Latino Lives, Health At Risk

By Sunny Lewis, Environment News Service. Posted June 30, 2004.

Maria Nolasco is raising three grandchildren who were poisoned by lead paint. She lives in Bushwick, a low-income section of Brooklyn, New York where houses colored with toxic lead paint are common. Many Bushwick children suffer from lead poisoning, which brings permanent brain damage, learning disabilities, and behavioral problems.

In Salinas, California, former farmworker Jorge Fernandez is living with blurred vision, head, throat, ear and abdomen aches, and rashes after working for 12 years with the pesticide methyl bromide in the fields of California and Arizona. "I was never informed that this was harmful," says Fernandez, who has been unable to work since September 2003.

Nolasco and Fernandez are two of the people coping with environmental health problems who are featured in the Sierra Club's first "Latino Communities at Risk Report," released on Tuesday from the national organization's Washington, DC headquarters.

The Sierra Club says the report and a companion Spanish language television ad detail "the cumulative impact of harmful Bush administration environmental policies on Hispanic communities."

"While Americans are diverted by war and millions of job losses, the Bush administration is quietly stripping protections from our air, water and lands, seriously threatening our health and heritage and putting Latino communities at risk," said Robbie Cox, Sierra Club board member and former president.

The report features stories of people across the country: in Las Vegas, Nevada; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; St. Petersburg, Florida; Fajardo, Puerto Rico; Fresno, California; Blanco, New Mexico; Tar Heel, North Carolina; Tucson, Arizona; and Reynosa, Mexico.

And the report tells the story of Fernandez and his fellow farmworker Guillermo Ruiz who are suffering from asthma linked to pollution of the air by the pesticide and soil fumigant, methyl bromide.

Ruiz, who has also been out of work since September 2003 due to methyl bromide exposure, says, "They would just give us a pair of plastic pants and a paper mask which provided no protection. There were days when I could not speak because within a couple of hours the gas would burn your throat."

Most Powerful Toxic

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rates methyl bromide in the most powerful class of toxic chemicals. In California alone, 18 people have died and hundreds have been poisoned by it.

The Sierra Club blames the Bush administration for incidences of asthma related to methyl bromide. Earlier this year the administration requested and was granted exemptions from the Montreal Protocol that will allow the continued use of thousands of pounds of methyl bromide on agricultural fields although the chemical is supposed to be banned in 2005 because it depletes the ozone layer.

The administration acted at the request of the growers, who say affordable alternatives to methyl bromide do not exist, but it is the workers, the majority of them Latinos, who bear the brunt of the methyl bromide exposure.

"We get to do this job just because we are Mexicans," Fernandez says. "Why doesn't Mr. Bush come and do it instead?"

Asthma mortality rates are higher than average in the Latino community, and asthma attacks are the leading cause of school absence. Still, the Sierra Club says, "the Bush administration has weakened Clean Air Act protections, which will likely increase asthma related air pollution."

Lead paint is a major source of lead poisoning for children and can also affect adults, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. In children, lead poisoning can cause irreversible brain damage and can impair mental functioning. It can retard mental and physical development and reduce attention span. It can also retard fetal development even at extremely low levels of lead.

Old Lead, New Problems

U.S. law prohibited lead in paint as of 1978, so new paint is free of lead. But in older buildings, such as those in the once grand Bushwick section of Brooklyn, expensive lead paint was used because of its superior coating qualities that protected the wood from weathering.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a federal agency based in Atlanta, was scheduled to consider stronger standards for lead poisoning, but has taken no action.

Sunny Lewis is founder and editor-in-chief of Environment News Service, an independently owned, continuous, real-time wire service covering the environment.

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