Healthbuzz

What’s in you?

by LaVonne on 23/08/05 at 4:54 pm

Part one of a three part series
Douglas Fischer – STAFF WRITER
Inside Bay Area

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?
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