Clean-Up Key to Public Health
Nurses Focus on Environment

By MEREDITH KOLODNER

The New York State Nurses' Association launched a task force last week that is aimed at reversing the environmental degradation that the union argues is the most important threat to public health in this country.

The Chief-Leader/Michel Friang NURSING ENVIRONMENT BACK TO HEALTH: American Nurses Association Senior Policy Analyst Kristen Welker-Hood asserted that providing health-care and protecting the environment went hand in hand. 'You are practicing as a nurse when you get involved in environmental advocacy,' she said.

Alongside dozens of other state and national nurses' organizations, NYSNA hopes to position itself as a crucial player in the going-green debate. The union argues that its members' status as acute and primary-care providers makes them indispensable witnesses to the health impacts of global warming and toxic chemicals. And they are hoping to map out a strategy that will not pit the need for jobs against cleaning up the environment.

'Prevention a Priority'

"You are practicing as a nurse when you get involved in environmental advocacy," said Kristen Welker-Hood, a Registered Nurse and senior policy analyst for the American Nurses Association who spoke to a group of NYSNA members last week. "Our mission is bringing patients to the highest level of wellness possible, and that means prevention is one of our highest priorities."

The Chief-Leader/Michel Friang 'WE SEE IT': New York State Nurses Association Health and Safety Representative Thomas J. Lowe wants members to play a more-prominent role in environmental health policy, arguing that nurses experience first-hand the results of environmental toxicity. 'We see it in the people we care for every day,' he said.

The Nurses Healthy Environment Advocacy Taskforce, or RN-HEAT, is set up to involve rank-and-file nurses in environmental education, disease prevention and legislative advocacy focused on cleaning up the environment and showing the connection between environmental destruction and the chronic and potential health problems that threaten to overwhelm the public health system.

The nurses acknowledge that many links between environmental changes and diseases are not definitively scientifically proven. But they argue that the burden of proof is often so high that historically many products have not been banned and environmental problems have gone unrecognized until well after the damage has been done.

"We see first-hand the result of environmental toxicity," said Thomas J. Lowe, an RN who is the health and safety representative for NYSNA. "We see it in acute care and we see it in people we care for every day."

Factor in Autism, Asthma

He pointed to studies that suggested that soaring autism cases and national asthma rates that doubled between 1982 and 2003 are the result of environmental shifts. He said that the improvement in diagnosing many diseases did not account for the fact that today one in eight women in the U.S. will contract breast cancer, while in 1940 only one in 22 women got the disease.

"We don't have a nursing shortage," he said. "We have too many patients. We are trying to do things to reduce exposure so that so many people don't have to be patients."

In addition to an increase of toxins in the air due to chemical production and the greenhouse gases that trap them, the nurse-environmentalists, along with some scientists, believe that global warming is producing more severe weather disasters.

Ms. Welker-Hood was a practicing nurse in Houston and treated people fleeing New Orleans after Katrina hit in 2005. "The storm surge released chemicals into the water," she said. "There was serious exposure, and there were many nurses that didn't have the environmental education to know how to protect themselves while caring for their patients. They were the unobserved victims."

'Chemical Trespassers'

She argued that the problems were far from being solved. For example, the lead that was used to build many of the houses in the 9th Ward was released into the soil when they were destroyed and is now working its way through the ecosystem.

"It makes the exposure greater now," she said. "It's not over."

NYSNA officials noted the way that chemicals flushed through the sewage systems have begun to make their way through the food chain and into people's bodies. They labeled those toxins "chemical trespassers." And they asserted that 89 percent of the 10,500 ingredients used in personal care products, like soaps and cosmetics, were not screened by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Consumers were potentially at risk, they claimed, since the average person uses 25 different cosmetic products with 200 different chemicals.

Green Jobs

But they also argued against trying to simply shut down the powerful chemical industry, noting that it has existed for 150 years, produces over $25 billion in tax revenues each year, and creates 5.5 million jobs nationwide. In some towns, they noted, chemical plant jobs have supported families for generations.

"As advocates, we're not going to try and destroy jobs," said Mr. Lowe. "We're going to take the economy from point A to point B. We've gotta be sensitive to what's sustaining our economy."

'This Choice is Better'

The nurses support creating safer alternatives and imposing more stringent regulation. "Heretofore the environmental movement has been tree-huggers and leaf-eaters," said Mr. Lowe. "The environmentalists were the people saying, 'You can't have it.' We're going to be the folks who say, 'You have that, but this is a better choice.'''

NYSNA and national nurses' groups are pushing Congress to reform the Toxic Substance Control Act, which they say is so industry-friendly that only five chemicals have been banned by the Federal Government since 1976, and none have been removed from the market since 1990.

'Tie It All Together'

They are also releasing the Principles of Environmental Health for Nursing Practices this fall. The guidelines advocate for integrating environmental health issues into nursing education, allowing nurses to be part of the decision-making about hospitals' choices of materials and technology, and giving nurses information about the health-care products they are using.

Overall, the nurses are hoping that their positions as health-care providers will make them invaluable resources in assessing what is happening in the public-health realm and communicating to the public the options available to them. They argue that their status as the most trusted profession, according to public opinion surveys, gives them a special role in the movement to stem the tide of global warming.

"It's economic, it's social, it's occupational," said Mr. Lowe. "We can be that communication bridge. We can tie all of these strands together."