This article is a wake up call to Americans. However, it omits one essential question. Why are we spending so much money on consumer goods and services that trigger or cause asthma and reactive airway disease? Our product labels tell us almost nothing about our products since full disclosure on product labels is not legally required in the USA as it is in many European countries.

However, the MSDS sheets on products offer a wider vision. Still incomplete, they provide details of the hazardous properties for disclosed ingredients, e.g. detergents, fabric softeners and household cleaners often contain petrochemicals and alcohol esters which are respiratory irritants and non-essential to product efficacy. Synthetic fragrances are reported to be asthma triggers for the majority of sufferers by the American Lung Association. Why are they not banned from use in our schools and offices to maximize productivity when 25 million Americans have respiratory problems?

Industry is fond of citing cockroach remains as triggering asthma but fails to tell us that broadcast spraying of pesticides distributes highly toxic particles with severe adverse effects on pulmonary, digestive and neurological systems. The contamination may last for months or years in carpets, clothing and upholstery. Pesticides were developed for use on crops with sunlight to help degrade them. Indoors, residues can again become airborne from application of heat and cleaning efforts. Why can’t we get a bill passed in congress that allows parents and teachers to be told in advance when pesticides of this nature are to be sprayed in schools or even restrict the use of pesticides to effective products which do not become airborne? Asthma is the major cause of absenteeism in schools.

Industry profits from developing medicines to help asthma (ineffective for many sufferers) but also profits from the sale of chemical used in marketed products which can provokes asthma attacks. The public needs to demand full disclosure of ingredients when making purchases so we can determine the risk/reward curve for ourselves in spending our dollars. Asthma is a symptom of our national health crisis and we can effect changes in this state of affairs with knowledge and using our power as consumers.

Barbara Rubin

The Medicare bill provisions, requiring it to compete with private health care policies while still offering advantages to those insurers, is another signs that we are no longer regarded as citizens of a great nation
We are now employees of a large corporation, the strangest ever to grace a boardroom.

This corporation continuously implements policies which empty its coffers and assumes incredible debts which offer no advantages in ‘tax write-offs’. This corporation plays as fast and loose with its employees retirement and healthcare policies (social security and medicare) as Enron, diverting those funds to other purposes. In a bizarre twist, the main beneficiaries of its policies are all the next largest corporations in America (and offshore), over and above its own ‘shareholders’ (the taxpayer).
Many of us working in this plant are also frequently ill from ‘OSHA’ violations allowing too many pollutants in our ‘plant’. So, now that our CEO sees the approach of the next major proxy fight to be held by the electoral college in November of 2004, some pretense at offering ‘stock dividends’ in the form of drug benefits are underway. Mr. Tommy Thompson, guardian of the shareholder’s ‘health and human services’ told Congress to stop trying to meet the needs of shareholders and do things the “modern way”, abandoning any kind of “absolutist approach”.

But life and death are absolutes and having the freedom to select ones own doctors and the most appropriate medications necessary to promote survival are essential to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness (promised in the corporate prospectus and paid for by our ‘union dues’).

Perhaps it is time the ‘employees’ of this sweat shop took the ‘prospectus’ more literally. The prospectus begins with “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union…”. It is indeed time for us all to form a national union and fight for our rights as employees until the day comes when we can be looked upon once again as citizens of a great nation.

Barbara Rubin