January 2026 Networker: Reasserting the Precautionary Principle and
Resisting Preventable Harm |
Volume 31 (1), January 2025 |
Executive Director’s Note |
Hand-on-heart gratitude to you for your donations to our winter fund appeal. We know these times are uncertain and yet you gave so generously when we asked. Much of our work over the past 28 years has been devoted to preventing suffering caused by environmental problems. This idea is encapsulated in the idea of the precautionary principle, which was translated from the German word Vorsorgeprinzip, a word that literally means “forecaring.” I understood it to mean preparing for a difficult future. Those of us who live in northern climates are deeply familiar with the necessity of preparing for winter, laying in supplies, getting our vehicles winterized, and knitting those mittens. Your financial gifts help us at SEHN prepare for the difficult future so that we are ready to do the work at hand. Thank you. |
In this month’s newsletter, you will see articles on our versions of forecaring as it applies to problems like the preventable harms of residential gas-fired appliances and climate-change amplified wild fires. But first I look at why some of our foundational work is proving to be, well, truly foundational. In 2008, SEHN’s science director Dr. Ted Schettler and his co-authors made a startling claim in a landmark report: some diseases of aging, like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, were delayable and, in some cases preventable. This was a novel idea. Novel enough that the Today Show featured Environmental Threats to Healthy Aging: With a Closer Look at Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Diseases on one of their morning television programs. Ted was ahead of his time, at least according to the scientists who are researching Parkinson’s today. In December 2025, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment hosted a webinar that featured Dr. Ray Dorsey, co-author of The Parkinson’s Plan, with Ted providing commentary. During the webinar, Dr. Dorsey lauded Ted’s work of 18 years ago as prescient. Ted and his co-authors recognized early on that many terrible diseases like Parkinson’s were preventable. Here is the current synopsis on Parkinson’s: |
An estimated 1.1 million people in the U.S. are currently living with Parkinson's disease (PD), and this number is expected to rise to 1.2 million by 2030. Globally, more than 10 million people are estimated to be living with PD, which is now the fastest growing brain disorder in the world. Science has long linked certain environmental contaminants to increased risk of PD, and some researchers are now making the case that this fast-growing disease may be largely preventable. |
Did you catch that? Parkinson’s is the fastest growing brain disorder in the world and it is preventable. Continue Reading |
The Risks and Harms of Gas Appliances are Personal and Planetary: We All Have a Part to Play in Mitigation |
By Carmi Orenstein, MPH Editor, the Networker and Program Director, Concerned Health Professionals of New York |
A few years ago, my adult daughter arrived for a visit to the house where I grew up, where a couple of other relatives were living at the time: one is sensory-impaired, one was fast asleep in the room furthest from the kitchen. My daughter immediately smelled gas (that is, the organosulfur compound added to residential “natural gas”). Fortunately—though she didn’t grow up with a gas stove—she knew what the odor was. She threw open the nearest doors and windows, and ran to turn the gas stove knob to “off.” It had been in the “on” position without a flame, thereby leaking the unburned gas and all its contaminants, creating explosion and poisoning risks. Some sources say not to touch the knob in this situation, and guidance for these emergencies do say: call the gas company and 911. But thankfully everyone was okay, at least in the immediate term. No telling how much this episode added to the house occupants’ ongoing, routine toxic exposures inherent to life with a gas stove. Smelling gas is not prevention. The practice of gas odorization, which began after a 1937 gas leak disaster killed 300 in a Texas school, is mandated by U.S. federal law. A unique study recently detailed the drawbacks of dependence on odorization for detection of leaking residential methane gas (a more specific and useful term than “natural gas”). The study revealed major inconsistencies in odorant levels and showed that many leaks go undetected by smell. In fact, the researchers showed that large leaks were routinely taking place in about four percent of homes they studied, in spite of odorants. They described their concern that leaking methane and with it, for example, carcinogenic benzene, “could go undetected by persons with an average sense of smell, with large uncertainties driven by smelling sensitivity, gas composition, and household conditions.” There are disparities in our population, they said, that make relying on a “normal sense of smell” cause for great concern. Older age and infections including Covid-19 can affect sense of smell; research has already demonstrated that Covid-19 infection can impair the ability to smell gas odorants. The risks and harms of gas-fired appliances are well documented. The odorant findings are just a glimpse of the wide-ranging, recent data coming from brilliantly designed and executed studies showing us the risks and harms of residential gas-fired appliances. We organized and summarized them in a report we published in late 2025 with our allies at Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Continue Reading
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Parkinson’s Disease and the Environment:
Opportunities for Prevention |
by Ted Schettler MD, MPH, Science Director |
Parkinson’s disease was probably uncommon when first described about 200 years ago. Now however, the Global Burden of Disease Study, published in The Lancet Neurology, estimates that Parkinson’s disease afflicts more than six million people throughout the world, and projections suggest over 12 million cases by 2040. Although registries are incomplete, an estimated 90,000 new cases in people 65 and older are diagnosed annually in the United States alone. Aging populations and genetic susceptibility explain only a portion of this growing disease burden. Geographic “hot spots,” where the disease is more common, and a rapidly growing number of epidemiologic and laboratory studies make it clear that environmental factors, many now identified, are largely responsible for what some call a Parkinson’s pandemic. Parkinson’s disease, now among the most common neurological disorders, is characterized by slowed movements, tremor, rigidity, and difficulties with gait and balance. Changes in smell, cognition, affect, and sleep are also common. These symptoms are due to degenerative changes in neurons along with deposition of aggregates of a protein, alpha-synuclein. Dopamine-producing cells in a portion of the brain called the substantia nigra have received the most attention because dopamine replacement can alleviate some of the symptoms. However, other cells in the nervous system are also involved, and the disorder may actually begin in the nose or gastrointestinal tract long before neurological symptoms appear. Continue Reading |
Repercussion Section:
Wilder Fires |
by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist and writer in residence |
According to a federal criminal complaint, one year ago, on January 1, 2025, 29-year-old Jonathan Rinderknecht started a blaze on a hiking trail in the Santa Monica Mountains. Six days later, it turned into one of the two infernos that laid waste to vast swaths of Los Angeles. The so-called Palisades Fire. While reading about his arrest and indictment, I became confused by the word wildfire. Is a wildfire wild because it starts in a wild, uncultivated place? Or is a wildfire wild because it burns in wild, uncontrollable ways? Is it the fuel that is wild or is it the behavior of the flames? The history of the word doesn’t really clarify matters. In fact, the first attested use of the word is from the 13th century AD when the Old English wilde fyr was used to refer to a weapon of war, later known as “Greek fire,” whose specific ingredients were a closely guarded secret but likely consisted of some kind of petroleum. As near as I can figure out, wilde fyr was basically napalm that could be blasted at one’s enemy using some sort of flame-thrower situation. So, the original wildfire involved the ignition of fossil fuels, which is exactly the opposite of how the public health community uses the word now in our attempt to delineate the smoke from burning forests from, say, tailpipe-derived smog.
Continue Reading |
In both English and Spanish editions, the international newspaper El País featured an interview with Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior science and writer in residence. “‘Hydraulic fracturing was invented in the United States. This has led us to become the world’s leading exporter of natural gas, in a time of climate emergency,’ she reflects. ‘So, I feel the need to apologize, because I think it’s the worst technology that my country has ever exported.’”
“Health advocates tied climate policy to public health impacts. Sandra Steingraber, co-founder of Concerned Health Professionals of New York, said, ‘The science is clear: 91,000 Americans die each year from oil- and gas-related air pollution.’” Sandra was quoted in a Fingerlakes1.com piece covering a rally outside the New York Governor’s State of the State address.
A Georgia Public Broadcasting investigative piece about the September 2024 BioLab chemical fire in Conyers, Georgia extensively quotes SEHN science director Ted Schettler about the “textbook conditions” the fire created for the formation of hexavalent chromium. Hexavalent chromium, the carcinogenic compound made infamous by the 2000 film Erin Brockovich, had been excluded from testing at the site. The piece also appeared in the Georgia Sun and Rough Draft Atlanta. |
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