(Day 3 on the THK Blog Tour belongs to the Democracy Cell Project, a website I've been known to frequent from time to time. This is the intro and outro to the Day 3 threader there -- to read the actual Q&A-with-THK portion of the program, visit the DCP blog and view it in its native habitat so I don't have to overwhelm CK by re-posting the whole thing here.)

Teresa Heinz Kerry is no stranger to the spotlight. She's been on stage in front of crowds larger than most of us can even imagine. But as far as she's concerned, her most important work takes place behind the scenes. As head of the Heinz Endowments and the Heinz Family Philanthropies, she has long been a leader in promoting responsible, sustainable social action.

One of Teresa Heinz Kerry's more visible projects is the ongoing Women's Health and the Environment Conference series. This year's keynote conference will be held in Pittsburgh on this coming Friday, April 20, and will feature a number of outstanding speakers, scientists, and activists discussing critical health issues facing women today.

We will be attending the Women’s Health & the Environment: New Science, New Solutions conference and will posting reports about it here at the DCP blog. Today, however, we're also participating in a special 17-stop virtual blog tour (see the complete tour schedule here). And that gave us the opportunity to ask Teresa Heinz Kerry a few questions of particular interest to members of the DCP community:

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[insert main body of Q&A w/ THK here]

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We appreciate Teresa Heinz Kerry taking time to answer questions for our DCP readers as part of this virtual blog tour. Yesterday's stop on the tour was at Light Up The Darkness, and tomorrow's will be at A Dem Fine Woman. The full virtual tour schedule is listed in our introduction to the series here.)

Teresa Heinz Kerry also sat down with a reporter from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for an extended interview this weekend. You can view the full story, complete with MP3 segments of the recorded interview, on the paper's website here. In the course of that interview, she went into more detail about the upcoming Conference on Women’s Health & the Environment:

Dr. Christine Gabriel, hired from Carnegie Mellon University by the Heinz Endowments last year, is fiercely described as a "brilliant engineer," while one of the conference's speakers, John Peterson Myers, is "amazing." A reporter is repeatedly urged to read his book, "Our Stolen Future," about how chemical contaminants interfere with hormones in humans and wildlife. Devra Davis, director of the groundbreaking Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh, is doing a "tremendous job... very important stuff."

At the same time, Mrs. Heinz Kerry seems to know what will catch and hold an audience: Fran Drescher, a cancer survivor and nasal-voiced star of the long-running TV show "The Nanny," will also be speaking about her best-selling book, "Cancer Schmancer." Ms. Drescher carries a lot of credibility with women, Mrs. Heinz Kerry believes, with her compelling story about navigating the health care system and a strong message about prevention.

Cosmetics, too, will be a focus: Jane Houlihan, from the Environmental Working Group, will talk about her organization's Web site, ewg.org, which tells consumers which cosmetics to choose and which to avoid. A recent study by the group showed that children's shampoos contained higher than government-recommended amounts of the cancer-causing agent para-dioxane.

"These are the needless and horrific things we are doing to ourselves," said Mrs. Heinz Kerry, who noted the relatively thin body of research that exists on the environmental causes of cancer, and the medical establishment's tendency to stress treatment over prevention.

"We do this to ourselves, nobody's doing it to us. We've got to change direction and change attitudes. There are chemicals, there are products that we spray in a room, products we put on our bodies, things that we eat, things we take or things we drink, like water. It's the whole realm of what touches our skin, which is our largest organ, after all."