The bottom line

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http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/Basics/bottomline.htm

 

The bottom line

 

 

The central point of the Our Stolen Future is that some man-made chemicals

interfere with the body's own hormones. These compounds find their way into our

bodies through a variety of pathways. They build up over time, often over years.

 

When a woman becomes pregnant, some fraction of her contaminant burden is

transferred to the fetus. When this happens they interfere with the hormonal

signals directing development and thus disrupt fetal growth. Sometimes the

effects are conspicuous, sometimes they are not.

Some of these chemicals alter sexual development. Some undermine intelligence

and behavior. Others make our bodies less resistant to disease. Sometimes the

effects don't appear until a child reaches puberty or afterward, even though the

exposure took place in the womb.

These chemicals pose the greatest hazard in the earliest phases of life because

hormones orchestrate development and because fetal development is exquisitely

sensitive to tiny variations in hormone signals. For a fetus to grow up

according to its genetic blueprint, the right hormone message has to arrive at

the right place in the right amount at the right time.

The emerging science we present in Our Stolen Future is about what happens when

something interferes with the delivery of that message. A signal doesn't arrive

because it is blocked. One that was small becomes large. One that shouldn't have

been there at all shows up nonetheless.

The first nine chapters of the book examine a chain of evidence that extends

from wildlife populations to laboratory experiments to the epidemiology of

exposed groups of people. There's not a lot in these sections that is

controversial.

We are working from a data base of over 4,000 scientific publications. Over 100

scientists have participated directly in deliberations that have produced a

series of consensus statements about the nature of the problem. Many scientists

reviewed their sections of the book word-by-word to ensure that we did not

misrepresent their findings. This is not fringe science.

After we examine in Our Stolen Future the basic science from wildlife, lab

animals and relevant human studies we then ask a larger set of questions.

Given these findings,

given the the uncontested observations that endocrine contaminants are

ubiquitous

and given that at least in some places in the world those background levels

of contamination are within the ranges in which effects are seen in the

laboratory and in people.

given all that, what signals should we look for in human populations?

We could have stopped before this. We knew that going on would be controversial.

But as we thought about the implications of these basic findings and their

potential ramifications, we concluded that the only responsible course was to go

on and find out what science was able, and not able to say, given the current

evidence.

If you have read this section, you will find it replete with all sorts of

cautionary statements, with many comments to the effect that data on one issue

or another are as yet inadequate to reach a judgement. In sum, however, the

weight of the evidence says we have a problem. Human impacts beyond isolated

cases are already demonstrable. They involve impairments to reproduction,

alterations in behavior, diminishment of intellectual capacity, and erosion in

the ability to resist disease. The simple truth is that the way we allow

chemicals to be used in society today means we are performing a vast experiment,

not in the lab, but in the real world, not just on wildlife but on people.

 

 

 

 

 

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