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Studies show Americans' bodies high in toxins
SEAFOOD.COM NEWS
31st January 2003
Michael Lerner and Sharyle Patton avoid red meat, buy organic produce and keep pesticides out of their Northern California home. Yet chemical analyses of their blood and urine found lots of toxins -- 105 different ones for her, 101 for him.
He's got worrisome amounts of mercury, arsenic and lead. She's troubled by measurable levels of dozens of different forms of two industrial chemicals linked to cancer, dioxins and PCBs.
Two studies, one released Thursday by a New York hospital and a Washington environmental group, the other coming today from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, look at the prevalence of low levels of industrial and agricultural chemicals in Americans' bodies. The chemicals' presence is not necessarily harmful, but it raises questions about how they got there and what effects they have.
'We really made choices to avoid chemical exposures, yet as my wife said, what these tests demonstrate is that we all live in the same chemical neighborhood,' Lerner said.
Lerner and Patton were part of a $200,000 two-year 'Body Burden' study by the Environmental Working Group and New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital.
Philip Landrigan, community and preventative medicine chief at Mt. Sinai, said his study illustrates the need for answers to serious questions about what these chemicals are doing in bodies when they interact with each other, and what doses are low enough to be safe.
While the Landrigan study is of a tiny sample, its findings fit previous CDC and Environmental Protection Agency analyses, said University of Oregon biology professor Joe Thornton. He reviewed Landrigan's work for the journal Public Health Reports.
'It shows the universality of chemical contamination of people's bodies,' Thornton said.
All the studies 'confirm the general message that everybody in our society has these chemicals building up. Some people have it worse than others, but everyone has it. No one is clean anymore.'
So what, say other scientists.
'Hey, our body is full of chemicals. That to me isn't a concern,' said Bernard Goldstein dean of the University of Pittsburgh's Public Health School and a former research chief for the EPA in the 1980s. 'It's a chemical era that we live in and there are trade-offs.'
Some of these chemicals are harmful in low doses, but many are not, Goldstein said. More than anything else, these studies show that scientists have improved tests to detect chemicals, he said. Still, he added, it makes sense to do what the CDC is doing: watching how chemical loads in the body change over many years.
Original article courtesy Biloxi Sun Herald
Ken Coons
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