Posted by Article on 4/2/2002, 10:38 am

Hi Friends, Here is just an excerpt from the full article I have linked to below. The writer of the book, Susanne Antonetta, has endo, along with other health problems. ****** Woman looks back at her toxic N.J. youth Wednesday, February 20, 2002 By CANDY J. COOPER Staff Writer Her body's betrayals, in her 45 years, range from asthma to infertility, from miscarried quadruplets to malformed organs. She wears a scar across her throat like a necklace that binds her to others who have had thyroid tumors removed. Susanne Antonetta traces her body's breakdowns to the smokestacks and pipelines of industrial New Jersey. Here in the most chemically contaminated state in the country, she ran as a child behind trucks spraying clouds of mosquito-killing DDT, splashed in waters polluted by factory waste, and picked berries along a fence bordering a nuclear plant. It was an ordinary New Jersey life: poisonous, in retrospect. "I think we, as baby boomers, have been the lint filters of the chemical age," said Antonetta, whose memoir, "Body Toxic," examines her toxic exposures in the Garden State. "We're the head lab rats," she said. "After World War II, we discovered all these wonderful miracle chemicals -DDT got rid of mosquitoes so nicely, PCBs conducted heat and didn't burn. And little by little, many of these things were made illegal or banned." Antonetta's book explores the connections between pollution and health that have troubled so many residents of this industry-laced state. Here in North Jersey, in towns from Wayne to Garfield, residents have long looked to the water they drink, the air they breathe, or the ground underfoot for answers to their illnesses. Over the decades, their questions have gone mostly unanswered... "I'm tired of talking to the sons and daughters about how their parents died, or to parents about how their children died," said Wayne attorney Jon Gelman, who has handled asbestos cases since the 1970s. "It shouldn't be the result of living in New Jersey. It's not so much what's happening today as what happened in the past. It's a legacy of toxic contamination." In today's world, there is no escaping toxic substances, Antonetta said. For example, she has explored the effects of radiation contamination at a nuclear plant in Hanford, Wash., only to recognize a trait shared by some residents there: They too, bear the scar across their throats left after surgery to remove thyroid tumors. They refer to it as the "Hanford necklace." Antonetta calls it her "Mona Lisa smile." She says hers is the story of "a normal, everyday, commonplace New Jerseyan." Doctors have removed numerous cysts from her ovaries, and growths - always benign - from her liver. She has endometriosis, an arrhythmic heart, and severe allergies. She suffers from manic depression - which she believes may be tied to chemical exposures - and she controls it with medication. Of the six women in her family who shared summer bungalows, only two have been able to conceive. "So many women I knew from the same area were dealing with these health problems," said Antonetta, who has written three collections of poems in addition to her "environmental memoir." "It was really important to me at the time to make sense of the chaos my body had become." Though intensely private - she shuns photographs and most interviews - she describes her ailments in vivid detail. She conceived quadruplets spontaneously, an event given a one-in-500,000 chance, but lost them in the third month. Infertility followed, and doctors found that she had a malformed, double-chambered uterus. It was after her thyroid surgery - after many doctors asked when she had been exposed to radiation - that she decided to investigate her past. Six years ago, she began reading the literature of chemicals from the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties, in which "DDT, PCBs, and nuclear power were hailed as friends of humanity, the things that would lead us into the future. The rhetoric was so powerful and sincere." She turned to the chemistry around the bungalow on Barnegat Bay, where her family summered, as well as in Elizabeth, where she grew up. Her inquiry transformed what had been a childhood spent swimming, picking berries, and catching fish into, in retrospect, a decades-long toxic bath. The blowfish - caught, fried, and devoured - were snatched from the waters of Toms River, where the Ciba-Geigy dye and resin factory disposed of 14,000 barrels of toxins from 1952 to 1996 and where thousands of drums of Union Carbide company waste was dumped in 1971. The tart gooseberries - picked and popped into her mouth raw - were not only sprayed by DDT trucks and crop-dusters, but were picked along the chain-link fence of the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant, a facility nuclear regulatory reports show released radioactivity into the air in the 1970s and '80s, according to a scientist, Jay Gould of the New York City-based Radiation and Public Health Project. He is studying radiation levels in baby teeth collected from around Oyster Creek and other nuclear power plants. Antonetta had also drunk and eaten sediment from Denzer & Shafer X-ray, a negative stripping plant that leached lead, arsenic, chromium, and mercury into the water. The tap water "reeked," tasting as if it were "pumped from hell's drinking fountain," Antonetta writes. "We all developed an unaccountable taste for it. Uncle Eddie bottled it and drank it at home." In 1984, the county told them the well was contaminated. Despite her research, she doesn't know whether the DDT exposure explains the endometriosis, whether any radioactive releases led to the thyroid tumors. "No one can explain what's wrong with anybody," she writes. "Though I don't believe in coincidences of this magnitude either: clusters of children with brain disorders, toxic plumes and clouds, radiation spewing in the air. Every vital system of my body is disrupted: an arrhythmic heart, a seizing brain, severe allergies, useless reproductive organs. Either it's Sodom and this is the wrath of God or it's the wrath of man, which is thoughtless, foolish, and much more lasting." Antonetta's achievement, according to The New York Times Book Review, "is to devise a literary voice for the people who live in such places, for the bodies that have been 'charged and reformed by the landscape' of pollution."

Link: Article Online