M2.4: Personal Care Products

After watching “10 Americans” by the Environmental Working Group, I’m a bit shocked honestly.  I was not familiar with Ken Cook or the Environmental Working Group before, but I’m happy to have been introduced to it.  I think this particular project is interesting, because as Ken Cook says, scientists have studied the air, water and pollution for decades, but for some reason the people who are breathing this air, drinking this water and exposed to this pollution have been left out.  We’re surrounded by chemicals, pollutants and other compounds that attack our bodies, and many of us have no idea. 

One personal example related to this is that I taught English for two years after college in northeastern China.  It wasn’t even a city that was considered to be “polluted” per se, but it was.  A city of 15 million people crammed into a relatively small land area surrounded back factories.  Just outside of those factories were farmlands.  One thing that struck me shortly after arriving was the level of soot that “grew” on everything.  I would clean my entire apartment and by the next afternoon, everything including the floors and furniture would have a thin layer of black dust in it.  I never knew where it came from but it was everywhere.  I couldn’t see anything in the air, but if I blew my nose, it would often come out black.  While I was a bit shocked, I was young and didn’t let it phase me.  About a year and a half into my time in China, I started having other symptoms.  I was dizzy all of the time and had trouble focusing.  I started getting headaches that were terrible and I’d never experienced headaches before.  After that, I started getting tingling in my fingers and toes.  I honestly had no idea what to make of all of it, but I thought I was just going crazy.  When home in a break, I visited my primary doctor in New York.  They ran a myriad of tests and found that my kidneys were functioning poorly.  After some more testing, it turns out that my mercury levels were off the charts.  It was at that point that my health was in serious danger.  I returned to China to finish out my final six months, and I continued to have all of the symptoms.  Every symptom disappeared within about a month of returning back to New York.  To this day, I don’t know if it was what I was breathing, eating, drinking or exposed to in some other way, but it was frightening to know my body was being attacked from something I couldn’t see or prevent.  My solution was easy, and that was to leave, but for others, that is their home, and it’s impossible for many to leave.  Sorry I went off topic here, but this personal experience I felt was really relatable to the video!