You already know that the biological legacy of our chemical supply is my pet cause. Here’s more from a CNN article today:
Michelle Hammond and Jeremiah Holland were intrigued when a friend at the Oakland Tribune asked them and their two young children to take part in a cutting-edge study to measure the industrial chemicals in their bodies.
[The] tests revealed that their children — Rowan, then 18 months, and Mikaela, then 5 — had chemical exposure levels up to seven times those of their parents.
“[Rowan’s] been on this planet for 18 months, and he’s loaded with a chemical I’ve never heard of,” Holland, 37, said. “He had two to three times the level of flame retardants in his body that’s been known to cause thyroid dysfunction in lab rats.”
The technology to test for these flame retardants — known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) — and other industrial chemicals is less than 10 years old. Environmentalists call it “body burden” testing, an allusion to the chemical “burden,” or legacy of toxins, running through our bloodstream. Scientists refer to this testing as “biomonitoring.”
As usual, some defenders of the chemical legacy say that presence does not equal proof. But wouldn’t we rather err on the side of caution, especially considering how sensitive our bodies are (especially our hormones) and how these same chemicals have been proven to cause cancers and reproductive problems in lab animals?
I hate it when the news makes me preachy. I wish there were more excuses to write about funny stuff, like gay wizards. Quit screwing things up, world!