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“Brilliant. Every parent in America owes a debt of gratitude to Philip and Alice Shabecoff. [Poisoned Profits] should be high on the next President's reading list.”

— Barry Commoner

“Powerful reporting backing powerful conclusions—it will make those of us with kids shudder, but hopefully it will also make us get out of our chairs and engage in the politics necessary to protect the future.”

— Bill McKibben, author, The Bill McKibben Reader

In this shocking and sobering book, journalists Alice Shabecoff and Philip Shabecoff directly and definitively link industrial toxins to the current rise in childhood disease and death. In the tradition of Silent Spring, POISONED PROFITS: the Toxic Assault on Our Children is a landmark investigation, an eye-opening account of a country that prizes money over children's health.

From autism to cancer

With indisputable data, the Shabecoffs reveal that the children of baby boomers—the first to be raised in a truly “toxified world”—have higher rates of birth defects, asthma, cancer, autism and a frightening range of other neurological illnesses from ADHD to mental retardation, and other serious chronic illnesses compared to previous generations.

They reveal that one out of two pregnancies fails to come to term or results in a less than healthy child, that premature births and infertility are on the rise as this generation matures, while the ratio of male babies dwindles.

These children are victims of a (perhaps unwitting) crime; the perpetrators are the companies who manufacture and use poisonous products.

Environmental exposures from conception to early life can set a person´s cellular code for life and can cause illness at any time from childhood until old age. Parkinson´s and Alzheimer´s diseases and breast cancer are examples.

Covering up the evidence

Why does the toxic assault on our children´s environmental health continue?: because the evidence is routinely obscured by controversy deliberately generated by the companies that profit, abetted by government collusion, scientists-for-hire, lobbyists, lawyers and cynical public relations.

Poisons in the environment

From fetus to adulthood, in our homes, yards, schools, cars and buses, and playgrounds. the assault is everywhere: air pollution, water pollution, pesticides, mercury and lead, industrial solvents, food additives, artificial growth hormones, arsenic, synthetic hormones (bisphenol A and phthalates) in bottles and teething rings and other plastic products, radioactive pollutants in the water, and even rocket fuel in lettuce.

Solutions

POISONED PROFITS is in the end a book about hope and optimism. Now we know what is happening. These poisons are manmade; manufacturers can take them out of our children´s lives and make profits from safe products. Find here the policy changes to spur this shift.

Find here the solutions to reduce your child´s risk and to alter the system.

Powerful, unflinching, and eminently readable, POISONED PROFITS is a wake up call that is bound to inspire talk and force change.