What's in you?
Part one of a three part series
Douglas Fischer - STAFF WRITER
www.insidebayarea.com
In a pioneering study, we tested a Bay Area family for a suite of chemical pollutants. The results stunned
even scientists.
A casual observer of Rowan Hammond Holland sees a little towhead, devilishly cute, who grins impishly
while tossing food at the family dog.
A pediatrician sees a kid who's a bit small for his age: 30-odd inches tall, 22 pounds, about 10th percentile
for 20-month-old boys.
But not even his mother could guess what's in his blood: flame retardants, at concentrations higher than
measured almost anywhere in the world for someone not handling the stuff for a living.
He's a typical kid from a typical family, picked for an Oakland Tribune investigation of chemical pollutants
in our bodies.
The surprising result, scientists say, suggests infants and toddlers have vastly higher levels of some
chemical pollutants than health officials suspect — or even consider safe.
But no one can say. Rowan is the only toddler, at least in the United States, who's been tested for such
things, despite evidence these compounds taint our blood, our food, our house dust, our kids.
This is our "body burden" our chemical legacy, picked up from our possessions, passed to our children and
sown across the environment. It's the result, scientists say, of 50 years of increasing reliance on synthetic
chemicals for every facet of our daily lives.
Only recently have regulators grasped its scope. Health officials have yet to fully comprehend its
consequence.
We are all, in a sense, subjects of an experiment, with no way to buy your way out, eat your way out or
exercise your way out. We are guinea pigs when it comes to the unknown long-term threat these chemicals
pose in our bodies and, in particular, our children.
In the first study of its kind, Rowan and his family had their blood, hair and urine tested for a suite of
chemical pollutants thought to be ubiquitous in our environment.
The tests showed PCBs, plasticizers, mercury, lead and cadmium in each family member. Chemicals used
to make Teflon and GoreTex contaminated their blood. Mikaela, Rowan's 5-year-old sister, had more
dibutyl phthalate — a plasticizer found in nail polish and cosmetics — in her urine than 90 percent of the
328 kids age 6-11 tested so far in the United States.
The shock was the family's level of a class of flame retardants — polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or
PBDEs — used in everything from TV casings to rugs to foam cushions. In the United States, where levels
are 10 to 100 times higher than the rest of the world, the average adult is thought to have 36 parts per
billion in their blood.
A cocktail mixed at that concentration would have 36 drops of gin in a rail tank car of tonic. Rowan's mom,
Michele Hammond, had 138 ppb. His dad, Jeremiah Holland, 102. His sister, 490. And Rowan: 838 ppb.
Scientists start to see behavioral changes in lab rats at 300 ppb.
"This is a very serious warning of very small children being heavily exposed," said Aake Bergman,
professor of environmental chemistry at Stockholm University in Sweden and one of the world's foremost
experts on human exposure to fire retardants. "We may have many more people being exposed at similar
levels." Proportions will vary, and indeed, a follow-up test of the Hammond Hollands found lower — but
still alarming — PBDE levels in the children. A similar chemical stew can be found in every adult and
child in the country, scientists say. The exposure comes courtesy of our lifestyle, in which synthetic
chemistry imbues the modern world with convenience beyond that of any generation in history.
We make perfume from petroleum and preserve food in plastic. Our chances of dying in a building fire are
almost nil. We clean bathrooms without scrubbing, spill coffee without worry of a stain.
Yet these modern wonders come with a price. As synthetic chemicals have saturated our lives, so too have
they permeated our bodies.
We don't know the effect it has on our health. But scientists do have suspicions.
Autism, once an affliction of 1 in 10,000 children, today is the scourge of 1 in 166.
Childhood asthma rates have similarly exploded. And one in 12 couples of reproductive age in the United
States is infertile.
One may not cause the other; to draw such links remains, for now, beyond the grasp of science. Industry
and other scientists say exposure remains well below levels considered harmful — the Hammond Holland's
numbers notwithstanding. Our ability to detect these compounds, invisible even five years ago, has
outstripped our ability to interpret the results.
Publishing body burden data, in other words, does little but make people worry.
But if it was your 2-year-old, would you want to know?
------MONDAY NIGHT at the Hammond Holland's Berkeley home, and life is quiet.
Jeremiah, 35, a high school photography teacher and coach of the school's mountain biking team, is away
leading a team cycling class at the Berkeley YMCA.
Mikaela started kindergarten last fall and has mastered the alphabet, which she proudly shows off: big A's
and little c's, small d's and capital Z's, painstakenly written by small fingers with remnants of red polish on
the nails. The alphabet is in random order but amazingly complete.
Rowan is finishing dinner — corn, carrots, pasta with tomato sauce, hard-boiled egg yolk and cheese. He
has dispensed with bib and utensils in favor of a more direct hand-to-mouth approach, announcing he's
done by shoveling a big handful of spaghetti off his high-chair tray onto the floor.
Michele, watching, doesn't mind. The dog will get it. And at least Rowan is eating.
In February 2004, Rowan fell off the growth charts, registering below the zero percentile for kids his age.
He's since held steady at the 10th percentile, but Michele, 36, says it's never been easy to get him to eat —
or sleep.
His location at the lower end of normal and the upper end of active could be a simple result of genetics. Or
it could be his thyroid.
The danger of PBDEs, says Dr. Mark Miller, director of the Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit
at the University of California, San Francisco, is that they act as developmental neurotoxins and disrupt
thyroid activity in rats and other lab animals. And they do so at levels one-third of Rowan's, say scientists at
the state Environmental Protection Agency.
Michele, who figures her son is just a small, active kid, tries not to dwell on that thought.
Doctors such as Miller who specialize in environmental contaminants see no reason the family should have
such high exposures. Researchers at Albemarle, a Louisiana-based manufacturer of brominated flame
retardants, are equally mystified.
"It's hard to interpret the results,
yet so important," said Dr. Gina Solomon, associate director of Miller's UCSF clinic and a senior scientist
at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The fact that (the family's) levels are on the high side is
symptomatic of what's going on out there."
Swedish scientists such as Bergman first alerted ®MDNM¯the world to growing levels of PBDEs in our
bodies. Researchers monitoring Swedish breast milk samples for a slew of contaminants found PBDE
concentrations doubling every five years over the 1980s and 1990s.
The United States recently launched a similar program but it tracks only a dozen of chemical families and
won't release PBDE data until 2007. Efforts to create a similar program in California for a suite of
environmental contaminants, including PBDEs, were shot down last year after the state Chamber of
Commerce labeled it a job killer.
But tipped off by the Swedes, researchers here found concentrations in wildlife, human blood and breast
milk doubling even faster — every 18 months.
That's just fire retardants. And one type, at that.
There are organochlorine pesticides such as DDT, the pesticide that launched the modern environmental
movement. Banned in the 1970s, they can be found today in our house dust, food and bodies.
PCBs, banned in 1979, similarly plague us. Decades worth of evidence shows these chemicals —
predecessors of and close chemical cousins to PBDEs — don't belong in the body. Numbers have declined
over the years, but they're there in Rowan and Mikaela and all of us — a lifetime's supply, courtesy of
Monsanto Chemical Co, once the only domestic manufacturer.
Also everywhere, but with little known of the health consequences, are phthalates — plasticizers that make
lotions absorbable, nail polish pliable, cologne scented and plastic soft. Our kidneys filter them quickly
from our body, but a daily replenishing shower from our material world keeps our bodies' phthalate levels
steady.
Then there's Teflon, GoreTex, Scotchgard and other non-stick and stain-repellent wonders. In 2000, 3M,
the sole U.S. manufacturer of the two crucial ingredients necessary to make such products, announced it
had found traces of one — perfluorooctane sulfanate — in virtually every human blood sample it had tested
in the United States and Europe.
Sure enough, the two compounds turned up in the Hammond Hollands, too.
------MICHELE IS ANGRY , but not worried. Not yet. "If in the next year something goes wrong with Rowan,
then I'm all of a sudden going to freak out about these numbers," she said.
Michele is a classic naturalist, most at home in the field, where she identifies birds from their songs and can
name the grasses underfoot. At the University of California, Berkeley, she researches grassland ecology.
She finds most frustrating her inability to protect her kids from the pollutants. If she wanted to curb
Rowan's and Mikaela's exposures, Michele wouldn't know where to start.
Sources are everywhere, yet impossible to track.
PBDEs show up in foam cushions and plastic casings. But which ones? One manufacturer might use a
brominated flame retardant, another might use phosphorous. There's aluminum trihydrates and magnesium
hydrates. The label never says.
"You can't make a universal judgment that just because it's a plastic, it has flame retardant," said Paul
Ranken, senior research and development adviser for Albemarle, one of three domestic manufacturers of
decaBDE, a brominated flame retardant.
"Your house may be different from my house. Your carpeting might be different. You might have a little
bit of polypropylene … I might have nylon." Phthalates (THAAL-ates) are similar. We need them to make
plastics soft and flexible. Without them fragrances could not be dissolved into lotions and colognes. Ink
would flake off bread bags. Your vinyl shower curtain would crack as you pulled it open.
But like PBDEs, some products have them. Some don't. Good luck trying to tell the difference.
"The fact of life is that phthalates are a remarkably useful product that … allow people without a lot of
money to have a first-world lifestyle," said Marian Stanley, manager of the Phthalate Esters Panel for the
American Chemistry Council. "The risk is a theoretical risk. If you had the smallest baby with the most
exposure for the longest time, you theoretically have a risk. Practically, do you have a risk? Nobody's seen
it yet."
But is anybody looking?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is conducting the only widespread biomonitoring program
in the United States, looking at national exposure to pesticides, PCBs, dioxins and phthalates, among
others. Its next report, cataloging some 148 compounds, is due later this spring. But there are gaps.
Its last report, released in 2003, summarized the results of 2,541 people tested for dibutyl phthatalate, an
additive found in nail polish, cosmetics, pill coatings, printing inks and, oddly, insecticides.
Of those, 328 were children under the age of 11. None were younger than 6. Yet exposure increases as the
age group gets younger, with kids between 6 and 11 on average having twice the level as adults over 20.
That's true with the Hammond Hollands. Mikaela's levels are three times her mom's and almost nine times
her dad's.
"There's not enough (information) to allow for big generalizations," said Solomon, the UCSF physician,
who with Miller met with the family and helped interpret their results. "What it does do is show the huge
need for this information, both to allow us to put these results in context and also give us information on
what's going on out there over time and over age groups.
"We're blind to what's going on out there."
------FORTY-SEVEN minutes in and Jeremiah's heart is churning at close to 180 beats per minute. His legs blur
against his stationary cycle, thighs and calves straining, as he leads his high school bike team through a
Monday night "spin" class.
A furious beat thumps from the room's loudspeakers. Sweat pours off Jeremiah's nose. Flywheels spin,
pedals whirl. Then the pitch jumps a notch as Jeremiah goads the teens and the pace, incredibly, picks up.
Two years ago Jeremiah weighed 237 pounds. Today he's 180. He went from a size 40 waistband to a size
34, which he last wore in high school.
His wedding suit is too big for him.
He shed those pounds on the bike trails, trying to keep up with his students. He gave up alcohol and started
eating better.
PCBs, dioxins, DDT, PBDEs, phthalates all love fat. Which is one reason many stick around so long,
sequestered in our waistlines.
So as Jeremiah's fat burned off, so, too, did some of his body burden, doctors surmise. It could explain why
his exposures, in many instances, are lower than his children's.
He also — unwittingly — played a dangerous game, Solomon and Miller said. As the fat broke apart,
contaminants were freed. Some got trapped by the bile and were eliminated. Some landed in other fat cells.
And some likely migrated to nerve cells or the brain.
Michele, meanwhile, shed her body burden as only a woman can.
Breast milk is 4 percent fat. As Michele nursed Mikaela and then Rowan, she drained a life's accumulation
of pollutants into her children.
Her PCB results show that most dramatically: Mikaela has 207 ppb — slightly more than her dad.
Rowan has 355. But Michele has 69.
That's no reason to stop breast-feeding, cautioned Kim Hooper, the state PBDE expert with Cal EPA who
has done extensive work with breast milk. Quite the opposite. Because in addition to fat, breast milk
contains essential vitamins, minerals, growth hormones, enzymes, proteins and antibodies.
Plenty of evidence also suggests Rowan and other children get a far bigger dose from their environment.
Several studies have found dust studded with these contaminants in the part-per-million range — 100 to
1,000 times what's found in humans. We all ingest a little dust daily, with children eating far more than
adults due to higher hand-to-mouth contact.
The other big route to our bodies is food.
------THREE YEARS AGO, Arnold Schecter, a professor at the University of Texas School of Public Health, set
out to show how much our diets contribute to our body burden.
He pulled 30 everyday items off the shelves of three Dallas supermarkets. They got sliced, diced and
mashed to a pulp, washed in hexane, vaporized and shot into a high-resolution gas chromatograph. He
found PBDEs in eggs, milk, steak and fish. He also found them in soy infant formula, albeit at a minuscule
16 parts-per-trillion <cm-cq> concentration.
In Emeryville, Richard Wenning is doing the same thing with chickens, finding no difference in PBDE
levels between free-range organic hens and factory-farmed roasters.
The compounds are spread far and wide, in air and dust. They're taken up by plants, eaten by animals. We
eat the animals and spread our sewage sludge back on the fields.
In this respect, organically grown food is no different from conventional, said Wenning, a principle at
Environ International Corp., an environmental consulting firm advising industry and regulators. "It's all
recycled … Until we can actually break the molecules apart, they're going to come around again."
As Michele and Jeremiah look around their house and wonder, industry — and to a certain extent
regulators — see red herrings.
It would make little sense to toss the family's hand-me-down polystyrene carpet or their recently purchased
foam-and-coil mattress and replace them with all-natural products, even if they could afford it. Nobody
understands how PBDEs migrate from your living room couch. Or if they even do.
Come summer, mother and daughter will still polish their toenails together, as they always have. With
phthalates everywhere, would doing otherwise make any difference?
;
Not if the Tribune's lab results are any indication. Michele uses no cosmetics beyond nail polish, yet her
level of mono-butyl phthalate — the body's byproduct of a compound common in beauty products _ sits
above average for American women, based on CDC data.
The CDC cannot say whether that's good or bad for her health.
That, industry says, is the problem with trace analysis. We can see in the parts-per-trillion range, but we
have little idea what it means. While consumers may be alarmed, industry looks at the numbers and sees
the need for further study.
"The science doesn't say (exposure) is going to grow to any level where we see concern anytime soon," said
Ron Zumstein, vice president for health, safety and environment at Albemarle, the decaBDE manufacturer.
"That's kind of how we look at it. You've got a huge margin of safety."
Others note we didn't see epidemics 30 years ago, when DDT and PCB use were at their height. Teflon has
been applied to pots since 1962, with no apparent problems from the compound or its precursors.
Zumstein and a crew of Albemarle scientists analyzed the Hammond Holland's PBDE results at the
Tribune's request. They were skeptical.
The samples could have been contaminated, they said. There's no easy explanation for why the children
would be so much higher than their parents, and the results don't seem to match what little we know about
PBDEs.
The EPA is assessing exposure risks and is expected to announce soon what it sees as the gaps in the
research. Zumstein and his team say they're waiting for that before taking the next step.
"The (family's) results are outside the range of what we've seen," Zumstein said. "We don't want to jump to
conclusions if the science has not been scrutinized yet."
That's exactly what industry has been saying for years, contend critics seeking to reform U.S. chemical
oversight.
We don't know what these chemicals do in our body. The science is still being scrutinized. Yet we still put
these compounds in our products, expose them to our children, eat them daily for dinner.
------IN A COUNTRY OF 300 MILLIION, we know the levels of fire retardant in fewer than 200 individuals.
Meanwhile annual worldwide demand for PBDEs, according to industry groups, was almost 150 million
pounds in 1999, up 67 percent from 1990. Half of that ends up in the U.S. market.
We have a legacy of reacting after the fact — lead, asbestos, mercury, ozone depletion.
Studies, notoriously difficult to construct, remain scarce. The federal government hasn't made funding such
science a priority, declining, for example, to underwrite any studies of toxins in breast milk, Schecter said.
Would we curb our appetite — take more of a precautionary approach — if we all knew, like the
Hammond Hollands, what lurks in our bodies?
"I'm not happy with a few data points. We cannot draw final conclusions from a family of four," said
Bergman, the Swedish PBDE researcher. But "this is an indication of a very serious problem that society
has to address."
The Great Experiment
Part two of a three part series
Douglas Fischer
www.insidebayarea.com
SOMETIME IN LATE 1997, 3M Corp. medical director Dr. Larry Zobel learned of a troubling stain on his
company's signature product:
Everyone's blood in the United States apparently was contaminated with a tiny amount of a chemical used
to make Scotchgard, his company's famously successful stain-resistant spray.
Zobel discovered this as his lab was checking workers' blood for perfluorooctane sulfonate, or PFOS — a
key chemical used to manufacture the product.
That the compound contaminated workers' blood came as no surprise. But the chemical was showing up in
the supposedly clean blood samples used to verify the results.
So 3M contacted two biological supply companies, bought pooled samples representing some 760 random
United States blood donors and ran the same test.
It found PFOS in every sample.
Zobel then went to the Red Cross and asked for samples from 600 different donors. Same result. He turned
to Europe, pooling samples from blood banks in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Same result.
Zobel's lab would go on to test the blood from 238 elderly people around Seattle, 645 more Red Cross
donors and 598 U.S. children.
It would find the compound in every sample but two, with some children scoring at or above the level 3M
found in its workers.
Alarmed, 3M in 1998 notified the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of its findings. Two years later,
in May 2000, 3M announced it would cease production of PFOS and a related chemical, perfluorooctanoic
acid, or PFOA.
Together, the two are critical for many consumer and industrial products — from GoreTex and Teflon to
firefighting foam, power plant pipe linings and jet engine gaskets.
After 50 years of providing the world with the chemical, 3M was out of the business.
University researchers the world over, suddenly alerted to the problem, started finding both PFOS and
PFOA everywhere they looked — polar bears in the Canadian Arctic, cormorants in the Sea of Japan, the
blood of Inuits in Alaska.
Four qualities set off a toxicologist's alarm bell when investigating a pollutant: Does the compound
accumulate as it works up the food chain, does it stick around for a long time in our bodies, is it widespread
and does it cause cancer?
PFOA and PFOS persist. This year the EPA declared PFOA a potential carcinogen. There's no question
they're everywhere.
"I would've never predicted it," Zobel said in an interview. "I am amazed."
------ADVANCES in synthetic chemistry have made our lives more comfortable and secure than possible even a
generation ago. GoreTex, nylon and polystyrene are the fabric of our lives. Perfumes come from petroleum,
vinyl siding protects our homes. You can shop all day and touch nothing but plastic.
In short, synthetic chemicals are the material foundation of our society.
The downside of that transition is increasingly apparent: In the course of a generation, we have
contaminated virtually all of Earth's biological systems.
Every day we expose millions of people to chemicals and chemical mixtures for which the toxicity is
unknown, said Michael Wilson, a research scientist with the Center for Occupational and Environmental
Health at the University of California, Berkeley.
"A disturbing pattern of human health damage has emerged that appears to be linked to … synthetic
chemical substances." Regulators did not realize how widespread PFOA and PFOS exposure were until 3M
alerted them. They had no way to test for the compounds until 3M provided the method. They had no idea
how long they stayed in our bodies until 3M scientists offered an estimate — four years for PFOA and
eight for PFOS until the body rids itself of just half the load.
Regulators have no data, however, on what they do in humans, though scientists say PFOS alters thyroid
metabolism in monkeys and acts as a developmental toxin in mice. 3M says years of medical surveillance
find no problems attributable to the chemicals among its workers.
Society's blindness to PFOA and PFOS is far from unique.
The EPA receives 108 applications on average per month from companies seeking to introduce new
chemicals on the market — 32,559 since 1979. With the application comes "all available data" on
production volume, use and environmental release but not a word on toxicity unless the manufacturer
happens to have some data.
Other information the EPA might want — be it the chemical's effects, physical properties, health impact —
comes from agency files or public databases. And the burden rests with the EPA to prove a problematic
chemical should be restricted.
So perhaps it comes as no surprise that, since 1979, the agency has forced restrictions on just nine
applications.
------3M AND ON OF ITS largest customers, DuPont, had every reason to suspect fluorinated compounds like
PFOA and PFOS would show up far, far away from the garments and carpets their products protected.
As early as the 1970s, company documents obtained by the Environmental Working Group show industry
researchers knew the compounds were virtually indestructible.
When scientists want an idea how fast bacteria can break down an industrial molecule, they turn to
activated sewage sludge. Undisturbed in soil, PCBs have a half-life — the time it takes half the molecules
to decompose — of 25 years. In sewage sludge, the half-life is 28 days. DDT in such sludge has a half-life
of seven hours. PFOA and PFOS show no change, according to 3M data given to the EPA.
Their resiliency is one of their greatest selling points.
"They're just essential," said Robert C. Buck, a chief scientist for DuPont's surface protection solutions
division. "They're very, very stable at very high temperatures. … They're not cheap and they're not easy to
fabricate. We're still selling these materials, even though they're expensive, because they're extraordinarily
useful."
PFOA serves only one purpose: to mix oil and water. Technically a "processing aid," not an ingredient,
PFOA acts much the way a few drops of soap do when added to a jar of water and cooking oil.
"It helps bring things together that normally wouldn't get together," Buck said.
Without it, we would have no Teflon, no Stainmaster, no GoreTex. Car engines would be larger and less
efficient without PFOA-made polymers to withstand higher oil and engine temperatures. Silicon Valley
would be hard-pressed to make such miniature chips without that high performance plastic pipe liners to
keep impurities from leaching into etching solutions.
Power companies depend on fluoro-products to keep pollutants from the environment. Firefighters spread
fluorotelomer-based foam over fuel spills to smother flames. When a jet crashes on a tarmac, nothing
extinguishes a fire faster.
The stability also explains why they show up in the blood of virtually everyone tested. Half the people in
the United States, based on 3M's and other scientists' estimates, have 30 or more parts-per-billion PFOS in
their system. For PFOA, the median exposure is 5 ppb.
Mashed potatoes seasoned at that concentration would have five grains of salt among 110 pounds of spuds.
The question now is straightforward: Does exposure pose a problem for our health? Because we can't go
back.
"We don't understand how much a rat, let alone a human, can withstand before long-term effects begin to
catch up," said Jonathan Martin, an associate professor with the University of Alberta, who is studying
fluorinated compounds. "We're going to be exposed to them presumably long-term, and we don't know
what the long-term consequences are."
DuPont disagrees. In a study released earlier this year of 1,024 PFOA workers, the company reported no ill
health effects beyond a 10-point rise in cholesteral levels among the most-exposed.
Either way, industry has no replacement for PFOA.
"We have to have it," said David Boothe, strategic planning manager for DuPont's fluoroproducts division.
"We've looked for 30 to 40 years and not found an acceptable substitute."
So when 3M announced it was out of the PFOA business, industry sat up. Someone needed to make it.
-------
TODAY AT DuPONT'S sprawling Fayetteville Works production facility in North Carolina, a modest
plant produces the United States' only domestic supply of PFOA.
DuPont started building the plant in 2000, after 3M's announcement. It has 99 percent less PFOA emissions
than 3M's old plant.
DuPont maintains the chemical is largely obliterated during the manufacture of consumer goods. Trace
amounts might exist in some products, but nothing approaching levels found in humans, the company says.
So how does it get everywhere around the globe? Scientists have lots of theories but are largely certain of
one thing: Somehow this compound is, contrary to industry's claim, ending up in everyday consumer items
— our pots, coats, carpets and clothing.
"If you're thinking global spread, it's the products," said Kurunthachalam Kannan, an associate professor at
the State University of New York, Albany, School of Public Health.
But that's where the knowledge largely ends.
------IN THE WAY, PFOA is part-way down a well-trod path blazed first by PCBs, DDT, hexane and asbestos.
All went on the market with, at best, an incomplete understanding of their health effects. All were largely
unstudied until problems began showing up. All have been banned or sharply limited.
But chemical policy is driven by our demand for products. The benefit of the doubt goes to the chemical.
Regulators and activists must prove harm before restrictions kick in.
PFOA is just one of 81,600 chemicals produced or imported today in the United States, and critics note
3M's after-the-fact discoveries about PFOS and PFOA could be said for any number of those others.
Federal law, in place since 1979, directs regulators to assess the hazards of chemicals in commerce and
control those of the greatest concern. But in the past 20 years, four agencies — the National Academy of
Sciences, the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the U.S.
EPA — have said little progress has been made on either front. The Toxic Substances Control Act, they all
conclude, has fallen short of its objective.
"Do we know there's a hazard?" asked Wilson, the UC Berkeley researcher. "We don't even have the data
to begin thinking about it."
Wilson notes that industry can produce safer chemicals if they chose — and fails to do so at its peril.
Take lead solder.
In the early 1990s, the American electronics companies fought regulations driving lead — a neurotoxin —
from solder. European and Japanese manufacturers moved to lead-free technology, Wilson said, and today
the domestic electronics industry lags its overseas competitors.
But don't blame industry alone. Our appetite for these chemicals drives the market — and to some extent,
regulators.
In the last 25 years, the country's consumption of synthetic chemicals increased 8,200 percent, Wilson said.
Looking just at the 100 highest-volume compounds, the United States put 975 billion pounds into our
products and environment in 2002, 16 percent more than in 1992.
The law does not require routine testing of chemicals, and critics contend required tests provide only
limited information about new chemicals. The EPA has no power to order more testing or in many cases to
make their information public, because the law protects data businesses claim as confidential.
To approve a new chemical for commerce, EPA chemists compare its structure to a list of similar
compounds. If no red flags pop up, off to the market it goes. The EPA has 90 days to review a chemical,
though approval typically comes earlier because the agency has accumulated enough chemistry data to fasttrack large categories of compounds.
Ken Moss, policy analyst for the EPA's Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics, says new chemicals get
a "very robust and active" review. The agency may not have the power to require more tests from
manufacturers, but it can and often does coerce more data from industry, he said.
"We do have the power of the office and the power of the pocketbook," he said. "It's not perfect, but it does
make the point (to industry) that we need to see further testing."
But there are gaps.
When the law went into effect in 1979, PFOA, PFOS and 58,000 other chemicals already in use got
grandfathered in, no questions asked. Of the 32,550 applications for new chemicals received since, 1,662
were withdrawn after the EPA suggested changes or restrictions, 300-plus underwent more testing and a
handful were flat-out rejected.
Thousands of chemicals are found in everyday consumer products. The EPA has full toxicity data for about
25 percent.
------THERE AREalternatives.
Europe in 2006 is set to switch to a chemical policy that requires chemicals be evaluated for safety before
going on the market. Called REACH — Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals — the
policy promises to revolutionize the way European regulators look at chemicals.
"They're basically saying no data, no market," said Dr. Ted Schettler, science director for the Science and
Environmental Health Network. "That, of course, is calling in the cards, and the industry is just up in arms
about it."
What's needed, Schettler and other critics of current policy say, are rules that place precaution first.
Europe's move has other governments taking a look. The California Legislature, for instance, has asked the
University of California to assess the state's chemical policy. That report is due to the Legislature later this
spring.
Two years ago, the state became the first to enact a ban of two classes of a common flame retardant,
polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs. California's law, effective 2008, is modeled after a European
Union ban on those compounds. Hawaii, Maine and Michigan since have followed.
The Bush administration, however, is moving the opposite direction. The Commerce and State
departments, in concert with industry, are attempting to water down REACH, according to a report
produced for the House Committee on Government Reform. One example: A 2002 e-mail from the U.S.
Trade Representative's office to industry groups urges industry to "get to the Swedes and Finns" — who
lead the world in environmental pollutant research — "and neutralize their environmental arguments."
This comes as surveys of breast milk and blood show Americans have the highest levels of PBDEs in the
world — 10 to 100 times the concentration the Swedish researchers have found in their population.
Levels have shot up so high, so fast that 5 percent of the population — 15 million Americans — are
thought to have PBDE levels near those that cause thyroid problems in laboratory rats, said Tom
McDonald, a toxicologist with the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.
An Oakland Tribune investigation of a Berkeley family, picked in part because they lead a largely
chemical-free life, found that. Laboratory analysis of their blood found surprisingly high levels of PBDEs,
particularly in the children.
Researchers, industry scientists and doctors working with the family on the Tribune's behalf see no reason
for such high exposures.
There's also the question of risk. Industry officials repeatedly note that a few parts-per-billion of a
contaminant in one's blood represents an unknown threat.
"It gets to be a little exasperating," said Peter O'Toole, U.S. program director for the Bromine Science and
Environmental Forum, which represents the world's bromine manufacturers. "Why don't we talk about the
levels of risk when you take a fire retardant out of a product?"
"The fire safety risk is ignored and tends to be ignored at people's peril. … You're replacing a real
precaution with a theoretical one."
And that perhaps is the point. The information to make a decision isn't there. Which makes it awfully tough
to make a case for banning a compound as important — or as invisible — as PFOA or PBDE.
If the EPA said industry couldn't make any more PFOA, for instance, would our health be any better?
"We don't know," said Martin, the University of Alberta researcher. "Until that's straightened out, it's
difficult to take any action. It's not fair to the manufacturer and it may not do anything."
------BACK AT DuPONTt, Robert Rickard, the company's chief toxicologist, has spent a lot of time thinking
about that very issue.
He looks at PFOA's persistence and global reach and, without downplaying them, pulls out another set of
statistics.
The chemical has been in commerce for the better part of 50 years. Products made from it permeate every
facet of our lives. Tests on archived blood samples show exposures are increasing almost imperceptibly:
about 1 ppb a decade.
So in a society where tobacco use kills 440,000 every year and obesity is an epidemic, how important is it
to get worked up over PFOA, a contaminant that may be present in microscopic amounts in a fast-food
hamburger's wrapper or your Stainmaster-treated carpet?
"It is appropriate, when we identify a biopersistent material found in the entire population, that we
understand that chemical," Rickard said.
"But let's not overreact because that chemical is there."
The Body Chemical
Part three of a three part series
Douglas Fischer
www.insidebayarea.com
No one can prove the link. But it's there.
It's there for Susan Liroff, diagnosed with breast cancer, who spent the 1950s on Long Island — where
DDT saw liberal application — and the 1970s as a veterinary technician in California, bathing pets in
malathion and other since-banned pesticides.
It was there for Rose Mendez, who staked a claim as one of Los Angeles' promising young architects and
won a 1997 contest to redesign San Francisco's Union Square. Non-Hodgkins lymphoma snuffed that
promise in 2002, killing her at age 32.
It's there for any parent watching their 3-year-old succumb to the early signs of autism.
Something in our environment is killing us.
For 50 years, society has pumped the global environment full of synthetic chemicals, reaping benefits never
before imagined. And over those 50 years our bodies, almost without exception worldwide, have become
repositories for those industrial and consumer chemicals.
This is our chemical "body burden." A few years ago scientists could not even see it. Now researchers are
finding some of these compounds impair our health.
Scientists can draw precious few lines connecting toxic load to specific ailment. Simply because we detect
a pollutant in our blood does not mean it causes harm, many toxicologists say.
More profoundly, the ability to link body burden to harm remains just beyond the limits of science, for
now. Exposures are fuzzy. We move from place to place. There are far too many variables. Epidemiology
— the study of the incidence and prevalence of disease — has considerable limits.
But these chemicals do take a toll, researchers suspect. They're in our environment, in our kids. They will
not kill us today or tomorrow or perhaps ever, but they threaten us with insidious, almost impossible-todetect debilities and frustrations — a child robbed of a few IQ points, a couple struggling to conceive.
Infants begin life with detectable levels of PCBs and DDT in their veins. Fire retardants lace mothers'
breast milk. A chemical once used to make Scotchgard taints everybody's blood.
As with the blood of polar bears in the Arctic and cormorants in Japan.
As exposures have risen, so, too, have a string of ailments:
Breast cancer incidence rates have climbed 90 percent since 1950. Non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a cancer tied
to a weakened immune system, has seen a 250 percent jump in incidence rates.
Sperm counts appear down — by some indications a man born in the 1970s has three-quarters the sperm as
a man born in the 1950s. Eight percent of all couples of reproductive age in the U.S. are infertile, according
to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
And fertility problems seem to be increasing.
Between 1982 and 1995, the number of women in their prime childbearing years to report some difficulty
conceiving increased 42 percent, according to one study.
During those 13 years, Swedish researchers tracking fire retardants in breast milk saw a sevenfold leap —
from .5 parts-per-billion to 3.5 parts-per-billion.
One does not cause the other. But the parallel trends sound a klaxon for our health.
"We're all confident environmental exposures of some sort do cause cancer," said Dr. Sheila Zahm, deputy
director of the National Cancer Institute's division of cancer epidemiology and genetics. "But it's very
difficult at these very low levels to know what is going on.
"We don't have good answers."
To be sure, diet, exercise and other lifestyle choices remain by far the biggest culprit for most afflictions. In
the United States, three-quarters of all new cancers can be traced to smoking, diet and obesity alone.
For instance, during the same 50-year period that saw breast cancer rates rise 90 percent, lung cancer in
women jumped 685 percent — largely because women started smoking in large numbers in the '60s and
'70s.
Also worth noting: Our environment by most markers remains considerably cleaner than 30 years ago.
We're living longer. PCBs, DDT and other dangerously bioaccumulative, persistent pollutants have been
banned since the '70s. Suspected carcinogens are tightly regulated. Big killers — tuberculosis, pneumonia,
childhood mortality — are, with few exceptions, problems for Third World economies.
But some of those with cancer — 2 percent, 5 percent, no one truly knows — had their ailment foisted
upon them, triggered, according to the National Cancer Institute, by the soup of environmental toxins in
which we live.
Only in the past 10 years, in fact, have scientists come to understand how exquisitely small amounts of
some pollutants mimic our body's hormones, setting off cascades of largely unknown, and likely unwanted,
downstream effects.
"Even things like a reduction in one's ability to process information or reductions in intelligence — these
are subtle changes," said Tom McDonald, staff toxicologist at California's Office of Environmental Health
Hazard Assessment.
"We're not talking about retardation. We're talking about someone getting (an IQ score of) 160 instead of
170."
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set out in the late 1990s to catalog the nation's
environmental chemical burden. The first report, in 2001, surveyed thousands of Americans for 27 different
compounds. The second, released in 2003, upped the catalog to 116. The third, to be released this spring,
will track 148.
But the CDC will never know for sure. Some 82,000 chemicals are in commerce today, with nearly 1,000
new ones added annually. Not all make it to our bodies. But some will. Not all prove poisonous. But some
do.
We have metals, nicotine and benzene in our blood. Phthalates, used to make our plastics soft and dissolve
fragrances in our shampoos and lotions, filter through our kidneys. Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs,
settle in our fat. Pesticides, both organophosphate and organochlorine, cling to house dust, even though the
latter was banned in the United States in the 1970s. Fire retardants and pest repellents and plastic all can be
found in blood, urine and breast milk.
Toxicologists insist the dose makes the poison. And for the average American, these exist in minute
amounts, a few dozen parts per billion or less — a chocolate bar split among the 750,000 residents of San
Francisco.
But that does not mean they do no harm.
"As studies have gotten better, we're finding effects at lower and lower levels," said Don Wigle, a semiretired epidemiologist with Health Canada and author of the textbook "Child Health and the Environment."
"It's not going away."
And not all of us are average.
For reasons unexplained, studies consistently show about 5 percent of all subjects have extremely high
blood concentrations of environmental toxins — in some cases, particularly for PBDEs, near concentrations
known to cause defects in laboratory animals.
Which means 15 million Americans live near a threshold that gives scientists pause, McDonald said. "The
comparison is very close. … It doesn't mean we're finding effects in people, but it is a cause for concern."
A Berkeley family tested by the Oakland Tribune supports this point.
The family was picked because they lived as chemically clean a life as possible, yet lab tests found PCBs,
phthalates, mercury, lead and cadmium in each member. The surprise was the family's level for a class of
fire retardants common in plastic appliances, foam cushions and carpet backing.
The parents were well above what scientists consider "normal" for the United States. But their kids, for
reasons no one fully understands, had levels as high or higher than found in workers handling the stuff for a
living.
Thirty five years ago, Wigle emerged with his Ph.D. and set to work in a world where lead exposure was
simply an assumed price to pay for civilized society.
Doctors find signs of acute brain damage at a blood lead level of 80 ppb. But at the time in the United
States, 60 ppb marked the CDC's health threshold. Physicians, Wigle said, would basically shrug at a child
with 40 ppb in their body.
The nation's average, after all, was 14 ppb for children under 5, and lab researchers considered 10 ppb the
minimum exposure.
Today 10 ppb is the government's threshold. Scientists suspect no safe level of exposure exists, particularly
for children.
In the hunt to define our body burdens' toll, scientists often fail to see the damage until once a compound is
removed. Lead is such an example.
In 1975 the California Air Resources Board ordered lead out of gasoline — not amid concern of lead
exposure, but because catalytic converters necessary to curb smog in Los Angeles wouldn't work with the
octane booster.
By 1980 the CDC could start drawing links. From 1976 to 1980, lead levels dropped 40 percent in gasoline,
40 percent in air and 40 percent in the blood of every population cross-section the agency could track.
The information single-handedly spiked a 1981 proposal by the U.S. EPA to increase the amount of lead
allowed in leaded gasoline. "It's hard to put a price on how valuable those data are," Wigle said.
Since then, researchers tracking cognitive ability, memory, sensory function and motor skills in children
have found dysfunction at progressively lower lead levels. They've found a link between lead and preterm
delivery, low birth weight and fetal growth retardation.
But the main effect is on the brain, with exposure tied to impaired development and to aggressive,
destructive and delinquent behavior.
Today the average U.S. level is 2 ppb.
But the damage from high lead levels haunts us still. Many scientists suspect the exposure fried four to five
points off the IQ scores of every kid growing up across the nation at that time.
"You're shifting the whole curve to the left," Wigle said. "You're drastically reducing the proportion of very
bright kids and drastically increasing the proportion of kids with learning disabilities."
For lead, the evidence is clear. For newer compounds, the data remain far too sketchy to prove — or
disprove — similar conclusions. "There's not a lot of studies done," Wigle added. "We don't have 40 to 50
years of experiments observing what happens to humans."
Rick Becker hears this all the time. He doesn't believe it.
Our body burden, he — and many others — say, hovers below the level where those chemicals do harm.
Becker holds a Ph.D. in toxicology and pharmacology. He spent the 1990s assessing the exposure risk of
pesticides, hazardous waste and other chemicals for the California Environmental Protection Agency.
Today he's a senior toxicologist with the American Chemistry Council, representing every major chemical
manufacturer in the country.
The central tenet of modern toxicology holds that the dose makes the poison. The amount ingested, in other
words, has great say in whether a substance is a killer.
Ethanol is one example, Becker notes. Toxic at high levels, we all consume tiny amounts every day in
fruits, vegetables and grains with no effect.
Aspirin is another. Swallow a full bottle, and someone will be calling 911 on your behalf.
But break a pill in half, then in half again and again and again, and Becker will be able to detect aspirin in
your blood. But the dose has no effect.
"You have a similar principle with reproductive toxicity," Becker said. "The idea that ultra-low doses cause
harm is a hypothesis. But that hypothesis generally has been shown not to hold up."
Take perfluorinated compounds — the stuff behind GoreTex, Scotchgard and Teflon. They're
uncomfortably long-lasting, with a half-life — the time needed for the body to purge half its total exposure
— of between four and eight years in humans. At high levels, they cause liver damage. The U.S. EPA sees
potential for carcinogenity in the chemistry but hasn't made a definitive decision yet.
Studies suggest we all have trace amounts in our bodies, with an average of 30 ppb for PFOS, one such
compound.
If that posed a problem, toxicologists reason, we'd surely see it in chemical workers at 3M's plants —
where blood levels average 2,000 ppb. But years of tracking data find their health no different than ours,
said the company's chief medical officer.
"The low levels in the general population really do not represent a health issue," Dr. Larry Zobel, 3M's
medical director said. "Those levels are not associated with health effects."
That's the danger, say Zobel, Becker and other epidemiologists and toxicologists studying environmental
toxins. We can detect these compounds in microscopic amounts. But we don't yet know what it means.
"If you can't measure it, it's a non-detect and you're not worried," said David Savitz, a professor at the
University of North Carolina and president of the Society for Pediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology.
"There's a little bit of danger, if you will, of the information itself. You could argue that by being aware of
it, what could it do, other than help people to worry?"
Or would you make a different choice?
In a modest office off the University of California, Berkeley campus, Professor William Nazaroff pulls a
piece of paper with a simple graph from among a sheaf of papers.
The graph shows what happens when you mix a few capfuls of Pine-Sol with water and start cleaning.
In a ventilated chamber — akin to a room with an open window — Nazaroff mixed a bit of vaporized
cleaner with a modest bit of ozone — what blows through a typical urban house on a summer day.
The result, due to a bit of reactive chemistry, was particles. An invisible cloud of hundreds upon thousands
of microscopic particles still being generated four hours after the release.
That in itself is alarming. Tiny particles lodge in the lungs and are considered a key contributor to asthma.
But these weren't just any particles.
They were carcinogens.
Nazaroff is one of a relatively few scientists studying the chemistry and physics of indoor air.
He looks at the ways such everyday items as carpets and air fresheners and cleaners like Pine-Sol interact,
producing problematic compounds nobody expected. Given that Americans spend 90 percent of their time
indoors on average, his findings are eye-popping.
Take Pine-Sol. The original formula _ not, for whatever reason, the lemon-scented version _ consists of 15
percent to 20 percent terpene. A relatively harmless hydrocarbon, terpenes are everywhere, from hand
lotion to dry cleaners to air fresheners, even plants. That pine-fresh scent from Pine-Sol? The whiff of
citrus from Formula 409? What you smell are terpenes.
But mix those benign cleaners with highly reactive ozone — from car pollution, from an ozone-generating
air cleaner, from just living in a city — and that pine-fresh scent becomes far more malevolent:
formaldehyde, carbonyls and other reactive and unstable compounds.
"You don't have to be in Livermore on a Spare the Air Day," he said. "You're going to get ozone combining
with these terpenes, and you're going to get all these secondary compounds."
Oakland-based Clorox, maker of Pine-Sol and Formula 409, notes that plant-based cleaners such as PineSol have been around for 150 years or more. They've played a key role improving hygiene and human
health.
So if you splash some in a bucket of water, mop your floor, then open the windows to let it dry, does the
potential for chemical reaction outweigh the benefits of a clean floor?
"Pine-Sol has never been shown to be an irritant," said spokeswoman Mary O'Connell. "We're not
disputing there's potential for reaction, but what it means is really unclear."
The problem doesn't sit on Clorox's doorstep alone, Nazaroff added. It's the whole industry.
What amazes him is not the dearth of hard facts about how these chemicals interact. It's that so many
believe they can improve their environment by adding an odor, or lighting a candle or — even worse, he
says — using an air cleaner that deliberately introduces ozone.
"You start with a biologically innocent compound, and you expose it to ozone, and you get a carcinogen,"
he said. "There's a lot of downside risk from reactive chemistry, as our investigations have begun to
explore."
In some ways, Nazaroff's puzzlement gets to the center of the issue. We live in a rich culture, with pans that
don't stick, jackets that shed water, sprays that disinfect toilets, traps that kill ants.
We have lotions to moisturize chapped skin and colognes to make us smell good. Our grandparents would
never recognize today's tiny, fuel-efficient car engines. We enjoy first-rate medical care.
But we also carry a legacy — a tiny bit of the chemicals that make it all possible. It's in our parents, us and
our children. And no one yet knows what it means.
"We should not be arrogant or ignorant," said Wigle, the Health Canada epidemiologist. "Arrogant in the
sense that we think we know a lot about the significance of these contaminants, or ignorant in not admitting
what we don't know.
"And there's a lot we don't know."