SIX years ago, Abi Pass was told her seven-month-old daughter Ambra wouldn’t walk, talk or sit up due to her tiny body’s high levels of toxicity.
Today, she’s a bright and engaging youngster in her first year at primary school, happy to run to the living room to fetch a jigsaw puzzle she’d completed to show me.
With feeding difficulties as a baby, and suffering chronic colic, doctors were at a loss, so Abi had Ambra’s hair analysed.
It came back showing levels of lead, cadmium and aluminium at 50 to 100 times above acceptable levels. A second test in the US confirmed the findings of the first.
The flaking lead paint of their rented house was blamed: the family of five moved, and began an intensive regime of naturopathy and chiropractic treatment, which set Ambra and her brothers on the path to a happy, healthy life.
• Abi and Ambra Pass.
Now Abi has teamed up with like-minded mums, including Dr Fiona Ibach, Julie Griffiths (masters in cancer research), and yoga teacher and shiatsu therapist Amber Queern, to set up Super Chem-Free Kids.
They hope to raise awareness about the chemicals in products used daily, from cleaners, soaps, shampoos and toothpaste to food.
“My message is not to be complacent, check all the boxes.”
With Australia’s weak labelling laws, working out what’s good and what’s not is a minefield, so the group is holding a seminar to shed some light.
“The speakers will discuss toxicity issues affecting our children, chemicals found in daily use products, effects on the earth and our environment and solutions and suggestions, with some fun audience interaction thrown in too, making their own cleaning product to take home on the night,” Abi says.
Over the past 50 years 70,000–10,000 different chemicals have been introduced into our world, she tells the Herald.
A 2005 US study found 287 different industrial chemicals in umbilical cord blood of infants, 180 known carcinogens, 217 toxic to the rain and nervous system and 208 known to cause birth defect and abnormal development, she says.
The seminar is on at The Grove Community Learning Centre, in Peppermint Grove, Thursday May 12, 7–9pm. Tix $25. For more info or to book call Abi Pass on 0424 061 081.
by JENNY D’ANGER
