influence policy, and drive to bottom line results.  Many businesses spend significantly more money on sales, marketing, and lobbyists than they do on research and development.  Drug companies spend about twice as much on sales and marketing than on R&D.  Regardless of the product we are buying, we should be educated consumers.  This is especially true for a serious medical intervention such as vaccination.

Real Mama:  How did you come to be a speaker on this topic?

When I was a brand new parent, I never questioned vaccination for my children.  I accepted that it was standard medical practice.  I had never met a physician who raised any concerns.  In my circle of friends, I had never met parents who were worried either.  I did more research on cars and washer/dryers than I did on the dozens of doses of vaccines that doctors injected into my children.  I did not know the ingredients in vaccines, nor did I understand most of the diseases against which doctors were so eager to protect my babies.

There is nothing like personal experience to grab someone by the heart and the throat, and doubly so when one’s children are involved.  This is what motivated my research.  I wanted to know, above all, where’s the science?  Specifically, I was looking for the body of peer-reviewed literature, upheld by the highest standards of evidence-based medicine, which justifies today’s childhood vaccination schedule.

If you’re wondering the same thing, let me save you some time.  I could not find this literature because it does not exist.  I was flabbergasted.  There are no randomized, longitudinal studies on vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations. There are no studies of the U.S. vaccine schedule as a whole.  There are no studies on health outcomes for individual vaccines.  And the U.S. government has never studied the large populations of children whose families allege that they sustained severe vaccine injury following vaccination.  These include hundreds of thousands of cases reported in the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (www.medalerts.org) and the approximately 5,000 families in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding who collected comprehensive evidence and medical records, and retained counsel, to make the case that vaccination resulted in their children’s autism diagnosis.

I also learned that most pediatricians and family practice doctors do not understand the state of vaccine-safety science.  In medical school, students spend about one day learning about vaccines: what they are, how to administer them, and how to “catch children up.”  In their medical practices, most doctors learn about new vaccines and vaccine research by pharmaceutical company sales reps.  Drug companies perform the limited clinical studies required to justify licensure by the FDA.  Our government does not do its own research to justify its recommended schedules.

The icing on the cake, however, is when I discovered that vaccine manufacturers and physicians are not liable for most death and injury caused by vaccines.  In 1986, the drug industry asked for and received liability protection from Congress. Pharma argued that they were paying multimillion settlements to families of children who died or sustained massive brain damage after vaccination. Here’s the gist of the message that vaccine makers delivered to our government: “If you want your vaccine program, you better protect us. If you don’t, we won’t make your vaccines.  And even if we do, they’ll cost you an arm and a leg.”  Wow, right?  Instead of telling these companies to go make safer vaccines, our government acknowledged that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe” and passed legislation granting almost blanket liability protection.  By protecting industry, our government set the stage for an astonishing run up in the numbers of vaccines on the schedule.  The 1986 law set the stage, in the United States, for a marked departure with our first world peers.  After 1986, our government added some of our most controversial childhood vaccines to the schedule, including chickenpox, diarrhea, flu, cervical cancer, and the birth dose of hepatitis B to newborns.

Imagine this scenario.  Let’s say that you could run a business where you could get all fifty state governments to mandate your product as a condition of daycare and school admission.  Let’s add that, if someone died or became very ill from your product, you could never be sued.  What would you think about this kind business?  It’s a very simple equation, and corporations are exceptionally logical.  There are many hundreds of new vaccines in the development pipeline, and drug companies only make pediatric vaccines that they can get on the childhood schedule.

As I continued my research, I connected with other advocates who care about this subject.  Together, we stand on the shoulders of courageous researchers and activists who have done this work for decades and centuries, even.  A review of the history of science reveals that people have been concerned about vaccine safety since the inception of vaccination and its predecessor “variolation” (the use of pus from cowpox scabs) in the 1700s.   While much of the vaccination debate may appear to center on the science, it is not really about science.  It is about our fundamental rights.  Make the vaccines, make them available, and even subsidize them. But don’t hold a gun to parents’ heads and say “no shots, no school.”  That’s coercion.

Real Mama:  What is your position on vaccines?

I truly am not anti-vaccine.  Vaccines are an option that people have when contemplating how to protect against disease, and people should have access to them.  But they are by no means the only tool in the tool box.

People must have the right to make decisions that deeply affect their lives and their health, and includes whether to receive all, some, or no vaccines.  Parents must have the right and responsibility to make these decisions for their children.  I know these are not easy choices.  People are understandably and legitimately concerned about mortality from infectious diseases.  But they must understand that vaccination is not a risk-free panacea.  Vaccines don’t always work; and regardless, they are serious medicine, with potentially grave consequences.  Every vaccine carries with it the potential to cause death and massive injury. People deserve to know this, and factor it into their decision making.

Many feel they must delegate this important decision to the physicians.  I urge individuals to do some basic research first.  A great starting place is to read the first ten pages of our book Vaccine Epidemic (the preface and introduction) and the chapter entitled “What Should Parents Do?”  In chapter 24, I summarize eight advice books on vaccination authored by credentialed medical professionals that span the gamut from all to none, with several advocating “some,” including alternate schedules and other specific recommendations.  As with other important decisions that affect our lives, including religion and politics, reasonable people will differ when it comes to critical questions about health, wellness, and medicine.

It comes down to one important question.  Who gets to decide?

Dr. Bernadine Healy was the former director of the National Institutes of Health and served as president of the American Red Cross and a member of the Insitute of Medicine.  Dr. Healy passed away on August 6, 2011.  To remember her, I’d like to close this article with the quote that she wrote for the cover of Vaccine Epidemic:

“There are unanswered questions about vaccine safety.  We need studies on vaccinated populations based on various schedules and doses as well as individual patient susceptibilities that we are continuing to learn about. Vaccine policy should be the subject of frank and open debate, with no tolerance for bullying. There are no sides—only people concerned for the well-being of our children.”