Dr. Rosalie Bertell

On Earth Day—which falls on April 22 this year—the nation celebrates and works to protect the Earth’s natural bounty. But there are those, like Dr. Rosalie Bertell, GNSH, who work toward that end every hour of every day.

Bertell, a native of Buffalo and a Grey Nun of the Sacred Heart, is a world-renowned expert in the field of radiation, and she’s made it her life’s mission to uncover the health costs of our nation’s—and the world’s—obsession with a lifestyle that is killing the environment. In 35 years as an environmental epidemiologist, activist and whistleblower, she’s fought for the rights of countless people around the globe exposed to radiation and pollution, including here in Western New York, and battled the military over its use of depleted uranium in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Last year, she was one of 1,000 women symbolically nominated for a Nobel Prize. She also founded the International Institute of Concern for Public Health, an organization dedicated to helping communities assess and improve their environmental health status, and wrote a book, Planet Earth: The Latest Weapon of War.

AV spoke with Bertell from the Grey Nuns’ Motherhouse in Yardley, Pennsylvania about her life and Western New York.

What does an environmental epidemiologist do? “Epidemiology is the study of epidemics. Environmental epidemiology means that you’re looking at non-living causes, like chemicals and radiation—mechanical things.”

How’d you end up in this field? “My Ph.D. is in biometrics, which is applications of mathematics to biological and biomedical studies, so I’ve really been working in this field for 35 years. I started at Roswell Park for nine years when I worked on a very large leukemia study. It was then that I began to realize that there were lots of things in our environment that were causing disease that weren’t bacteria or viruses. There was no such discipline at the time I went to university.”

Were you one of the first people in this field? “I’d say that Dr. Alice Stewart was one of the first, and I knew her. She was in England, and chose to work with pregnant women. That’s when she made the discovery that x-raying pregnant women increases instances of leukemia in the babies. That was way back in ’54. That really started people looking at things other than bacteria and viruses.”

Tell me about your work at Roswell. “I was working on a leukemia study for nine years. That was really how I discovered the problems with low dose radiation, like medical X-rays.”

And you found that no dose of radiation is a “safe dose.” “Correct. What I found was the low doses of radiation accelerate the aging process on a cellular level. Radiation has always been associated with cancer, which is an old-age disease in adults. So what happens is cancer occurs at a younger age. The industry was looking at it as if it was causing cancer, and they didn’t see that as a secondary effect. So basically they ignored what I was saying. It’s because the aging isn’t perceptible. You don’t feel like you’re getting older. I published in a peer-reviewed journal in 1978. They really ignored it more than anything else.”

Why did you eventually leave Roswell? “I left in a dispute over what I could say at a Congressional hearing. They were having Congressional hearings on overuse of medical X-rays. At that time, for instance, they even had X-rays in the shoe stores to see if the shoes fit. Because I had published research on it, I wanted to talk about that research, and there was some pressure on me not to talk about it, so I quit. Some good things came out of that hearing. They stopped the shoe store use and also stopped demanding chest X-rays whenever anybody entered the hospital. Also, they used to do it at most employment—every year the employer would x-ray all the staff, and they stopped doing that.”

Where’d you go after Roswell? “I worked in Buffalo for two years, and then I was invited to go up to Toronto in 1980. So I worked out of Toronto for the next 22 years. I started the International Institute of Concern for Public Health in 1984.”

What kind of work did you do at first? “Well, I started working with communities who were exposed. I really started at the Love Canal, because when I was at Roswell, we connected both with the Love Canal and West Valley. I went from one disaster to the other. Rather than just do the mathematical analysis of other people’s data, I would actually work with the people, and try to help them restore the best health they could and get as much relief as they can from the pollution, you know, the water and the air and the food and the land.

“A lot of waste was deposited in Western New York. It started to be known at West Valley, and then they discovered the Lake Ontario Ordinance Works in Lewiston, where something like 95 percent of the world’s radium was stored in an open silo that leaked radon gas. And the Tonawanda area, the Lewiston area—all of those were part of the Manhattan Project, because the uranium came from Canada and it crossed into the States at Niagara Falls and they processed it there. Even the Love Canal had a uranium pile near the school.”

Have you done epidemiological studies in WNY? “Yes. I’ve found that cancer levels are, in general, significantly higher in that Tonawanda, North Tonawanda, Niagara Falls, Lewiston area than in the rest of the state.”

Tell me how we trade off health for money. “I think most decisions are made on an economic basis, not on a health basis. As a society, we trade our health for different goals. You have students staying up all night and cramming, and you have people using coffee to stay awake and earn more money. Things like that are common examples of our society routinely trading off health for money. I think it’s occurring now in the big decisions; military always takes priority over health.

“I try to make it visible, because the way we do this tradeoff of health is not to look at it. I show the number of babies that are affected, or the young people that can’t study because they have attention deficit, or the asthma rates going up. Almost any physical indicator we have is going in a negative direction right now. Our health is not improving.”

You often talk about the difference between civil rights and human rights. “The United Nations, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, drafted the human rights covenant after WWII, which is in four parts. The civil rights include things like the right to vote, the right to assembly, freedom of speech; things that have to do with running a civic society. The human rights are the right to life for workers, the right to clean air and unpolluted water, the right to housing and so on. The US has recognized only the civil and political rights, not the human rights. So you have no right to housing, for example, in the United States, or food or medical care.”

What should we all keep in mind this Earth Day? “I think the most important lesson people can take home is to care about their air, their water and their land. That’s our food and our life-support system, and it seems kind of crazy to destroy your life-support system.”