Poisoned by Alan Bell

Author:Alan Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2017-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

11 • A FOUNDATION IS BORN

BY THE TIME I SAID good-bye to my marriage and my sister, I felt as though I’d been on an odyssey littered with countless obstacles. But there was a bright side: struggling to solve my own medical mystery enabled me to piece together a global view of environmental health.

Despite being trapped inside the bubble, I knew that I wasn’t alone. Based on reading news articles and scientific journals, and on my conversations with top clinicians and other victims of toxic exposures worldwide, I knew with certainty that millions of people were being harmed every day by environmental poisons found in their homes, schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods. I was terrified.

My conversations with scientists taught me that all disease stems from interactions between our genes and environmental exposures. You could take a hundred people, pump them full of toxic chemicals, follow them for twenty years, and discover that each of them will acquire a different disease (or none at all), depending on each person’s genetic predisposition. One easy example: a husband smokes three packs a day and never becomes ill, but his wife develops lung cancer from breathing in his secondhand smoke.

So far, few scientific studies have addressed this genetic-environmental axis. Pharmaceutical companies don’t fund these studies because they haven’t figured out how to make money by producing drugs to treat environmentally induced illnesses. Charities are raising money for scientific research aimed at studying various diseases, but they rarely address how such illnesses are linked to common environmental factors.

I was overwhelmed by this huge void. The only possible way to fill it was to start my own charity.

Soon after Judi’s death, I placed a call to my brother, Bobby, and explained everything I’d learned. One thing I’d always respected about Bobby was his ability to turn an idea into a successful business—he had built the Banana Boat company into a corporate giant, with retail sales topping $95 million dollars in 1992.

“I want to start a charity to fight environmental illness through research and education,” I told him. “We can fund scientific research to help treat and cure disease. We can also educate people about ways to modify their own environments to prevent illness and death. Nobody’s doing anything about this, Bobby! Wouldn’t it be great if we could take my misfortune and turn it into a benefit for others? What do you think? Would you be open to funding something like this?”

Bobby, bless him, said, “I’m in. Tell me what you need.”

I set things in motion quickly from there. After so many painful losses, it felt good to have a new purpose that extended beyond my tiny, glass-enclosed life.

• • •

By March 1995, Bobby and I had opened an office in Tucson for our new Environmental Health Foundation. In addition to funding the charity, Bobby brought in his top publicist from Banana Boat to get the media ball rolling. Meanwhile, I worked on everything else.

My long-term goal was to help prevent environmentally linked disease on a global level.

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