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<misty3 wrote:

Mon, 10 Mar 2003 23:35:48 +1300 (NZDT)

Scores of toxins found in 'average Americans'.

 

RENSE.COM

 

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Chemical Soup

By Alexandra Rome

3-2-3

 

We all learned in high school chemistry that our bodies are just amalgams of

chemicals. But what we're not taught, what few of us grasp, is that

increasingly our bodies are sites for a vast chemical experiment, bombarded

daily by industrial and agricultural toxins. I learned this first hand recently

when I volunteered to be tested for 210 of these chemicals. In the summer of

2000, I was one of a group of nine participants from whom 13 vials of blood

were drawn and a 24 hour urine sample collected, all to be shipped overnight to

labs in Kansas and California for evaluation.

 

The Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a

nonprofit research and education organization, and Commonweal, a nonprofit

health and environmental research institute -- collaborators on the study --

wanted to discover what scientists call our " body burden. " This term describes

the chemicals accumulated in our bodies as a result of simply living in our

world. Our industrialized society leaves its chemical imprint on us.

Industrial, agricultural and waste management practices introduce chemicals

that linger in food, air, water, and soil and enter our bodies through

breathing, drinking, and eating. Chemicals in consumer products can contaminate

us directly.

 

At about the same time we were being tested, the Centers for Disease Control

and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta was conducting the second in a series of body

burden studies on 2,500 individuals. Unlike us, those participants remained

anonymous and never learned which of the 116 chemicals they were tested for

remained inside them. Our group wanted to put a human face to the numbers.

 

This is my test result: I have measurable levels of 86 out of the 210

chemicals, including 27 different compounds from the chemical groups PCB and

dioxin, both considered among the most toxic of environmental contaminants.

(The manufacture of PCBs was banned in the United States in 1976 because of

concern for its effects on human health. Dioxins are byproducts of the

manufacture and burning of products that contain chlorine.) To put this number

into context: there are over 75,000 chemicals licensed for commercial use; over

2,000 new synthetic chemicals are registered every year; the Environmental

Protection Agency (EPA) has tallied close to 10,000 chemical ingredients in

cosmetics, food and consumer products. 210 is a very small number compared to

the total number of industrial chemicals out there in our world.

 

In 1998, US industries reported manufacturing 6.5 trillion pounds of 9,000

different chemicals, and in 2000, major American companies -- not even counting

the smaller ones -- dumped 7.1 billion pounds of 650 industrial chemicals into

our air and water. Considering that out of these vast numbers we were tested

for only 210, we can probably surmise that the actual number of manufactured

chemicals in our bodies is far greater than our results show -- in the many

hundreds, if not thousands. Very few of these chemicals were in our bodies or

environment just 75 years ago.

 

How do I feel about knowing that I have all these chemicals in my body? Despite

the fact that I've spent most of my adult life working on environment and

public health issues, and in an intellectual sense I expected the results,

seeing the lists of chemicals written out -- heavy metals like lead and

methylmercury, organophosphate and organochlorine pesticides, numerous furans

that are pollutant byproducts of industry, volatile and semivolatile chemicals

that are widely used in consumer products like gasoline, paints, glues and fire

retardants -- was just shocking. I secretly harbored the hope that I would find

I didn't have much of the bad stuff in me. After all, I have been privileged to

live a " clean " life: I haven't worked in factories or lived in heavily

industrial areas; I've had access to good, organic food; I'm well educated and

knowledgeable about the dangers of pesticides and have made a point of not

keeping them in my house. (Though I'm an avid gardener, I haven't used them for

years.) What I discovered is that we are all in this chemical soup together.

While the levels of toxins in our bodies may differ depending on circumstances,

environmental chemicals don't discriminate.

 

These findings gave new and pointed meaning to terms that I've heard for years:

toxic, persistent, and bio-accumulative. One example is the chemical Mirex, an

organochlorine pesticide. I became fixated on Mirex because I was the only one

in our group to have a measurable level of it. Mirex was banned for use in the

US in 1976 -- 26 years ago, the year the second of my three daughters was born.

Manufactured by the Allied Chemical Corporation, it was until then used as an

insecticide and fire retardant. I have no idea when or where I came in contact

with it. Here's what the Environmental Working Group found out about Mirex: " As

a class, organochlorine pesticides are toxic, persistent, bio-accumulative and

lipophilic. This means that organochlorines build up and are stored in fatty

tissues and fluids, such as breast milk, and can be passed on to fetuses and

infants during pregnancy and lactation. " And, chillingly, " Extremely little is

known about the effect of Mirex in humans. "

 

I'm fifty-five years old. My personal health history includes the following

four diagnoses since 1986: SLE (known as lupus), autoimmune thyroid disease,

fibromyalgia, and a rare cardiac syndrome known as Syndrome X. I've had three

breast biopsies, one of which showed a finding of atypical cells that are

usually considered a precursor to breast cancer.

 

Learning of these chemicals in my body has been deeply disturbing. I have many

questions and concerns: How and where was I exposed to each of them? Have they

contributed to the health problems I experience? Had I known, could I have done

anything more to avoid the exposures? Most importantly to me, how much of what

bio-accumulated in me have I, however unwittingly, passed on to my daughters?

As they live in a world with ever increasing numbers of and uses for chemicals,

how will this affect them and their future children, my grandchildren? And why

is it that we know so little about these chemicals and the ongoing, ubiquitous,

low-dose exposures we are all subjected to daily?

 

I am all too well aware that on an individual level we can seldom link specific

health problems to specific exposures. The science is not yet available for

that. However, we do know that the prevalence of many illnesses and diseases - -

including cancers, birth and reproductive system defects, asthma, nervous

system disorders such as autism and attention deficit disorder - - are on the

rise and that environmental factors may play a very significant role in these

increases. Over 50 of the chemicals I tested positive for are known to have

harmful effects on the immune and cardiac systems.

 

Unfortunately, way too little is known about the vast majority of chemicals we

have unleashed into our environment and bodies. There is no information

available on the chemical uses or health effects of over one-third of the

chemicals for which the nine body burden study participants tested positive in

a review of eight standard industry or government references used by the EPA.

The chemical industry continues to claim that low dose exposures to hundreds of

chemicals simultaneously are safe. Yet, for most of the chemicals found in us,

there are almost no studies done on such exposures, much less on related

questions about how they may interact with each other in our bodies, how the

timing of exposure may affect us, or how genetic vulnerability plays into the

mix. It is simply not acceptable for any of us to be participants, through no

choice of our own, in this chemical soup about which we have so little

knowledge.

 

The main reason so little is known is this: companies are under no legal or

regulatory obligation to understand how their products might harm human health,

except in the case of certain chemicals that are ingredients in drugs or food

or used as pesticides. That is also unacceptable. We must have more reliable

scientific information about these chemicals. We must reform the Toxic

Substance Control Act (the nation's chief regulatory statute for commercial

chemicals) and incorporate into it the precautionary principle, which would

require that industries show reasonable certainty no harm will result from

putting chemicals on the market. There is precedent for such a reform --

companies are already required to do this before marketing pesticides. Where

the weight of plausible scientific evidence shows that industrial chemicals are

likely to contribute to diseases, and the benefits of their use don't outweigh

the harmful effects, exposures should be reduced or eliminated. We have to

change our laws and regulatory practices relating to the chemicals pouring into

our world. It's no less important to support independent research and public

health facilities, like the Centers for Disease Control, which will pioneer the

science that must lie behind the decisions we need to make.

 

What drove me to participate in this project was the hope that the cumulative

effect of many efforts like this study would lighten the body burdens my

daughters -- and all of our children -- have to carry.

 

You can find a complete report on our study, information about the chemicals

tested for, as well as profiles of the other eight participants and myself, at

the Environmental Working Group website: www.ewg.org/reports/bodyburden/.

 

The Mount Sinai report is available: Thornton, J.W., McCally, M., and Houlihan,

J., Biomonitoring of Industrial Pollutants: Health and Policy Implications of

the Chemical Body Burden, Public Health Reports, 2002:117: 315-323.

 

The website for Commonweal is www.commonweal.org.

 

Information on the CDC studies is available at: www.cdc.gov/exposurereport/

 

Alexandra Rome was Co-Director of the Sustainable Futures Group at Commonweal,

a nonprofit health and environmental research institute, until 2000. She

remains active in local environmental issues in the San Francisco Bay Area and

Montana.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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