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  • From: tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] Toxic threats to children---NOW, not in Never Never Land
  • Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:08:43 -0500


tvoivozhd---Sorry, all you mindless anti-taxers and unthinking Libertarians---as long as air currents travel around the globe carrying toxic chemicals (most of which did not exist sixty five years ago) you cannot and will not protect your kids from airborne poisons---and will not even reduce them except from (groan) collective action by nasty old socialists forcing you (gasp) to pay your share of the burden.




Save the Fetus
In a world awash in pollutants, what exactly is our obligation to protect the health of the unborn?

by Karen F. Schmidt

When Kim Hooper gives a public talk about his work at the California Department of Toxic Substances Control, he flashes a slide of his baby granddaughter. “We’ve given her the best genes we can, but what about her environment?” he asks the audience. “Already she’s had an early experience far different than my own.” After all, Hooper points out, her life in the womb began with exposure to myriad chemicals that weren’t around sixty-five years ago.

It’s a reality that makes Hooper and many others nervous. Today, about 2,500 different chemicals are used in high volume, but basic information about their potential effects on human development is still being compiled. Many toxic villains have been unmasked in the last three decades, including DDT, PCBs, dioxins, lead, mercury, and more recently, phthalates (plasticizers) and PBDEs (flame retardants). As researchers use new tools for measuring trace levels of contaminants in our bodies, the issue of chemical safety is again in the spotlight. Studies using “biomonitoring”—the testing of body tissues and fluids—are revealing that we all harbor a cocktail of chemicals, some of which were banned long ago.

Although it’s difficult to know whether the pollutants in our tissues are causing harm, we do know where to look for the first signs of trouble. “Fetuses are the population we think are the most sensitive to chemical pollutants,” says Hooper. That’s because a small disturbance in the highly choreographed process of development can have profound and long-lasting effects on a baby, showing up immediately as birth defects or later as subtle dysfunctions of the nervous, immune, and reproductive systems. Scientists believe that environmental factors play a role in at least three percent and as much as twenty-five percent of all developmental defects in children, according to a National Academy of Sciences report published in 2000.

Although the placenta was once thought to protect the fetus, researchers now know that many harmful substances—drugs, alcohol, toxic byproducts from cigarette smoke—pass through. Recent evidence suggests the chemicals a pregnant woman is exposed to in her environment can and do reach her fetus, Hooper says. Even chemicals encountered years ago can come back to haunt; for instance, DDT and PCBs stored in fat tissues slowly trickle into the bloodstream. But there are also plenty of new contaminants to deal with as women of childbearing age ingest mercury in their tuna fish sandwiches, breathe solvents wafting out of cosmetics, and absorb particles coated with flame retardants while sitting on treated couch cushions. The big question is: How much is reaching their babies? As part of a study investigating fetal exposures to flame retardants, Jane Williams, director of California Communities Against Toxics, is recruiting 120 new mothers to give breast milk samples, which she sends to Hooper’s lab group in Berkeley for analysis for PBDEs. The chemicals— which have been added to everything from electronics to drapery to vehicle interiors— have recently turned up in house dust, river sediment, foods from the grocery store, and wildlife, as well as people. Laboratory studies of mice found that low doses of PBDEs caused offspring to suffer permanent defects in their ability to learn and remember, and rats showed delayed sexual development. Since a fetus’s exposure is generally the same as the mother’s, Williams says the early breast milk samples will reveal the dose of PBDEs these California babies got in the womb.

Such biomonitoring studies are finally possible due to advances in mass spectroscopy that allow researchers to detect many different chemicals in just a few drops of blood, urine, or breast milk. The analysis is also cheaper than ever, so researchers can run experiments more often and look for more chemicals. Indeed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now take blood and urine samples every two years from 2,500 adults across the country and test them for 116 chemical contaminants, up from twentyseven in 1999. The third “National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals” is due to be released in June.

Still, the meaning of these measurements—often in parts per billion, or the equivalent of one drop of water in an Olympic-size swimming pool—remains an open question. As the CDC puts it, “The measurement of an environmental chemical in a person’s blood or urine does not by itself mean that the chemical causes disease.” Moreover, the CDC’s study reveals nothing about sources of exposures. It was not designed to identify geographic clusters of high exposure—near chemical waste dumps, for example— nor was it meant to look for linkages to particular products, such as hair dyes. The CDC’s goal is simply to get baseline information about how much and what kinds of chemicals typically reside in the bodies of a broad range of Americans, and to follow trends over time, says John Osterloh, chief medical officer of the environmental health laboratory at the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health.

The CDC’s approach to biomonitoring gets a supportive nod from the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a trade organization representing ninety percent of U.S. chemical producers. Still, spokesman Chris VandenHeuvel wonders what should be done with the CDC data. “We’re concerned whenever someone jumps to the conclusion that finding very small amounts of chemicals in the body is reason to worry,” he says. “There is a level of anxiety that comes from publishing biomonitoring results.”

Many environmental organizations—including the Environmental Working Group, Greenpeace, and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)—are indeed tapping into this fear. For example, the WWF tested the blood of European legislators while it lobbied them to support a European Union proposal called REACH, a new system for regulating chemical safety. “Blood testing is a good way to draw attention to what REACH is trying to accomplish,” says Clifton Curtis, director of the WWF’s Global Toxics program. “It shows directly that we are all contaminated— and so why don’t we know more about these chemicals that are out there and entering our bloodstreams through air, water, and food?”

Clearly, biomonitoring illustrates the need to investigate whether environmental exposures are causing harm, and some researchers are doing just this. In 1998, for instance, the Columbia University Center for Children’s Environmental Health began examining the impacts of common prenatal exposures on children. In one study of 314 infants, researchers measured the levels of two household insecticides— chlorpyrifos and diazinon— in blood drawn from the umbilical cord at birth. They found that babies prenatally exposed to the highest combined level of insecticides weighed a half-pound less on average and were significantly shorter. Babies born after the EPA banned chlorpyrifos in December 2000 had markedly lower insecticide levels in cord blood, and the effect on fetal growth disappeared. “The benefit of this regulatory action was almost immediate,” says Frederica Perera, who directs the center and led the study. Still, there is much more to be known. An encouraging sign came last November, when the federal government launched a project to track the health of 100,000 children from the womb to young adulthood. The hope is that the National Children’s Study will answer critical questions about whether children are being harmed by exposures to pesticides, plastics, and heavy metals. In addition, researchers will try to assess whether such environmental agents are contributing to specific conditions, including autism, asthma, obesity, diabetes, schizophrenia, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The ambitious study, however, comes with a $2.7 billion price tag—with funding approved so far only to set up study centers and begin recruiting participants—and it will take twenty-one years to complete.

In the meantime, there’s some disagreement over how to ensure that children are protected from toxic exposures. Many environmental groups want to apply the precautionary principle to chemical regulation. Essentially, they would ask industry to prove that chemicals are safe, rather than make citizens prove they are harmful. That’s the idea behind the EU’s REACH proposal, which environmentalists believe could become a global standard.

The ACC, however, prefers a cost-benefit approach to regulation, and is fighting REACH. The group is working with U.S. embassy officials in Europe to make the case that the new system would cost too much to implement. ACC President and CEO Greg Lebedev says, “The world doesn’t want or need European regulatory colonialism, and the EU’s trading partners won’t buy a scheme that puts them at a competitive disadvantage and is more complicated than a Rubik’s Cube.”

Still, calls to better protect fetuses and children from toxic exposures resonate with many people—often for spiritual reasons. “There’s a sacred bond between a mother and a child,” says Jane Williams. “Telling women that the sanctity of that relationship is being tainted by the chemical industry is very hard. They get really upset.”

Indeed, the urge to protect our offspring arises not just from biology, but also from religion. Spiritual traditions are built on a respect for life, says Daniel C. Maguire, a professor of religious ethics at Marquette University. “Many religions view children as a symbol of the most powerless people, as well as the glue that holds society together,” he says. “As a principle of ethics, whatever is good for kids is good; whatever is bad for kids is ungodly.”

Yet the same moral argument for protecting children can be extended to anyone who unfairly bears the burden of pollution—be they African Americans residing next to power plants or Pacific Islanders living with radioactive fallout. “People should have an equal shot at a clean environment,” says Manuel Pastor, founding director of the Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians came together two years ago to form the California Interfaith Partnership for Children’s Health and the Environment. The group spreads the word in religious communities about the impact of synthetic chemicals on health, and gives people practical tips to reduce exposure in homes, schools, and houses of worship, says director Suellen Lowry. Members also encourage support for state legislation, such as one bill requiring more detailed labeling of personal care products— shampoos, nail polish, lotions—that contain chemicals linked to cancer or birth defects. “As people of faith, we are called to care for the vulnerable,” says Lowry, “and we ask our policymakers to heed this call, too.”






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