TRUMP AND PRUITT'S EPA GUTS RESEARCH ON TOXIC CHEMICALS AND KIDS

I maintain a computer file with hundreds of scientific articles about the effects of toxic substances on children.

Arsenic and lead in drinking water. Pesticides and other Persistent Organic Pollutants in the air we breathe, clothing, furniture, building materials, you name it. Some common drugs taken during pregnancy. Hormones and endocrine disrupting chemicals in food, plastics, toys, just about anything that could go into a child's mouth. Chemicals used in fracking that get into the air and water. Fire retardants, fungicides, and many other classes of chemicals. Not to mention the impact of the cocktail of these chemicals that many people carry in their bodies, in breast milk, in their blood.

 Credit: DES Daughter

These articles detail the impacts of these toxins on developing children still in the womb, on infants, children, teenagers (and adults too). Autism, attention deficits, abnormal brain activity, birth defects, impaired sleep, impaired learning, reduced IQ, disruptions in the reproductive system, infertility, obesity, cancer, breathing problems, kidney and liver damage--all of these and many more impairments and diseases have been linked to various chemicals that find their way into our children's bodies.

Like research on smoking decades ago and on climate change now, much of this research is controversial or marginalized. The suspect chemicals have important uses in agriculture, energy production, medicine, and many other activities, and add billions of dollars to the economy and to the bottom lines of giant corporations. The companies that manufacture and sell these substances are strongly motivated to keep selling them, and are willing to spend huge sums to question, hide or suppress research that threatens their bottom line, carry out or fund research aimed at sowing doubt about such threatening findings; and in many cases demean or threaten researchers who are brave enough to research these links.

Still, this body of research has been used by governments around the world, and by the US, to develop legislation to ban some of the most deadly chemicals, reduce and control the use of many others, and protect the health of children and adults.

In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been one of the major sources of funding for research on the impacts of known or potential toxins, through its National Center for Environmental Research (NCER). The NCER funded millions of dollars of research on the risks to children from potentially dangerous substances. Until now, that is.

Trump's appointee to head the EPA, Scott Pruitt, has decided to kill the NCER, as announced on February 26, 2018. The gutting of the program is couched as an efficiency measure, but is in line with Trump and Pruitt's goals of reducing regulations and risks for corporations, unfortunately at the expense of America's children.

In 1965, comedian Tom Lehrer satirized the extent of pollution that Americans were then being exposed to in the song "Pollution" on his album That Was the Year That Was. The song opens with:

If you visit American cith
You will find it very pretty
Just two things of which you must beware:
Don't drink the water and don't breath the air!

The EPA was created five years later, in December of 1970. Over the years, it did a lot to clean up America's polluted rivers, lakes, industrial sites, cities and skies. However, under Trump and Pruitt, we seem to be turning back the clock to those bad old days, when, as Lehrer concluded:

So go to the city, see the crazy people there
Like lambs to the slaughter
They're drinking the water
And breathing the air

IN U.S. EXPOSURE TO HORMONE DISRUPTING CHEMICALS COSTS HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS PER YEAR

Following up on my recent post "Ten Percent of US have high concentrations of ten or more toxins in our blood,", here's a new study that calculates the costs to the U.S. economy from the burden of disease that some of those chemicals cause.

Plastic bottles--one of many sources 

of endocrine-disrupting chemicals

Credit: Velka/Shutterstock (public domain)

Writing in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, October 17, researchers at the New York University Medical Center say that even a conservative estimate of the diseases and conditions--including birth defects, autism, attention-deficit disorder, intellectual disability, infertility, obesity, diabetes, heart disease and stroke--caused by exposure to these toxins puts their cost to the economy at $340 billion. That's 2.3 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Flame retardants alone (found in building insulation, fabrics, furniture and electronics) account for more than $200 billion of those health-related costs.

The researchers say this is the first assessment of the overall costs to the U.S. economy from the buildup of endocrine-disrupting substances in the population.

The major sources of these chemicals include plastic bottles, the lining of metal food cans, detergents, flame retardants, toys, pesticides and cosmetics. These pervasive chemicals build up in our bodies over time. They can impair fetal development in the womb, especially the brain and nervous system, and lead to a variety of diseases in adults.

These chemicals are pervasive and extremely difficult to avoid. To address the problem at the policy level, the authors call for more proactive testing and tighter regulation, starting with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). They point out that people living in Europe, where these substances are more strongly regulated, have less exposure, lower levels in the bodies and blood, and reduced risk of disability and disease.

At the personal level, they recommend steps such as not microwaving food in plastic containers or covered by plastic wrap, avoiding containers with the number 3, 6 or 7 on the bottom, which contain phthalates and using fragrance free or "all natural" cosmetics.

You can find more ways to minimize your and your family's exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals here.

This may seem a daunting or even impossible task, given how ubiquitous these chemicals have become. However, new research shows that avoiding common sources of endocrine disrupting chemicals can quickly reduce levels in the body

TEN PERCENT OF US HAVE HIGH CONCENTRATIONS OF TEN OR MORE TOXINS IN OUR BLOOD

It's common knowledge that we're all exposed to many different kinds of toxins from the air we breathe, the water we drink, the pesticides and other chemicals we're exposed to and many other sources, and that some of those accumulate and persist in our bodies.

Cycling of POPs. Credit: EUGRIS

What we didn't know but researchers have just discovered, is that at least some of those pollutants are not spread randomly through the population, with some individuals having more of one and others having more of a different one. Much like income or wealth, some people have just a little while some have a lot.

A new study of Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs)--the first that looked at many different kinds of POPs in the same people at the same time--found that that they were strongly clustered, with more than 10% of the U.S. population carrying ten or more different POPs in their blood at concentrations above the 90th percentile. Blacks, people with low incomes, people with a high body mass index (BMI) and older individuals were more likely to carry heavy loads of multiple organic toxins.

Industrial smokestacks--one source of pollutants

Credit Peter Essick/National Geographic

When I asked physician and epidemiologist Miquel Porta, one of the study's authors, about the implications of his findings, he first cautioned about stirring up fear. "As a physician, I firmly believe that fear is seldom compatible with a broad vision of health," he wrote. 

However, he went on to emphasize that finding that a large number of people have 90th-percentile-or-higher concentrations of 10 or more known toxins needs to be noted by researchers and public health authorities:

"Whatever we know, whatever we think we know about the adverse health effects of a given chemical compound, and about the adverse health effects of several different compounds, simply think that it will not be uncommon for them to be--each and all--present at high concentrations in a significant minority of your patients, constituency, citizens, family or friends. And then think about the plausible negative health effects of the combination or 'cocktail' at high and low concentrations."

As reported in the journal PLOS One, Porta and his colleagues looked at the concentrations of 91 POPs in the blood of 4739 people living in the U.S. They found that 13% of the people studied had 10 or more of the most frequently detected organic pollutants at or above 90th percentile levels. You can view the original article here.

"Decades after the evidence on the presence of toxic chemical mixtures in humans became available, official approaches to assess the risks for human health of such mixtures continue to lag tragically behind scientific evidence of the adverse effects of individual compounds and the potential effects of mixtures," Porta writes.

"We provide a method to improve exposure assessment. Our method is an important complement to what is usually done."

In other words, it's no longer justifiable to study one toxin at a time in one group of people at a time. Now that we know that many different toxins pile up in certain populations, with the odds tilted by race, age, income and other factors, studies, recommendations and regulations that don't take that into account from the start are likely to seriously underestimate the risks to the health of a significant number of people.

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You can find a follow-up to this research, detailing some of the health impacts of POPs, here.
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