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>> 139 5 Genomics and the Polluted Body In 2002 I attended a conference at Columbia University titled “Human Genetics and Environmental Justice: A Community Dialogue.” Sponsored by the environmental justice organization West Harlem Environmental Action, the conference brought together geneticists, public health specialists , lawyers, and community activists to explain the science of genomics and discuss its social impact. It marked an important moment in the history of the environmental justice movement by having long-time activists directly engage a scientific discipline other than epidemiology. The geneenvironment model informed the presentations of the speakers in a wellmeaning attempt to elucidate the mechanisms of diseases like asthma that do not affect all groups equally. Nevertheless, I had to wonder: do we really need to know how gene variants predispose someone to have an adverse response to cockroach droppings? Shouldn’t we just get rid of the cockroaches? Indeed, why did West Harlem Environmental Action feel the need to hold such a conference? Since the sequencing of the human genome in the late 1990s, genomics has played an increasingly large role in US public health research. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) both rely on the expertise of geneticists in order to classify risk among discrete populations of susceptible individuals. The CDC, in particular, considers the distribution of susceptibility alleles (genetic mutations that increase one’s vulnerability to environmental toxins) to be a key area of public health research and policy. This science, which I will call environmental genomics,1 rests on several fundamental assumptions about heredity, risk, and the body. Taking breast cancer research as a case study, I argue in this chapter that 140 > 141 contrast to the situation in the European Union, which is much more likely to require safety testing before commercialization. Related to this is the widely accepted belief in the United States that it is up to consumers to force industry to replace toxic chemicals with safer alternatives. Lax environmental regulations, it is believed, can be circumvented through consumer-driven creation of markets for safer products. An ethos of individualized, privatized fields of action ignores and thereby exacerbates the class, race, and gender dimensions of health disparities . Environmental justice activists have shown, for example, that dirty industries are concentrated in poor communities of color.5 Citing evidence that dates back to the early 1970s, Robert Bullard6 notes that a strong correlation exists between the conditions associated with political and economic disadvantage and disease.7 An early study of the 1,000 residents (all of whom were black) of Triana, Alabama—a community contaminated with DDT and PCBs—revealed the highest human levels of DDT ever recorded.8 Stress, lack of access to healthy foods, social isolation , and other factors make residents in such communities more vulnerable to diseases associated with exposure to environmental contaminants. Moreover, safer alternatives to many products are not available for purchase in these areas or are simply cost-prohibitive. In short, these communities are not well served by the pervasive and celebrated expansion of the market into public health and medicine, an expansion that is incompatible with the notion that social change, much of which can be effected at the policy level, is needed to correct the current state of affairs. Although much attention has been paid in recent years to the problem of health disparities—for example, differences in the incidence of and mortality from breast cancer between white and black women—research in this field does not necessarily draw attention to the limits of the current regulatory structure and its increasing reliance on market principles. In part, this is because of a latent biologism that health disparities scholars can and do rely on. Biologism has, historically, worked in the service of free-market norms, explaining the social order of things as the natural order of things, belying the need to correct for the maldistribution of resources . Some health disparities research contributes to the biologism of race in particular and, by extension, its connection to class. As I argued in the last chapter, drawing on the work of Janet Shim and Merlin Chowkwanyun , when race is seen as a risk factor in epidemiological research, it remains insufficiently explained at best, susceptible to reification at worst. A pervasive lack of historical perspective in health disparities research 142 > 143 that tend to be inherited unchanged. Because people share haplotypes, researchers can compare and contrast the haplotypes shared by those with a particular disease and by those...

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