Exactly 10 years ago this year, I sat in a Melbourne auditorium, listening to a lecture about conspiracy theories. One of the key points made by the speaker was that many of the great revelations in our world were once conspiracy theories confined to the fringes of society; think round earthers v flat earthers.
That’s not to say that every conspiracy theory will be proven true. Clearly not. I don’t for a moment believe Elvis is working in a 7-Eleven in Tucson, Arizona.
But there are some solid examples of critical issues being relegated to the fringes of society, and left there, because it suited the perpetrators of such damage to do so. Take tobacco and cigarettes as an example. For a long time, the idea that tobacco caused health issues was blamed on nutters intent on destroying everyone’s good, smokey time. In truth, cigarette companies had scientific evidence by the 1950s that cigarette smoke was deadly, but Philip Morris didn’t admit that publicly until about 40 years later.
Why were people so eager to believe Philip Morris, which had so much to gain from suppressing the dangerous truth? It’s my fundamental belief they were able to get away with it so long because to most people, ignorance is bliss. No one wants to believe something they enjoy or something they can’t control is killing them, right?
As I watched thick bushfire smoke blanket Sydney at the end of 2019, into the early months of 2020, I was already working on researching what eventually became my book on early pregnancy loss and miscarriage, Hard to Bear: Investigating the science and silence of miscarriage. Knowing the effects of particulate matter on the body, I wondered if pollution, whether extreme or “normal levels”, might contribute to early pregnancy loss. It turns out that it does and that led to a story published in the Guardian and a podcast and later resulted in RANZCOG changing its guidelines for pregnancy in relation to pollution. But that’s not where this issue ended, at least, not for me.
That was just the start of my deep dive into environmental toxicants and how they affect our body, our fertility and pregnancy. I’d always put much of this down to conspiracy theories and health nuts. Chemtrail weirdos. Because governments regulate chemicals and they have our best interests at heart, right? Right?
It turns out – and I’m sorry to be a Debbie Downer – that the world we live in is slowly poisoning every single one of us. And the chemicals doing the most damage are byproducts of the fossil fuel industry, agribusiness and manufacturing, and for many reasons there doesn’t seem to be the appetite at a regulatory or governmental level to stop it. Sound familiar?
In Australia, 50,000 agricultural, industrial and veterinary chemicals are being used; 1,500 are suspected to interfere with endocrine function, which is essential to the healthy working of our reproductive and hormonal systems. Others are potential carcinogens that can cause cancer. Only a very small number have been tested.
Microplastics, which can cause inflammation in the body, is being found in our blood streams and also in the placentas of unborn foetuses. Walking down a major intersection during rush hour can expose you to as much particulate matter as a major bushfire event.
Even if chemicals are tested, the testing regimen means that chemicals are only being tested in isolation and not in conjunction with others to see how compounds react. Also, they might be tested for carcinogenic effects, for example, but the test subjects aren’t monitored for other ill-effects, such as endocrine disruption. Or vice versa. Some effects take place long after the research has concluded. Some of these chemicals can stay in the body forever. Or affect the way our DNA functions.
Agricultural runoff from these chemicals is sliding into our waterways. One study showed that Queensland’s Noosa River saw benthic biodiversity (the small organisms that live on the bottom of the riverbed) fall from 9,000 individuals and 150 species in 1998, to 1,114 individuals and 50 species in May 2018. If that was the decline in two decades, the trajectory means that pretty soon there won’t be any river-life at all. And what is the effect of chemicals on humans living nearby?
There’s no doubt you’ve seen plastic containers at the supermarket proudly bearing the label BPA-free. What that means is that they do not contain bisphenol A, a dangerous endocrine-disrupting chemical. Not only can it raise your risk profile in terms of miscarriage and early pregnancy loss, but it can have a wealth of other negative effects on physiology to humans, including those in utero. But what you don’t know is that it’s in lots of other places, including supermarket receipts. Despite us knowing about its ill-effects for more than 15 years, only late last year did the big chain supermarkets undertake to remove it from receipts that are being handled by their staff hundreds of times a day and by their customers too.
The way we test and regulate chemicals that are freely available in this country for a range of purposes must be immediately overhauled for the safety of the population and the biosphere we depend on.
A recurring theme of novels set in dystopian futures is infertility: think The Handmaid’s Tale or The Children of Men. The reality is that these books are a blueprint for the future unless we turn this ship around.
Every single expert I spoke to in the context of my research on miscarriage said that while we’re not tracking miscarriage numbers, they believe miscarriage rates are rising. These are not crackpots. These are world-renowned obstetricians and endocrinologists from Columbia University, Yale, Imperial College in London and right here in Australia.
Shanna Swan is a professor of environmental medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. Her research shows that sperm counts in the west fell by 59% between 1973 and 2011. Studies are showing declines in fertility around the world, and in Australia annual rounds of IVF initiated each year are rising by around 2-3% annually, though from 2015–19, there was an 11% jump. Between 2018 and 2019, it jumped more than 6%.
There’s even an Australian website (not widely enough publicised) called yourfertility.org.au. It was set up by the Fertility Coalition, which includes the Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority, Healthy Male, Jean Hailes for Women’s Health, Monash University and the University of Adelaide. It has an entire section on chemicals in our environment and what to avoid, stating that “avoiding these chemicals may increase the chance of having a baby”.
There’s no doubt the climate crisis is well and truly on the worldwide agenda, no longer regarded as a fringe theory, but as an absolute truth that we need to act on immediately. Part of that discussion needs to be the toxicants being stealthily pumped into our everyday lives and the effects they are having on our bodies.
This is the stuff nightmares are made of; indeed, I dived so deep only because it was keeping me awake at night. Despite easing up my research as I came to the end of writing my book, I’m still not sleeping any better. We must address this as a matter of urgency if we want our grandkids to have a world to live in – or if we want grandkids at all.
Isabelle Oderberg is the author of Hard to Bear: Investigating the science and silence of miscarriage, published by Ultimo Press and available now
