My guest today is Charles Levenstein, Ph.D., MSc , an economist,  policy analyst and co-author of The Toxic Schoolhouse. We’ll be talking about chemical hazards endangering students, teachers, and staff in the education system of the United States and Canada. Dr Levenstein is Professor Emeritus in Department of Work Environment, retiring from teaching in 2003.  He is adjunct professor of occupational health at Tufts University School of Medicine and one of the leading researchers concerned with social factors in occupational and environmental health. For several years he was co-director of the Organized Labor and Tobacco Control Consortium, funded by the American Legacy Foundation at Dana Farber Cancer Institute.   He subsequently became a consultant to Dr. Edith Balbach’s NCI-funded research on tobacco industry relations with trade unions.  He has served as member and chair of the environmental health and safety committee of the Massachusetts Teachers Association.  He has been engaged in intervention research in immigrant communities and in the economic evaluation of occupational health and safety interventions. Until recently, Dr Levenstein chaired the advisory committee for United Steel Workers Federally-funded health and safety projects; he continues to chair the advisory board of The New England Consortium, an NIEHS-funded collaboration of health and safety advocacy groups, trade unions and academics.  He is Editor Emeritus of New Solutions, a quarterly peer-reviewed journal of occupational and environmental health policy and is co-editor of the Baywood series on Work, Health and Environment. Dr. Levenstein is a recipient of the American Public Health Association’s award for lifetime contribution to occupational health.

 

 

 

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Toxics in Schools

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Dr. Charles Levenstein

Date of Broadcast: April 07, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It’s Tuesday, April 7th, 2015. It’s a beautiful spring day in Clearwater, Florida. The sun is shining. It’s actually getting a little warm here. People here are here now on spring break. The beach is full of tourists this week and last week. Obviously, this is a beautiful time in Florida.

So today, we’re going to talk about something that we haven’t talked about before on this show, which is toxic exposure to children in schools. I think that this is a very important subject because first of all, children have a much more difficult time with toxic exposures than adults. It’s bad enough for adults, but children have a greater impact.

If you think about a child and an adult standing in the same room, having the same exposure to toxic chemicals, the child’s body is smaller and so the proportion of toxic exposure to body weight is much, much greater for a child. They breathe faster than adults do and so they’re inhaling more of the toxic chemicals they’re being exposed to in the air than adults would be inhaling.

They’re just more sensitive in every way to it. Their bodies, their detox systems are not fully developed. And yet, we send children to school every day right into a toxic environment. You might have a toxic free home, but it’s unlikely that your child has a toxic free school unless they’ve done something about it.

My guest today is an economist, a policy analyst and co-author of a book called the The Toxic Schoolhouse, which very thoroughly explains the problem and what people can do about it. This is something that every parent needs to know about and that every school should be paying attention to.

I’d like to welcome Dr. Charles Levenstein. Welcome to the show.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: Thank you, Debra. I’m really glad to be on the show.

DEBRA: Thank you.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: I hope what I say can be of help to people.

DEBRA: I’m sure it will be. I’ve taken a look at your book and there’s just so much information in it. First, I want you to tell us about yourself, your background and how you got interested in toxic schools.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: Okay. Well, I’ve been spending years – I was on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell in a new department called the Department of Work Environment. In 2003, I was a Professor of Work Environment when I retired.

At that point, the union, which I have been a member of for many years, the Teachers’ Union asked me if I would help the union to develop environmental policies for the schools because they were greatly concerned about exposures to the children and to the teachers and other staff. So I got recruited.

At the time, I didn’t know much about schools. A lot of what I did in those years is to learn about what was going on in the schools, what the efforts were to deal with problems in them. So I educated myself about it and worked with the Environmental Health and Safety Committee in order to try to improve the situation.

The first work that we did was because there were a lot of complaints about indoor air in schools. There were dusts and fumes and odors that the teachers were concerned about and they were sure that the children were being affected by it. There also has been a great increase in asthma both amongst children and among adults in the society. So people were afraid that the indoor air pollution that was going on was having some impact on them. So that’s really the first issue that I became involved with. Shall I say more about that?

DEBRA: Well no, I just wanted to know briefly your background just to start with.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: Okay.

DEBRA: And then, we’ll say that you ended up, the end of the story there – or maybe it’s not the end, but somewhere along the way in your story – you were the co-author of a book called The Toxic Schoolhouse.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: Yes. I have been the editor of a journal called New Solutions. In the journal, what we tried to do is to get environmental activists, labor activists and public health people together talking about issues on not just about schools, but other places.

Madeleine Scammell who’s a professor at Boston University and I did a special issue of New Solutions on schools and health. We gathered material from a lot of different authors. When we went through it, we realized that this really was not comprehensive. We needed more information. We talked to the publisher of New Solutions, Baywood Publications and suggested that we expand this and make a book. So that’s what you’ve seen, The Toxic Schoolhouse edited by Madeleine and myself, but with authors from all around the country.

So we are hoping that this is not a definitive book of all time, rather it is a first, I think, important step in trying to talk about what the exposures are or some of the exposures are, what people have been trying to do about it and what the central problems are in the schools. That’s what we were after really.

DEBRA: I think that you really did a good job. Obviously, I haven’t read the whole entire book every single word because I couldn’t possibly do that with every guest.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: Yes, sure. I understand.

DEBRA: But I’ve looked at a lot of it and you bring up some very good points. I just wanted to start asking you questions about things that you cover in the book.

The first question, chapter one, the first thing that you asked is “Who’s in charge of children’s environmental health at school?” I think that’s an excellent question. Who is in charge? Who’s looking to make sure that the children are not being exposed to toxic chemicals?

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: Because I’m an academic, that’s also the most obvious questions for me to be asking. I want to get information. Who do I go to?

The Healthy Schools Network people wrote the chapter on who’s in charge because they also had that question. And the answer to the question is that no one is in charge. That’s very, very disturbing. We had thought that they would be either some state agency or some federal agency that would be concerned about the school environment. And we could not find any single agency that was in charge of it.

So if you were concerned about indoor air, that was one kind of problem. If you were concerned about the use of pesticides, how to control vermin in the schools, that’s another issue. If you were concerned about lead in drinking water, it was a separate issue. If you were concerned about asbestos, there were other agencies involved with it. But there was no coordinated overall agency that was in charge and that was thinking about this.

So we were concerned because we have been working on legislation in Massachusetts to improve indoor air. It was very receptive. The legislation was very receptive to this when we went to talk to them. We did a couple of hearings with them. The only block came when it came up to money. They would say, “Oops, what is this going to cost to deal with it, to improve the indoor air school environment?” And because there had been so much deterioration in the conditions in the schools, it was a colossal amount of money. That’s when our legislators’ support backed off and fell away.

There was not only no coordinated effort, even in the legislature, there was interest and concern, but resistance because of the financial aspect of it.

DEBRA: Well, that is entirely understandable. But I’m looking at it. I don’t have children, so I don’t have children in school. But if I did, my question would be – since I know so much about this subject – I would say, “Listen. There are all these chemicals in the school room that can cause things like neurological effects, which affects the brain, which affects the ability to learn. Exposure to lead reduces IQ for one thing.”

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: That’s right. Yeah.

DEBRA: “So how are the children supposed to learn in a toxic environment? It’s affecting their ability to learn.”

Before you say anything about this, we need to go to break, but we’ll talk about this more when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Charles Levenstein. He is an economist, policy analyst and co-author of The Toxic Schoolhouse. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Charles Levenstein, economist, policy analyst and co-author of The Toxic Schoolhouse.

Dr. Levenstein, before the break, I was bringing up about how children can learn if their school room is filled with toxic chemicals that are affecting their brain function. So I’m going to let you answer that. But also, let’s just talk about now what are the toxic chemicals that children are being exposed to at school.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: One of the major issues is lead in the water. It comes in schools all across the country. Some of it is directly from the pipes, but some of it is from the water fountains in which the pipes are welded together with lead-containing material.

What can you do about that? Well, one at a time, what you can do is you can run the water first. If the water has been standing around, then run the tap first for a while and then drink the water because that will get rid of some of the lead. But that’s a very small part of an answer to this problem.

Let me tell you. When I first got involved with this, I decided…

DEBRA: I want to ask you a question just about water.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: Yeah.

DEBRA: So looking at it from my viewpoint, if I was a mom and my kid was in school, here’s what I’d say. I’d say, “Look. We can get a very effective water filter that will not only remove lead, but remove all other toxic chemicals from the water for about $300. Let us parents get together and get that water filter so that our kids don’t have to drink lead in the water or anything else.” Are people not saying this? Are our parents not looking for solutions for their children?

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: Part of it is that parents don’t know because there is little monitoring of this problem going on. If the parents were informed, I think that they would be concerned and they would be raising these issues through PTAs with the administration of the school.

And also, the teachers don’t know. We’re also trying to educate the teachers about this. So if neither the parents nor the teachers know, then the administrators have a set of priorities to include things like lead or PCBs or asbestos for that matter.

All these problems are well-established. There’s not really a new need for new science on lead or on asbestos. There’s still need for science on some other materials. But nevertheless, for some of the most basic and ubiquitous problems, the science is out there and someone should be taking care of it in each of the schools, but also in the school system as a whole.

There is no systematic monitoring that goes along with these things. There’s no audit that’s required. On asbestos, it’s supposed to be – do you want to talk about that or you want to stick with lead?

DEBRA: Sure. Go ahead. Go ahead. No, go ahead. I’m so…

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: On the asbestos issue, there is a law, the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Law, which is supposed to be enforced either by EPA, US-EPA or by the state.

When we did a survey in Massachusetts to find out what was going on, we found that 90% of the schools were not in compliance with the law. For someone who has worked in the private sector, I was shocked because you don’t have standards that 90% of the business systempay any attention to.

So when we looked at it, we found what was it that they were not doing? What are they out of compliance with? The major thing that they didn’t do was they’re supposed to inform parents and they’re supposed to inform teachers and other staff about the conditions in the school.

Once a year, there’s supposed to be an audit. And the administration of the school is supposed to inform them about that. That’s what the key violation was.

If that information doesn’t go to the parents or to the teachers, then they don’t know. They assume that everything is fine, that the kids are okay and that they themselves are okay and nothing happens. So the violation of this information providing aspects of laws is really quite fundamental.

DEBRA: I’m just astounded to hear this, but I shouldn’t be. I guess I shouldn’t be because I’ve been doing this work for 30 years. I’ve been talking and talking and talking, writing and writing and writing and being on TV and on radio and everything. And still, the number of people that I think actually knows anything about this is a very small percentage. I meet people every day who have never heard of these problems.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: I am sympathetic to parents who are working all day long and count on the schools to take care of the kids and they count on the schools to be a safe place and they don’t really want to think about it too much. Unless some acute problem shows up, then they assume that things are okay.

The problem is a lot of these substances don’t have an immediate effect. They have long term effect. So it’s even hard to tell whether kids who are exposed when they’re little in school, 10 or 20 years later, develop disease or cancer or whatever. It’s very hard to keep track of that. It is easier to study the teachers because they are there day in and day out and they don’t move as much and they have longer term exposures.

So we have been arguing the need for the studies of cancer in teachers, mesothelioma, which is what you get from asbestos, there really needs to be serious attention to that.

Some of the parent advocates are concerned about that because they say, “Well, what about the kids?” Well, it is hard to do the studies of the kids because we have to track them over long periods of time. But the teachers are there.

When we started to look, for instance, at mesothelioma, the asbestos-related cancer in the schools in Massachusetts, we discovered that there were 19 teachers right off the bat who had that cancer. And when we pushed to the Department of Public Health and the State to look for more, we got it over a period of 10 years, we discovered that they were about 50 staff, teachers, administrators and custodians who have mesothelioma.

Now that rattled the leadership of the union for sure because they didn’t know that. No one was telling them that, but it meant that their members were getting really seriously ill from this stuff.

DEBRA: I need to interrupt you because we need to go to break, but we’ll talk about this more when we come back.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: Okay.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Charles Levenstein. He’s the co-author of The Toxic Schoolhouse. It’s a very interesting book about how our children and teachers were being exposed to toxic chemicals. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Charles Levenstein who is the co-author of the book The Toxic Schoolhouse.

Before the break, we were talking about – what were we talking about? We were about to talk about something.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: What I was thinking about was the importance of providing information to parents and to teachers and to the people in the environment. I was thinking about how important that was because in the absence of pressure from either the workers there or from the parents of the kids, the administrators have pressures from school boards and from the community for other kinds of results and they don’t think about the impact, for instance, of lead on learning. It’s not at the top of their political agenda.

DEBRA: No, but I guess my viewpoint is different because I spent all of my adult life studying toxic chemicals in the home and in the world and their health effects and how they affect our bodies and our minds and our ability to think and learn and all of those things. But for somebody who hasn’t done that, I can see that something might be more important.

But to me, I can’t imagine that anything is more important than addressing toxic issues because toxic chemicals affect our ability to be healthy, our bodies to be healthy. They affect our abilities to think clearly, to be able to remember things. All of these different functions that go into learning or working or earning a living or being happy in life, all can be damaged by toxic chemicals and all are being damaged by toxic chemicals.

If schools are concerned about test scores, the first thing I would say to them is get the lead out of the school because lead affects IQ. It affects development. I mean, there’s no safe level for lead.

It just seems like that in the world – this is what I talked about in the summit. But in the world, people aren’t aware. I think everybody needs to be aware that these toxic exposures are going on, that they’re affecting our health, happiness and ability and they need to be at the top of the list.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: I agree with you. I think they should be at the top of the list. And I wonder why they were not at the top of the list.

One of the things I did was to look for whether courses on the management of facilities of the buildings were in graduate schools of education or the administrators and the people who run the schools and the people who are in charge of all this, do they know anything about this? I could not find one course on the management of the facility.

I finally found some things. The Association of School Business Officials has some short courses on that. But we really need the principals and the superintendents to know about this, not just the accountants. And there is no course. So part of the reasons why we’ve been forced to educate ourselves is because there is no place where that is happening already.

I’ll give you an example of a different kind of chemicals, PCBs. PCBs are endocrine disruptors. They’re carcinogens and endocrine disruptors. An endocrine disruptor means that they can affect your reproductive system. They can affect growth and the like over a long period of time.

Now if a school was built in United States between roughly 1950 and 1975, all those schools used PCBs in the caulking around the windows or in the fixtures, in lighting fixtures.

By the end of the late 1970s, there was so much concern about the health effects of PCBs that essentially, it was banned in the United States. It was not banned in the sense of pulling it out of the places where it existed, but it was the further production of it and use of it was banned.

So 1975 until 2000, let’s say, the caulking around those windows has been disturbed. It has dried up and it’s fallen out. It’s contaminated the earth around the school building. Some of it has gotten into the air filters. It went into the air system and the air conditioning. It’s a hazard!

We have had some people – it’s one of the chapters in the book – a guy from Harvard School of Public Health who have gone out and have done measurements to see how much of this is there. Is it a hazard? In some places, it is. In some places, it isn’t.

But the resistance of school officials to looking for it and to finding out about it is enormous. It truly would be expensive to deal with. There is no question.

One of the richer school districts in Massachusetts, they found out about it. They did the measurements. They changed all the windows over the summer and they dealt with the problem.

Less affluent school districts don’t want to know. This denial is a big problem. They just don’t want to know about it because of the implications for what they’re going to have to do.

So we got into trouble with some of them because one of our members forwarded samples to see whether there were PCBs in the caulking and the school said he was trespassing. There was a big scandal about it.

What are you going to do if the schools themselves are not doing the job and don’t want to know? But the state departments of Health are very concerned about school budgets and taxes, so there’s a resistance of knowing too much. We’re worrying because it does affect the teachers and it does affect the other staff in place and it affects the kids – long term effects on the kids. It is deeply concerning.

We had hopes that the control of asbestos was going to be a model for dealing with it. But then it turns out that they don’t enforce the asbestos laws. There are laws.

I initially thought that what I was supposed to do is share with the committee and to propose legislation to improve the situation. And then I realized that we have some laws, but they weren’t being enforced or they were being enforced in a lackadaisical manner because there was no pressure from parents or from the union to at least raise help about it.

So what I’m saying is that parents need to be informed about this and the PTAs need to be pushing to get the school systems to make changes.

DEBRA: I think that’s the place to start. We need to go to break. But we’ll talk more when we come back.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: Okay.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Charles Levenstein. He is the co-author of the book The Toxic Schoolhouse. And he’s working to try to get these toxic chemicals out of our schools and protect our children, which is a very good thing to do. Stay tuned. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Charles Levenstein. He is the co-author of the book The Toxic Schoolhouse.

There are a couple of things I want to say. We’re coming to the end of our hour, but I want to get these two things in.

The first one is an e-mail that came in this morning. I subscribe to a lot of different feeds and different places. One of the stories that came in this morning was about fields of toxic pesticides surround schools in Ventura County, California. It talks about how this is an area that particularly grows strawberries and we’re coming in strawberry season now. They’re talking about all the different pesticides that are used on these strawberries and how the children are being affected and increased asthma, et cetera.

As they go to school, these strawberry fields, they’re being sprayed with all these pesticides that are going – I mean, not the children particularly. But if they’re spraying the fields that are right outside the school door, you know that’s going to come into the school room. And certainly, pesticides are used in most, if not all schools in addition to all these other toxic chemicals.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: That’s right. I mean, in terms of spraying the field, the danger is that it can also get into people’s homes because of the drift of the pesticides in the air.

In the schools, we actually were successful in getting legislation to require the schools to develop plans for Integrated Pest Management, which meant the reduction in the use of the most toxic chemicals.

So, one of the tasks in doing the book was to find out, well, we know that there are real problems with the asbestos legislation. What about this requirement?

It’s being enforced by the Department of Agriculture for the state, which is interesting. I hardly knew that there was such a thing in Massachusetts, but there is. We called them up. And they said, “Oh, it’s very successful. Ninety percent or more of the schools have filed their Integrated Pest Management plans.” So we said, “Well, are they actually doing it or they’re just giving you pieces of paper?” At which point, we were told there are no inspectors.

The answer is apparently, they’re in compliance, but as far as we know, we have no way of knowing if they are actually in compliance because there’s nobody going out and checking.

Now, maybe I’m just a nasty urban person, but I think that you have to check when you got a law. You have to know if it’s being enforced or not. I don’t think that parents think a lot about the use of pesticides in the school environment. But in fact, it’s inside and outside. Inside, there are animals that kids bring at lunch. There are insects. They get around. Frequently, they’re in cafeterias. And then outside on the grounds, there are small animals and pests and the like.

So it’s great to have a plan. It’s great to require the schools to have plans. But it is also important that these things be audited. They will not be audited unless the parents put pressure on it. It’s that simple.

DEBRA: That’s exactly right. Of course, parents could just go and audit the schools themselves. They could just go and ask what’s going on and find out why there are toxic chemicals there.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: Yeah. I mean, it’s not exactly an audit to ask. But it is actually a good idea to ask because the parents asking means that the administrators are saying, “Uh-oh, we better pay attention to this.”

The other issue around this is the use of cleaning materials. And we have been very active in promoting green cleaners, that is the use of less toxic materials to clean the boards and to clean the classrooms.

I was watching a school system getting an award for being so good about introducing green cleaners. I went up to congratulate the guy who was in charge of that. He was a facilities director. I said, “That’s really wonderful that you’re doing this. Have you been working with the Teachers’ Union at all?”

And he said, “No. The teachers are a real problem.” I said, “What? What do you mean by teachers are a real problem?” He said, “Oh, the teachers bring in their own cleaners because they don’t like the green cleaners.” I realized no one had bothered to sit down with the teachers and explain to them what was going on and why they were doing it.

He said that the teachers are saying, “Well, that nearly doesn’t work so well. Who knows that that stuff works?” And the answer is you have to educate everybody.

DEBRA: You do have to educate everybody.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: Including the staff.

DEBRA: Right. You do. Everybody, all along the chain here needs to be engaged in this.

I want to just bring up something else because we’ve only got about six minutes left and that is you talked earlier about doing studies. I just want to share with you and the listening audience who may be considering what we’re talking about here that I’ve been studying this subject for more than 30 years. I started because I got really sick from toxic chemical exposure. Once I figured it out, I said, “Well, I got to find out where the toxic chemicals are if I want to be well.”

There’s an idea called the Precautionary Principle. So I look at studies, I read a lot of scientific studies, but I’m not so reliant on having a scientific study come and examine my house to see if I’m getting sick. The Precautionary Principle says, “If there is evidence of harm, the precautionary thing to do is to not use it.”

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: It seems like a pretty straightforward solution to a problem. Now if you’re still sick after you stopped using it, then you know there was something else that caused the problem.

DEBRA: Right. That’s exactly right.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: But with the large numbers of kids being affected, I think you are – the Precautionary Principles should hold.

DEBRA: I think so too. And this is what I…

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: I want to experiment on the children of the country. That’s a crazy way to behave. We should be very, very…

DEBRA: Right! But that’s what’s going on. It’s like our children are the lab rats for finding out are there toxic chemicals in the school and how long do we need to wait.

I mean, if you’re telling me that there’s lead in the drinking water, I can tell you that there’s safe level for lead. There’s ample evidence to show the dangers of lead. There’s no question that lead is toxic and that it disturbs the way children think and feel and learn.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: That is also true with asbestos.

DEBRA: Right.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: There is no question that it is a serious health hazard for humans. There is no question. There is a question of exactly how PCBs work, but basically it has been established that it is a human carcinogen and it is an endocrine disruptor.

DEBRA: Yes.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: Now what does that mean?

If you look at studies across the country, you will see that teachers are at a higher risk of breast cancer than one would expect. So when you ask the question why would that be, there’s no answer to that. They don’t answer.

DEBRA: Could it be that combination of PCBs and pesticides are a problem and all the other toxic things?

I just want to throw in also to this discussion that toxic chemicals, like you have mentioned earlier, are not chemicals that you might see an immediate effect for. I think that what most people say is, “Oh, I’m not sick. There’s nothing bothering me.” But what the piece of information that people don’t have is that toxic chemicals get in your body by the various ways that you’re exposed to them and they start to accumulate and you don’t get sick until they accumulate to a certain degree. They have to accumulate and when you get to that level, then you get really sick. But just because you don’t have symptoms doesn’t mean that that accumulation isn’t going on.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: It’s a lot easier to mobilize people if there is an acute effect. So we had a discussion of PCBs with a group of teachers who are working and the first thing they asked, “Does it give you headaches?” And the answer is no. It doesn’t give you headaches. “Are there any symptoms in the short run of this?” And the answer is no, there are no symptoms. So we’re arguing for a control of an exposure and it’s going to cost money to do that to get rid of the stuff for which there is no immediate impact. It is a long term effect.

DEBRA: It is a long term effect, but people are not thinking about the long term effect.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: Yes.

DEBRA: Anyway, we’ve got less than a minute here. I don’t want to interrupt you from talking about something.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: That’s okay.

DEBRA: I just want to say thank you so much. This is a very, very important subject. I think that we’re just scratching the surface here. But I’m going to talk about it more on the show and see what I can do to start spreading the word.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: Okay. You should tell people that the book is available from Baywood either as an electronic form or in paperback. We would love to get people’s comments and criticisms and suggestions as to the direction on which to go to move forward with this.

DEBRA: And you can go to Toxic…

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: Thank you.

DEBRA: You’re welcome.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: Yes.

DEBRA: Thank you. If you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, I have a link directly to the book.

CHARLES LEVENSTEIN: Great, okay.

DEBRA: So you can get it there and listen to the show again if you want and other shows. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Thanks for listening. Be well.