wealthy british style. that's not the title of. markets why not. come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with my charger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into cars a report on r g four.

asked. to.

my mother was diagnosed with cancer at the age of forty nine she did not smoke she ate five fruits and vegetables a day exercised regularly and her parents never had cancer yet she was diagnosed with the disease what caused her cancer no one could say i kept wondering why. a.

every day about three new synthetic chemicals enter the consumer market of the one hundred thousand synthetic chemicals in heavy commercial use only about two percent have talked to logical profiles in other words every day without our consent or exposed to about ninety five thousand untested chemicals.

who exactly are the world's leading chemical producers. now a new product is on grocery store shelves genetically modified foods. who develops most of the world's genetically modified crops. well only a handful of independent studies have been conducted health problems ranging from infertility to proliferate of changes have been detected to these foods cause cancer we have no idea because no long term health studies have been conducted anywhere the rest easy because if someone in your family is diagnosed with cancer a number of treatments are available and here are the companies that provide them. it's. it's. it's it's. it's. it's. just so it's. it's

it's it's it's it's. it's. it's. it's.

this is sarnia situated three hundred kilometers from toronto. you and i may not live in sarnia though we use the fruits of its labor. vinyl siding lastic patio furniture pesticides chargeable batteries plastic food containers compact this cases paint. jet fuel and gasoline. to make these products over five and a half million kilograms of suspected and known human carcinogens which are stuff. senses that cause cancer are emitted each year. dioxins one of the most toxic personages known to science is also limited during these chemical processes. sitting in the middle of these over sixty chemical plants is the owner's first nations reservation.

we're. eating. issues we were reason our concerns with respect. you know we should have been. experiencing. they did one of you was concerned you just did not use concert so therefore you should be because actually that's how almost every one of our meeting with the government has been. at that. for the industry because they were trying to tell the industry that they have to be more calls to them and they said there were huge n.p.r. i but the only report which is that over and over and tons of chemicals that are opening and the industry was kind of sad because they didn't want to believe their

trade secrets to notice and the thing to do sell before you're talking about who's going to actually believe so you. know you just let industry police them follow you and then we are just in. your office and waiting for them to report to you to tell you what's going on should know that you lived at home. we actually stole the land i don't know what year it was they did hold the boat out here and ask people to sell the land and i don't know how much land that they ended up selling to them but. you know it's had asked our elders and they said that they were told that there was going to be chemical storage what did they tell you about chemicals that there was. a boat if they didn't really tell the

whole lot more. bits and. then everybody had a bad time i guess they musta been lookin at thinking of dollars times that they're going to get some money. i don't know much anybody profited from it. when the kids ride their bikes in the town and that they say it like if there is a mist sometime there is that mr byrd and then they have all these little walkways around here they have a come in from sarnia and they want to put it through chemical valves and right through to kill everybody. every single facility that does any any kind of culture or fine and its currency i tell you what on benzene and figure there's no law limiting how much facilities can emit i mean the benefit that the industry has down there in having so many different facilities is nobody can point to my facility and say you're calling the

cause of the problem so everybody had it all the industries down there have you go into different variables and say they're meeting morning we're vision to clean up the mess we have all kinds of evidence that our emissions have been agreed to substantially done by measuring them. by working collectively as a as a group of companies to keep improving our performance there have been examples over the years in our reports where a companies have looked at the responsible care ethic and decided well this we can't do it this way this is cedar too risky to the community or transporting something that's in a way that's not. we can't defend it or a product looks too risky i'm not sure i can manage it so let's just eliminate it so there are countless examples i think where people have continually challenge themselves and prove their performance and ended up in their view a better company for.

what we're fighting over the bucket sampling because what we do is we take a sample. and we ship it off to california and then they tested to see what chemicals are in there and at what levels then we give a guard to global community monitoring and they love the chemicals and how they can affect your body and what the standards are in the states for these chemicals. that we turned around and headed to the people here drawn old people just to us and then they looked up the standards in canada or kerio or whatever. but they're finding that there is a lot of there is no standards for a lot of these chemicals here so that's what they were they were sort of there are

slides. are showing all the chemicals that are produced and how they affect your body and i was i was looking at that of oh my god there's a whole bunch of people on the reserve that have these bonuses. in two thousand for a to compile the health survey of the nine hundred residents in the adult she discovered severe chronic headaches chronic respiratory problems severe skin problems near logical problems infertility in miscarriages birth defects cancers and loss of children. in the children she found severe chronic headaches. chronic respiratory problems neurological problems developmental problems severe skin problems arthritis birth defects

kidney and bladder diseases and cancer what are you thoughts on the relationship between health and the petrochemical industry i'm not so sure what the relationship is we do know again we also legacy issues and you don't necessarily elma is an issue related to the use of asbestos in industry and you know that's well documented as well understood and we know that there is this legacy history out there you know it's unfortunate we have empathy for those individuals who are suffer from as well feeling on but we do know there is a legacy issue there with respect to other health issues that you know i think there's been a lot of inference was made of both the connection between health and potential missions coming from me coming from the petrochemical industry this is one of the reasons why we many others in the in the community major major major players in the community are advocating for a copper has a health study

a scientifically rigorous rigorous peer reviewed health study. inserting it's not if you're going to get cancer it's when we found a cat in my mom's field and the cat have since been sprayed down at the end of the season and she was drenched with pus decides we brought her home to died so can't stand the thought of her dying in the field. we managed to save her life but she has ongoing neurological problems she has seizures and tremors and if she's around any pesticides now or any type of a harsh chemical she has seizures and i started thinking if it's happening to cats what does it do in class so when i start looking at some cosmetic past sites and the science behind i must use screen science so reading this stuff again marrying another person could now be a very interesting in my life to learn what actually happens to chemicals on her body so and then with my husband working in chemical ballet i was even more interesting learning the stuff that happened there and then my mom got her first of her three cancers and then she got second and then i got cancer and then she got

the third and my concern about cancer is in this community on a personal level you know and you know that's got nothing to do with with with my job here or anything else you know regrettably in our society there's all kinds of potential for different exposures and lifestyle issues and genetics all have to be factored in i mean clearly i have had relatives who have you know curable diseases what their relationship is i couldn't tell you you know what i mean and again but i don't have a concern they've been in the city of sarnia related to the kinds of things that you're talking about you know that the levels of contamination there are among the highest ever recorded for as best as for benzine for the dioxins so why are we doing this we really it's supposed to be illegal to experiment on people without their permission. that's the nuremberg protocol sarnia is violating the nuremberg

protocols we passed a number of laws that were basic environmental laws to clean up the air of the water soil and provide for protection for consumers and workers the fundamental tenet of those laws was it's better to be safe than sorry the basic precautionary principle was in those laws in the one nine hundred seventy s. and in the one nine hundred eighty s. we moved away from that approach and we took a position in the government that we have proof in terms of human harm and dead bodies and we've now got to come back to that cautionary prochoice in europe they've passed legislation like the reach programme to require evaluation of chemical hazards but over the past eight years the bush administration has hammered away as has the canadian government at the european union saying that's a restraint of trade it's going to interfere with our ability to have commerce so the european principles have become

a slightly weaker because of that but they're still better than what we have in canada the us today and canada and the us today it is legal for you to use a bubble bath on your baby that contains a known carcinogen something that causes cancer in animals but not in europe it's not legal so why should european babies bottoms be safer than my grandchildren. milind michigan is home to dow chemicals world headquarters well dupont. they are monsanto and i.c.i. which is today owned by asco nobel are all responsible for releasing dioxins dow chemical is thought to be the world's largest root source of dioxin. was also

thought to be the world's largest producer of chlorine one of the root causes of dioxins and the largest producer of chemical feedstocks to make p.v.c. plastics whose life cycle is associated with more doubts information than any other manmade product on earth. because of these modern chemical processes one thousand nine hundred eighty seven were present in everything from daters to coffee filters to tampons. in two thousand and three dare released an open letter to middling residents douses were naturally occurring substance the letter however forgot to clarify a few details of forest fires and volcanoes to produce doubt since they are not the same toxins created during chemical processes many doubts and also a number of the natural variety by a hundred to one. a letter also forgot to mention that the first health assessment of dioxin completed by the american environmental protection agency estimated that

more people will get more cancer from dioxins than any other chemical on earth. it all signs up there are the doubt property of this all doubt property. dioxin is a molecule it's a byproduct of chemical processing it is a known carcinogen although da will dispute that tao has been able to manufacture so much uncertainty about this counterculture that if you look around the west rest of the world nobody else is debating the toxicity of dioxin except here and michigan. in fact one of the colleges the nineteen seventies said that this is perhaps one of the most toxic materials he's ever seen. why do you think dispute it now. because there's the financial implications are you know there's the pending

class action lawsuit against of chemical from residents on the river. and i think the implications or the dow denying the toxicity the chemical now has bigger broader implications worldwide i mean there are a lot of dioxin contaminations around the pantry that you know that not just i was responsible for that could be saddled or you know could have to have ramifications from a subtle manner of being on the toxicity of dioxin or on the some a bit of a class action lawsuit here i think the ramifications are huge for the chemical industry. and particularly when. we came here it was like an ideal spot and the only thing we didn't realize the nineteen sixty

seven when we bought it we were three miles downriver from a chemical plant. i have five children in three of them have immune disorders. my husband when he was diagnosed with colon cancer. my sister in law when i called her to tell her she said oh no i would expect diabetes or heart disease not cancer we don't have any cancer in my family and he actually got into a pilot's there early there the. health department in michigan was doing. and they came out and took his dioxin levels and the thursday before he died and he . and he was really pretty weak but he said that he would do

anything if it would help prove that there were problems with. living here and the chemical contamination in the area he had a high level of different dioxin contaminants and it's part of. a high for his age level like in the ninety five percentile my husband died at seventy his uncle's lived to be in their ninety's and as i said he wasn't sick so you know you say well seventy that's a good life but if there were twenty more years. that i would have liked if i had twenty years i lived in a corporate jet for tao can be interesting and rewarding reticular really want to. work with the angel network uses empty seats on company business trips to fly cancer patients which i feel i should treat the patients like christy this company

does great things this is one. of the. dow declined to be interviewed for this film if given the opportunity we would have been curious to know what that little girl dioxin levels were. well we've heard people say i don't see dead bodies floating down the river is that what it takes to get a response from the public health officials from the locks officials i don't know

but again cancer is very ubiquitous in our area we have you know these tremendous cancer rates and it's dioxin responsible for all of it no part of it oh probably but we have p.c. bees we have many many other contaminants out there in our environment that could be responsible for this the dioxin is just a part of it one hundred percent of cancers are genetically determined which means that for this cell to become cancerous we need to have a genetic change in the it's. ok it doesn't mean that one hundred percent of cancers are richer completely different story so even so hundred percent of cancer genetics going to be determined only five to ten percent of cancers are carried the time. the birds are so low in this is that a lot of people in the sea oh my god nobody with cancer in my feyerick and

therefore i protect focus because ninety to ninety five percent of cancers occur among people with funding history of cancer childhood cancer has increased thirty percent in the past two decades testicular cancer cancer of young men has increased fifty percent in every industrial country and that's not because of aging and we are seeing an increase in cancer in the elderly i've just heard for the fact that there are more of that yes we have more cancer because we're living longer and there are more older people but that does not explain all of the increase in cancer that we're seeing today. ruben's a new foundation is the only research facility in the world to perform fool i stammered in studies on the person a genetic potential of chemical substances but the foundation is also unique in that it has caught the logical screens of every organ in every road and tested for long term health studies of this kind which in cost about

a million dollars are not required by companies wishing to license a new some very chemical drug or genetically modified crops. or two thousand and five study on aspartame the artificial sweetener involved one thousand eight hundred rodents previous experiments on aspartame had had twenty rodents per group or forty rodents or group and so when we came in and did one hundred fifty rodents per sex per group it was very important results as a rule the u.s. in t.p. sacrifices their rodents aster two years of life so their experiments are usually take one hundred ten weeks that's considered the gold standard. whereas our sprints are lifespan and rather than interrupt the experiment and sacrificing the animals one hundred ten weeks are our rodents live out their natural lifespan about fifty percent of what they have studied has

proven to be carcinogenic and about fifty percent of what we have study there is data that shows that we actually only have scientific information hard data about two percent of all the chemical known chemical substances so it is a huge discrepancy between what we know and what we don't know unfortunately we as citizens tend to confuse the absence of evidence with the absence of risk that is in agent has not been adequately studies adequately and i would add independently study if it does not mean that it is safe. that tentative of the industry is always to call castine zip a job and many of. us about chemical agent chemical compounds

you know industry you'll soon. be on work and understandable what does not understand the boat he's a. scientist doesn't do they live work. and that is why most of the shanties of most independent they are sponsored by industry and most of the great bone not claim it's a conflict of interest. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for like sleep you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't. charge welcome to the big picture.

he. could be.