Health is the greatest wealth

By Kevin Hayden of Springfield, Oregon. Kevin calls himself "a hack who blogs a bit, a grouser of ill-repute, who voted for nobody for President in 2000."

Once you've lived half a century or more, the real value of good health starts becoming more apparent to most. Many have said they'd trade all their wealth to regain good health. But I don't propose to offer any miracle elixirs.

Instead, I'd point to the most critical component that can be achieved not by a miracle but by the simplicity of pragmatic choices, as pointed out by Robert Kennedy recently in Eugene:

Last week the federal EPA announced that in 19 states it's now unsafe to eat any freshwater fish because of mercury contamination. In 48 states it's now unsafe to eat at least some of the fish or most of the fish, and Oregon is one of those.

We know a lot about mercury now that we didn't know 10 years ago. We know that one out of every six American women now has so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for autism, blindness, mental retardation, cognitive impairment, heart, liver and kidney disease. I have so much mercury in my body - I got levels tested recently - that I was told by Dr. David Carpenter who's a national authority on mercury contamination that a woman with my levels, which are three times the safe levels, would have a child with cognitive impairment. He estimated a permanent IQ loss of 5 to 7 points in her children. He said the science is very certain. Today there are 630,000 children born in this country every year who've been exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in the womb.

Clinton, recognizing this catastrophic national epidemic, reclassified mercury as a hazardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act, which triggered a requirement that those plants remove 90 percent of the mercury within three and a half years. It would have cost them less than 1 percent of revenues and it would have solved the problem. Well, this is the same industry that's given that $100 million to the president, and eight weeks ago President Bush announced that he was scrapping the Clinton-era regs, substituting instead regulations that the industry never has to clean up their mercury contamination.

The Eugene Weekly covers the rest of Kennedy's speech. I can't find a point he made that I'd dispute. And I remind you, he's speaking of your health, your greatest wealth.

Oct. 04, 2004 Posted in guest column.