Tag: traditions

Unusual Lead Poisoning Case

  • Most US communities have low rates of childhood lead poisoning - averaging 1.2% of the total population. But with the new influx of Burmese immigrants, Fort Wayne’s exposure rate rose to 12%. (Photo by Erika Celeste)

Lead was banned from paint in
1978. And it was taken out of
gasoline a few years later. So
with less lead in the environment,
the problem of lead poisoning in
kids has been decreasing. But
every once in a while, health officials
find a dramatic spike in the number
of lead poisoning cases, and the race
is on to find the source. Erika Celeste reports on the poisoning
of some Burmese refugees:

Transcript

Lead was banned from paint in
1978. And it was taken out of
gasoline a few years later. So
with less lead in the environment,
the problem of lead poisoning in
kids has been decreasing. But
every once in a while, health officials
find a dramatic spike in the number
of lead poisoning cases, and the race
is on to find the source. Erika Celeste reports on the poisoning
of some Burmese refugees:

Three years ago, Mah We took her baby daughter and fled the unrest in Burma to Fort Wayne, Indiana. It’s the largest Burmese settlement outside of their home country. They wanted their new daughter to have an American name. They settled on Snow White after seeing some the Disney movie.

She is now three and a half years old.

Celeste: Hi, Do you like school?

Snow White: “School, yes.”

Celeste: “What’s your favorite thing at school?”

Translator: “Play with my friends.”

Snow White has had a lot of challenges in her young life. Blood tests revealed Snow White had lead poisoning. Exposure to lead can cause brain damage, I-Q loss, behavioral problems, and in rare cases, death.

Most US communities have low rates of childhood lead poisoning – averaging 1.2% of the total population. But with the new influx of Burmese immigrants, Fort Wayne’s exposure rate rose to 12%.

Amy Hastings is with the Allen County Health Department:

“We kind of assumed they had been poisoned when they were in the camps, and it just wasn’t identified until they got to the United States and so we conducted it like a normal lead investigation and found no lead hazards.”

But then new siblings were born into some of the Burmese families. At birth, the babies’ blood levels were normal, yet within a few months those levels became dangerously high.

Most small children get poisoned when they crawl on the floor, get dust from old lead paint on their hands, and then stick their hands in their mouths.

“The babies weren’t old enough to do that yet, and so why they had a blood lead level of in the 20s, made no sense to us.”

With the cases mounting and the source still unknown, the Centers for Disease Control helped Hastings assemble an investigative team. They set up a make shift field office and went door to door in the Burmese apartment complexes.

“We were hunting around for anything we could find that these kids might be getting into. We tested food, we tested toys, anything we thought that babies could have come into contact with.”

They tested more kids. And took samples of various household items. Then a break came in the case. Two homemade Burmese medicines – daw tway and daw kyin— geared specifically to small children for tummy aches came back with extremely high levels of lead.

Hastings was relieved to finally have an answer. But it didn’t solve the problem.

Aye Ma is a Burmese translator. She says many parents didn’t believe Hastings are her team.

“The mother was pretty upset. She referred back to her ancestors, ‘oh my ancestors have been using this medicine and how can you come and out of the blue tell me this is no good and it has lead in it?’”

While some families are taking the advice to stop using the medicine, others are still skeptical. The medicines are banned in the US. But they can still get a hold of them through family connections back home.

Hastings says she’s still seeing new cases of lead poisoning. But because she isn’t certain the medicines are the only cause, educating the families about lead poisoning remains important.

Officials have set up a pilot preschool program for kids like Snow White. The program will help the kids catch up through, speech, cognitive, and nutrition therapy. So far it seems to be a great success.

(sound of kids playing)

While this was an unusual case for the US, the CDC reports that many traditional medicines from East Indian, Middle Eastern, Western Asian, and Hispanic cultures still contain lead.

For The Environment Report, I’m Erika Celeste.

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O Christmas Tree

  • Lauren and her potted tree. It will stay outdoors until Christmas Eve, when it will be brought in for 14 hours. (Photo by Jennifer Guerra)

It’s the holidays… which for some
of us means time to deck the halls
with boughs of holly and, oh yeah,
pick out a Christmas tree. We sent
reporter Jennifer Guerra to find out which tree is greener –
real or artificial:

Transcript

It’s the holidays… which for some
of us means time to deck the halls
with boughs of holly and, oh yeah,
pick out a Christmas tree. We sent
reporter Jennifer Guerra to find out which tree is greener –
real or artificial:

Lauren Northrop and her husband Tom are big fans of Christmas.

“We love celebrating it, I love decorating, but we always have this dilemma: what do we do about a tree?”

They didn’t want a plastic tree because it’s, well, plastic. And they didn’t like the idea of bringing a live tree into their house, only to have it die and then drag it out to the curb to be recycled.

So they skipped the Christmas tree thing altogether for the last four years. But then, their son Will was born in January.

“We decided that we have to have a tree because it’s, like, his first Christmas, and we want to have those family videos of him having his Christmas morning by the Christmas tree and opening his gifts, and just the whole experience because that was important to us growing up and we always had that.”

They bought a live, baby Christmas tree with its roots still intact. That way, when Christmas is done and the ground thaws, they can plant it in their backyard.

“I was planning to keep the tree inside until December 25th so that we could decorate it and put lights on it. When we went to buy it they said if you do that, it probably won’t survive. So keep it outside so the temperature is more consistent, bring it inside only for a short period of time. (Like how short?) As in December 24th. Will goes to bed, Tom and I are gonna be up decorating that tree and bringing it inside for about 14 hours.”

That’s probably way too much hassle for 14 hours of Christmas cheer. So a lot of people go for real, cut trees. Pat Fera would love to have a real cut Christmas tree in her house.

“But I’m very afraid of them. I had a friend of mine, this was back in the 60s, and she and her mother had gone to midnight mass and her father was home and he was sleeping on the couch and what woke him up was the sound of the tree just going wooosh.”

Apparently the TV shorted, it ignited the tree, tree caught on fire and the dad just made it out of the house. Fera says the ceiling was charred black and the whole place was smoke-damaged.

“Well yeah, if you’re not careful that’s certainly, yeah, a real tree is a hell of a fire hazard!”

That’s Bob Schildgen. He writes an environmental advice column for the Sierra Club called Hey, Mr. Green. So I called him up and asked him…

Guerra: “Hey, Mr. Green. Which is more environmentally friendly? Why don’t we tackle one at a time: let’s go with plastic trees. What do you think about those”

Schildgen: “Well, I don’t think they’re environmentally friendly for a number of reasons. One is that they’re made out of materials that use petro chemicals and metals and so forth. They get eventually tossed in the landfill, they have a life of about 9 years and then they’re tossed. They can’t be recycled.”

And since most plastic Christmas trees are made in places like China, they have to be shipped a very long way to end up in your family room.

So plastic is out.

Schildgen does like the idea of live bulb trees, but their survival rate once you plant them in the ground isn’t that great. So he says – aside from the fire hazard mentioned – real cut trees are a much greener option than plastic. With a real tree you’re using a renewable resource; the trees are raised on tree farms, so you’re not contributing to any deforestation. And they’re completely recyclable.

“I think another feature that I like about them is that, and this is not exactly an obvious environmental issue, but I think it’s very good for children to see something fresh, green, real, alive, and then watch it cycle as the needles fall off and it goes into its natural demise. I think that’s good for people.”

Schildgen says some farmers use pesticides on their tree, so if you’re concerned about that, you should look for local organic trees.

For The Environment Report, I’m Jennifer Guerra.

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Artist Carries Tribe’s Traditions Forward


Every artist depicts nature in a different way. In one artist’s world, nature is a place where people, animals and plant life are intertwined in vibrant color. Karen Kelly visited this new exhibit:

Transcript

Every artist depicts nature in a different way. In one artist’s world, nature is a place where people, animals and plant life are intertwined in vibrant color. Reporter Karen Kelly visited this new exhibit.


Six and seven year olds are pointing and chattering in front of a mural bursting with plant and animal life. One of them, Pierre Rousseau, describes his favorite parts of the painting.


“People, strawberries, some leaves, and fish, and kind of mister who has a bird on his head.”


The kids are at an exhibit of Norval Morrisseau’s work at the National Gallery of Art in Ottawa, Canada. Usually, you hear a lot of shushing when kids are in an art gallery.
Here, you can almost feel the energy between the kids and the paintings.


In one corner, Sadok Benmoussa and Amir Shallal are trying to figure out a mural that tells the story of creation.


“And what’s that big stuff? A flower? That big stuff… Oh, the big stuff, bears? A bear? A bear.”


Norval Morrisseau grew up on an Ojibway reservation on the north shore of Lake Superior, and that environment fills his paintings; the water, the animals, trees, berries.
But most important are the people, his own people interacting with that nature.


Gabe Vadas lived with Morrisseau for many years, and now that the artist has Parkinson’s disease, Vadas is his spokesman and guardian. He says when Morrisseau was growing up in the 50’s, his tribe began rejecting many of its traditions, and it’s connection to the natural world, so Morrisseau used his paintings to tell the stories he learned from his grandfather who was a shaman.


“And I think Norval just felt desperation as a young person to regain the identity that had been passed down to him. And of course Grandpa is only telling him, so there’s a desperation that ‘wait a minute, I’m the only one who’s learning these things and learning these legends.'”


One of these legends shows a man who changes into a thunderbird. It’s one of Morrisseau’s most famous works and it shows this transformation over six canvases. It begins with a man who has a bird perched on his head, as well as one in each arm. Slowly, his eyes get larger, his mouth forms a beak and his arms become wings. This is Morrisseau’s later style, and it resembles stained glass. He uses thick black lines to create an intricate design of colors and shapes.


Greg Hill curated the Morrisseau show for Canada’s national gallery. It’s now on display at the McMichael Gallery north of Toronto and it will be in New York City in January. Hill says the artist’s later works contain a message for everyone, not just members of his own community.


“He’s saying that we all exist here on mother earth and we need to respect that, those interrelationships.”


That message is something that visitor Yvette Debain says she could see in Morrisseau’s work.


“Very spiritual. That’s why it touches me because I believe also that we’re all part of a creation, and the spirit, you can say God, is in all the creation. It’s not separate.”


Morrisseau’s guardian, Gabe Vadas, says that when the artist returned to his hometown many years later, he was surprised to find many people who had gone back to the native traditions, and many told him that his paintings had inspired them to do so. Now, he hopes that with this major exhibit, more folks will be touched by his message.


For the Environment Report, I’m Karen Kelly.

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Adirondack Man

As in so many rural areas, the culture of the Adirondack Mountains is
in decline. The days of hunting and trapping have given way to
condominiums and convenience stores. At one time, the Adirondack
pack-basket was a emblem of this culture. But the number of people who
make them has dwindled. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly
visited one of the few residents keeping this tradition alive:

Counting Birds Becoming Christmas Tradition

Christmas is a time for tradition. For tens of thousands of bird lovers,
the highlight of the season is the National Audubon Society’s annual
Christmas Bird Count. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly
reports on how this century-old tradition has changed many people’s
perspective on birds – and Christmas: