Trump's science policies

[Admin]

If you want to understand the perilous state of federal scientific research, ask Linda Birnbaum. For 40 years, Birnbaum has worked as a toxicologist for the US government, rising through the ranks to direct both the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program. She has authored more than 700 peer-reviewed publications and collected numerous awards and international accolades for her research on public health.

Now, as she prepares for an October retirement from the institute she says she has tried to “protect” from the ramifications of Donald Trump’s election, Birnbaum has words of warning about the dire path ahead she sees for public health. We ought to listen to what she has to say. Birnbaum fears that the US regulatory system has become too politicized, too beholden to corporate money and power, and lacks the urgency and political will needed to address dire health crises around the globe. Many of those crises are tied to the climate emergency, which she considers the “biggest threat to humanity.”

Also troubling Birnbaum are the impacts of exposures to pesticides and other chemicals on children and other vulnerable populations. From neurotoxic insecticides to a class of industrial chemicals known as PFAS, increasingly research shows that low level chronic exposures to a toxic soup of multiple pervasive pollutants jeopardizes the health of current and future generations, she said. “We have a very small world,” Birnbaum said. “People need to understand that pollution is global, not local,” and “it’s not just high-level acute exposures that are doing damage”. Low-level exposure is also dangerous, and people have different susceptibility. “An old person and a healthy adult and a little child are impacted differently.”

Part of the problem is the way that resources are allocated. “Infectious diseases are where so much of the money goes but that is not the biggest killer anymore,” she said. “It’s these chronic low levels of exposure, and long-term effects of early life exposure, which are hard to identify and are causing so much damage.” The Trump administration’s recent decision to continue to allow farmers to treat food crops with the insecticide chlorpyrifos, done at the bidding of Dow Chemical, is a prime example of how children’s health is taking a back seat to corporate interests, according to Birnbaum. The science showing that chlorpyrifos harms brain development in children is “open and shut”, Birnbaum said, with concrete evidence that “exposure to chlorpyrifos impacts learning and memory and behavior in children”.

Why this top federal scientist is worried about public health under Trump | Carey Gillam | Opinion | The Guardian