Tomgram

Chemical soup

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Alexandra Rome made herself into a human guinea pig in order to demonstrate to herself — and then to the rest of us — in the most graphic way that we reflect our world, our “civilization,” at the most basic level of all, our bodies. Our society, it turns out, has quite literally left its chemical imprint on us. We are, not to put too fine a point on the matter, ticking chemical bombs and an unchecked industrial/consumer society turns out to be the terrorist. Rome’s eloquent statement, which I urge every one of you to read, is a sad reminder that, in the crisis of the moment, under the rule of our own mullahs, we have had to postpone dealing with the basics at every level from global warming to the rampant toxins in our bodies. Tom

Chemical Soup
By Alexandra Rome

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.

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.