Thank you so much. This is the luxurious, Vignoli-built, wonderful convention center, and I m used to doing it at the Heinz Auditorium, where we are cozy. And I kind of feel a little lost. Thank goodness the mic works.

Thank you so much, so much, for being here again. Some of you, it s probably the tenth conference you've been to. Some of you are first-timers, I m sure. And some of you have been here intermittently. And I'm grateful that you're here.

Are we living in a chemical stew? I m pleased to see you all, two thousand strong . . . .

And it is a testament to the growing evidence of the connection between women s health and our exposures to industrial chemicals, as well as the awareness of the vital role of women and what they do - as advocates for change. So we begin it with a question. We ask if women are living in a chemical stew, and if the chemical compounds around us and in us are damaging our bodies, our bodies, our health, our minds, our chance for healthy aging, and of course and therefore, damaging the impacts even on our own personal economies and on the national economy.

The evidence shows us that we do indeed live in a world so infused with industrial chemicals that they have made their way into our own tissues and into the bodies of those we love, into our fat, our blood, our bones, our brains, and even our breast milk. We know now that what is called the body burden of industrial pollutants, the pollution in people, affects every person in this world, from conception to the end of life. And as women, we are more susceptible to certain chemicals, and our chemical exposures have consequences for our children. For example, we all know because it s been spoken in the campaign about this, about smoking dangers and secondary smoking. And people, by and large, have been responsible. But this gives us a special responsibility to raise questions about how pollutants affect our health and the health of our families, and to lead the fight for change.

We live in a country, as Jeff said, where every day the government approves an average of two new chemicals, industrial chemicals for commercial use. Eighty percent of those chemicals - that win approval within three weeks - do so with or without safety studies. Today we have 80,000 unique industrial chemicals registered for use. It is truly an impressive arsenal of commercial creativity, but we know very little about what risks these chemicals may pose.

There's no requirement that chemicals be tested before they reach the market as components of products people use every day. I'll give you an example. In 1997, the 3M Corporation detected Scotchguard in human blood, not just in their workers, where they'd been finding it for years, but in samples from US blood banks. Should that come as a surprise? Scotchguard in our blood? It had been in our homes for 50 years, after all. So follow-up testing has detected Scotchguard and related Teflon, Stainmaster, and Scotchban chemicals in blood samples from more than 3,000 people the world over. And in the past five years, scientists have found that these perfluoro chemicals (permanent fluoro chemicals, as they are called) in bald eagles, rain, cormorants, the Great Lakes, Alaskan polar bears, and so on, and in the blood of 598 children from 23 states and the District of Columbia. These chemicals are linked to cancer and birth defects and other health concerns. They are permanent (perfluoro carbons), they never break down in the environment, and they are persistent in our bodies for years. And that s just one ingredient in this stew.

The government has tallied 10,500 chemicals in personal care products alone (facial things, hair, nail polish, etc.). More than 3,200 of those chemicals are added to food, and 500 pesticides.

In 2003, the US industries released (listen to this) 4.4 billion pounds of 650 chemicals into rivers, streams, our land, and our air. And now scientists are finding flame retardants in our house dust.

They're finding estrogenic wastes, which means chemicals that in your body behave like hormones, but they're also persistent. They are finding those estrogenic wastes in our rivers and streams, in cosmetics, preservatives in human breast tumor tissue, and industrial plasticizers in urine. And I think the name for those is phthalates. And two conferences ago, we spoke a lot about phthalates. Phthalates were also, by the way, what made some of the rubber toy products that become malleable, soft enough but hard enough. And children would chew on them.

Scientists are also finding pollution in the last place you'd want it to be: in the womb of a mother. When the umbilical cord blood from ten US newborns was examined recently, an average of 200 industrial pollutants were found, including pesticides and flame retardants. And also perfluoro chemicals used in stain and greaseproof coatings for carpets, clothing, and food packaging. In a second study, the researchers found detergents and surfactants and persistent hormone-mimicking fragrance chemicals in samples from newborn European babies. While a woman can shield a baby from some chemical harm, these new studies show us that this barrier breaks down at some point in the face of the uniquely modern challenge and the amount of industrial chemicals. And while our own adult immune systems and metabolic pathways may reduce the risk of our lifelong exposures to industrial chemicals, we have evidence that our protective barriers aren't enough. One woman in three will develop cancer over the course of her life. One woman in seven will be diagnosed with breast cancer. One in four will suffer from depression. Five to ten percent of all couples are not fertile. Autoimmune diseases are on the rise, and 75 percent of them occur in women.

I am grateful for cancer research and new therapies. But is it good enough to say that far fewer children today die of leukemia, even though so many more still get it? What about the suffering, the cost, and the long-term impacts of treatment in children? We don't know all of it. Is this the price we pay for a world soundly reliant on and deeply committed and contaminated (I should say) to industrial chemicals?

Not every person is at equal risk, and there are cultural vulnerabilities. . . . African American girls age 2 to 8 grew premature breast tissue when they were exposed to hair care products marketed to people of color, which contained estrogenic chemicals. I don't know why they would put hormones in a product for hair, but they do. The premature sexual development of these children ended when they stopped using the products.

And there are genetic vulnerabilities as well. New research from the University of Arizona shows that autistic children are far more likely to have a genetic change that diminishes their ability to excrete mercury. Their work may reopen the debate on potential links between autism and thimoserol, which is a mercury-based preservative in children vaccines. And by the way, a doctor that gives children vaccines, if asked by the consumer, by the parent, to give non-mercury, non-thimoserol vaccines, should give it to them. But how many mothers or fathers know about this, and know that they have a right to ask? And so for one dollar cost per vaccine, they make the vaccine with it instead of without it. It s not necessary, and it's really criminal.

Despite the number of vulnerable Americans, in the 1998 EPA survey of 3,000 chemicals used in this country, the heaviest use, at rates of more than 1 million pounds per year (our high production volumes, they re called), found that 43 percent of these 3,000 chemicals completely lacked basic toxicity studies. Forty-three percent.  Say if you had 1,000, that would be 430 not studied at all, and each one and every one of them being used at more than a million pounds a year.  No safety data. These are the chemicals most likely to be in the environment, in our homes and in our bodies. So the EPA is working with industry to begin filling these gaps, and that's a start.

The Child, Worker and Consumer Safe Chemicals Act, introduced in the Senate last July, co-sponsored by my husband, is another very hopeful development. It links modern safety assessment to the imperative of evaluation first [of] the chemicals scientists are already finding in people, including in newborn babies. But we still have a public health system that allows untested chemicals onto the market, that sets no safety standards for chemical-based consumer products, and that cripples the Environmental Protection Agency to the point that they can't even ban asbestos, which still kills 10,000 people every year.

Since we face our own unique vulnerabilities from exposures, I believe that it s natural that women lead the fight to change the system, and to discover what role our exposures to industrial chemicals plays in the spread of diseases like breast cancer and diabetes. As women, we can no longer behave as victims. We can and we must change the debate. We're not just more likely, or increasingly likely, to suffer from chemical-related diseases. We're increasingly in the positions of power too, power in companies and in public office, where our decisions can reverberate widely. We make most of the purchasing decisions in our homes, and this money talks to corporate America. And as caretakers of our families, we have a unique and deep interest in learning the answers to important questions that we will raise today.

 *Portions of the transcript were edited or shortened for readability.