1
A CHEMICAL STEW: BODY BURDEN
The turnoff to the tiny hamlet of Bolinas is unmarked from California Highway 1 as it twists along Pacific Ocean headlands one hour north of San Francisco. Every time highway crews put up a sign pointing to Bolinas, the locals take it down. A building moratorium enacted in 1971 preserves Bolinas much as it was during its counterculture heyday: a colony of 1, 560 artists, writers, healers, and activists intent on safeguarding their bohemian community from commercial encroachment. While minimansions and new subdivisions dot nearby Stinson Beach, Bolinas still looks like it did when Richard Nixon was in the White House and Bill Clinton inhaled.
Downtown boasts a grocery store with more free-range dogs loitering outside than patrons shopping inside, a restaurant that serves the freshest ingredients from nearby farms, and a gas station with a bed-and-breakfast above it. Victorian houses and weathered clapboard cottages rim the shore of Bolinas Lagoon, a haven for pelicans and a regular pit stop for migratory birds navigating the Pacific Flyway. Living costs have gone up in Bolinas, but local sensibilities and the pristine landscape have stayed the same.
Twenty years ago, Sharyle Patton discovered the town and fell in love with it. "I used to come out to Bolinas and play music," said Patton, a pianist and singer who studied at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. That led to playing bluegrass and jazz for a living. She met her husband, Michael Lerner, in Bolinas. He founded and directs Commonweal, an alternative-medicine think tank and cancer healing center that occupies a former RCA transmission site overlooking the Pacific in Bolinas, where the couple lives.
Approaching the age of sixty, Patton has the trim build and spirited glow of a woman who pays attention to diet and exercise. "It's easy to eat organic in Bolinas," said Patton, who also takes advantage of miles of beaches right outside her door and nearby hiking trails that crisscross breathtaking vistas in Point Reyes National Seashore. She was raised on a Colorado ranch and she likes to be outdoors. The bungalow she shares with her husband came with a spectacular garden. Patton enjoys tending the previous owner's legacy, adding more color and texture to the garden every year.
She's always taken good care of herself, avoiding the pitfalls of drugs, booze, and tobacco that plagued others of her generation, especially fellow musicians. And it shows. She stands straight, which makes her look even taller than her five feet eight. A short tousle of blond hair frames blue eyes that twinkle and a wide, slightly lopsided smile. Patton displays the energy of a woman half her age as an activist on issues of health and the environment. In 2001 in Stockholm, as a leader of a network of 350 nongovernmental organizations from around the world, Pat-ton helped guide the UN's Persistent Organic Pollutants treaty, which calls for the worldwide elimination of a "dirty dozen" list of chemical contaminants considered among the world's most hazardous.
Intellectually, she understands as well as anyone the ubiquitous nature of chemical pollutants. But she didn't expect the emotional jolt she felt when she learned that her body was polluted with traces of 105 chemicals linked in animal studies to a list of devastating health effects including cancer, disruption of the hormone system, birth deformities, and neurological impairments. "I don't live next door to a refinery or an incinerator or some kind of factory," said Patton, whose blood and urine were screened for chemical pollutants after she volunteered for a study conducted by Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. "I've been careful and it hasn't made a bit of difference in terms of the chemicals that are in my body."
It turns out that what's in Patton is in every one of us, too. Unlike our forebears, everyone everywhere now carries a dizzying array of chemical contaminants, the byproducts of modern industry and innovation. These toxic substances accumulate in our fat, bones, blood, and organs, or pass through us in breast milk, urine, feces, sweat, semen, hair, and nails. Scientists studying pollutants in people—including researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta—call the phenomenon "chemical body burden." It is the consequence of womb-to-tomb exposures to substances so common in our daily lives that we never stop to consider them.
That water-repellent jacket you're wearing? It got that way because of a chemical called perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), which is used to make the fluoropolymer membranes needed to impart the extra utility. As of this writing, the Environmental Protection Agency, which has asked manufacturers to voluntarily reduce emissions of PFOA, is debating whether to officially describe the substance as "likely to cause carcinogenicity" in humans.
That cute yellow bath toy your child or grandchild loves to chew? It's likely to contain plasticizers known as phthalates (pronounced "THAL-ates"), which are part of a large family of industrial chemicals linked to impaired sperm quality in animals.
That TV you spend hours in front of? It's probably made with a neurotoxic chemical flame retardant known as polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE), which is showing up in the breast milk of U.S. mothers at rates one hundred times the average found in European studies. In 2003, California followed the lead of the European Union and became the first state to ban two types of PBDEs. Other states have followed. But the most common type of PBDE—and the one found in televisions—is still in wide use. Scientists are worried that PBDEs disrupt the developing thyroid system and could cause developmental deficits.
"It's overwhelming what we're exposed to," said Jane Houlihan, vice president of research for the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a Washington, D.C.–based public-advocacy organization that partnered in several biomonitoring studies in an effort to raise awareness of chemical body burden and the need for more research about the health effects of low-level exposures. "Every day we get a fresh flush of chemicals."
No place—and no one—is immune. The most persistent chemical contaminants are carried across oceans and continents by water and air. Like grasshoppers, they lift into the atmosphere, then glide back to earth, moving from warmer climates to colder climates and settling thousands of miles from a contamination source. They're fat soluble and they bio-magnify, increasing in concentration as they move up the food chain. They cross the placenta, so babies receive their first exposures in the womb.
"Not long ago scientists thought that the placenta shielded cord blood—and the developing baby—from most chemicals and pollutants in the environment," wrote the authors of a 2005 study sponsored by EWG that measured an average of two hundred chemicals in the umbilical cord blood of ten newborn American infants. "But now we know that at this critical time when organs, vessels, membranes and systems are knit together from single cells to finished form in a span of weeks, the umbilical cord carries not only the building blocks of life, but also a steady stream of industrial chemicals, pollutants and pesticides that cross the placenta as readily as residues from cigarettes and alcohol."
In the United States, our chemical neighborhood includes more than eighty thousand industrial substances registered for commercial purposes with the EPA. About ten thousand of these chemicals are widely used in everything from clothing, carpeting, household cleaners, and computers to furniture, food, food containers, paint, cookware, and cosmetics. But the vast majority of them have not been tested for potential toxic effects because the U.S. Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) of 1976 does not require it. And the news gets shockingly worse: the EPA cannot take any regulatory action regarding a suspected harmful substance until it has evidence that it poses an "unreasonable" risk of injury to human health or the environment. The barriers to action are so high that, according to a 2005 report by the Government Accountability Office, the EPA has given up trying to regulate chemicals and instead relies on the chemical industry to act voluntarily when concerns arise. These stunning policy failures have not been rectified in more than three decades.
Indisputably, chemicals have helped raise our living standard and make our lives easier and safer. Think of the conveniences of plastic food-storage containers, stain-resistant carpeting, sleek personal computers, and fast-cooking microwaves. Think of the security of fire-resistant materials, clean-water supplies, stronger-than-steel bulletproof vests and nylon seat belts. Who can argue with the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a trade organization that represents Dow, DuPont, and hundreds of other chemical companies, when it suggests, in a new advertising campaign, that chemicals are "essential2life"? Putting the unctuous text-message-style grammar aside, the slogan speaks volumes about the importance of the $664-billion-a-year U.S. industry and the seventy thousand products for which it supplies raw materials. It's not that chemicals are bad per se, and it would be preposterous for even the most ardent environmentalist to suggest such a notion. It's that costly societal problems often arise because we know so little about so many chemicals. And in the time it takes to learn what harm a substance is doing—to people, to animals, to places—the genie is long out of the bottle.
Examples originate from all over the periodic table: heavy metals such as lead, mercury, and cadmium that steal precious brain function; potent organochlorine substances such as the pesticide DDT, the industrial insulators known as polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, and the man-made chemical by-products called dioxins that have been contaminating the environment for decades; and halogenated compounds such as ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons. Even when regulators intervene to ban or restrict their use, some of these substances show up in people years after they've been proved unsafe.
My own body burden analysis, performed by a laboratory in Manchester, England, at a cost of nearly $2, 000, confirmed I am a poster child for the era of better living through chemistry. On a beautiful fall day, I visited my doctor's office in Portland, Oregon, where a lab technician drew six tubes of my blood. She centrifuged the containers in order to separate the wine-colored cells and platelets from the wheat-colored serum. Then I carefully boxed the tubes in dry ice to preserve them for transport and drove to a FedEx office. Eight weeks later, an e-mail from Scientific Analysis Laboratories settled in my in-box. The attached spreadsheet showed that my body contained traces of at least three dozen persistent toxic chemicals, including DDT and PCBs. Both of these toxics were banned in the United States and Europe thirty years ago when I was a teenager, but their persistence in the environment means they are still part of the food web, contributing to my body burden—and everyone else's. These two chemicals and their metabolites, which are the substances formed as the original compound breaks down, are routinely detected in the population by the CDC's biomonitoring program and others around the world.
The good news is that human exposure levels are decreasing, confirming the wisdom of banning these long-lived pollutants. But my blood also contained traces of PBDES, which are building up in North Americans at rates so astonishing that some researchers refer to these chemicals as "the PCBs of the twenty-first century." These flame retardants have been widely used in North American consumer products ranging from computers to office chairs. The U.S. manufacturers of PBDEs agreed to stop producing two forms of the chemical in 2004. But production continues on the most widely used type, and experts predict that the PBDE-containing products that fill homes and offices will contaminate people for many years to come. As a result, scientists worry that PBDEs have the potential to create a new public-health crisis. "It's scary to see chemicals that behave like PCBs rising in the environment and in our bodies," said Dr. Gina Solomon, a senior scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council and assistant professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco.
Similarly, perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs), an ingredient in the fluoropolymers essential for making nonstick coatings, water-repelling fabrics, oil-and grease-resistant food packaging, and firefighting foam, are ubiquitous in people and the environment. Most levels of the three dozen chemicals and metabolites measured in my body were about average compared to results from other body burden studies. The exception, however, was perfluoro-octane sulfonate or PFOS, a chemical once used in a broad range of industrial, commercial, and consumer products, including 3M's Scotchgard line for carpet, furniture, and clothing. PFOS has been shown to cause cancer and developmental problems in lab animals. At 77. 2 parts per billion, my exposure to PFOS was higher than the maximum levels detected for nonoccupationally exposed adults in three comparison studies, and more than four times greater than the average 18.4 parts per billion for adult women reported in 2007 by CDC researchers. In 2000, at a cost of $200 million, 3M announced it would quit making PFOS and that it was reformulating the Scotchgard line using a closely related chemical alternative. The EPA proposed a "significant new use rule" in October 2000 to limit new uses of PFOS. Around the same time, the agency expanded its investigation to include PFOA, a related chemical used in making Teflon cookware coatings and water-resistant fabrics. In early 2006, the EPA announced a deal intended to reduce PFOA releases and product-content levels with the eight companies, including DuPont, that manufacture the substance in the United States. These companies committed to work toward elimination of all sources of PFOA exposure no later than 2015. But there's much more to the story of perfluorinated chemicals and their potential for harm.
I have no idea why I have higher exposure to PFOS than most other adults. Biomonitoring studies can't tell scientists anything about the source of exposures or when they occurred. So I'm left to wonder if my exposures came from products or from the food chain. In either case, it was largely unavoidable. I came in contact with this extremely persistent, bioaccumulative chemical through the course of my daily living. And because of the substance's remarkable ability to survive—it does not biodegrade or break down in the environment and it is slowly metabolized in animals and humans—it will be in my body for many years, even in the unlikely event that I never have another exposure. And I have no idea yet what this might mean for me healthwise.
Scientists sometimes refer to perfluorinated chemicals, in use since the 1950s, and brominated flame retardants, which were introduced in the 1970s, as emerging chemicals of concern. When I think about that term, it makes me wonder if we've learned anything from our earlier experiences with other persistent substances. The story lines of the "emerging" contaminants are strikingly similar to DDT and PCBs: persistent substances used widely for years before their toxicity was truly understood. DDT and PCBs are now known as "legacy" chemicals because of their continued presence in the environment and in people. Because of gross inadequacies in the U.S. toxics law, perfluorinated chemicals and brominated flame retardants are destined to become the legacy substances of tomorrow.
Excerpted from The Body Toxic by Nena Baker.
Copyright 2008 by Nena Baker.
Published in First paperback edition, 2009 by North Point Press.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.