Blog Assignment #4: Selection 31 (Summary)

Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment

Sandra Steingraber

 Image from: The Good Wife

Steingraber shares her experience with bladder cancer as a young adult, and the history of cancer in her family as well.  Stenigraber believes that "what runs in the families does not necessarily run in blood", but because families share the same environments.  She also mentions that she is an adoptive child, and yet cancer that runs in her adoptive parents, was somehow related to her as well.

This selection, Steingraber talks about her search for answers on bladder cancer and its information on inherited risk factors and enzymatic mechanisms.  She tries to link the environment and carcinogens during this search.  She went on to find that workers who manufacture carcinogens are exposed to higher levels than anyone else.  She also found that two percent, 10,940 people in the United States dies each year from environmentally caused cancers.  What releases these chemical carcinogens into the environment are household materials that contains PCBs and DDT and also pesticides.   

A least toxic alternative would mean choosing the least harmful way of solving our problems such as getting rid of weeds in our fields, cocroaches, fleas, stains or pathogens in our water.  This would help decrease the amount of people exposed to environmental carcinogens.