How polluted is your body?

How polluted is your body?
http://www.suntimes.com/output/health/cst-nws-pollute26.html
December 26, 2003

BY PAUL ELIAS


SAN FRANCISCO -- Davis Baltz shops for organic food and tries to live as healthy as he can.

So he was shocked to learn the pollutants collecting inside his body sounded much like a Superfund cleanup site: pesticides, flame retardants and other nasty, man-made chemicals turned up in a recent test.

''What that told me is that no matter what I tried to do, the plumes of chemicals that we are passing in and out of every day give us exposure,'' said Baltz, who works for Commonweal, an environmental group in Bolinas.

For decades, researchers have sampled the air, land and sea to measure pollution from power plants, factories and automobiles.

Now, in a process called biomonitoring, scientists are sampling urine, blood and mother's milk to catalog pollutants accumulating in humans. They call the results ''body burden.'' Commonweal and the Washington-based Environmental Working Group funded tests for Baltz and eight others at $5,000 apiece.

Though the tests are yielding scary lists of contaminants found in the body, their links to disease are less clear. Nonetheless, proponents say such testing will help researchers learn what role the environment plays in causing disease and how to treat it.

It's not a new phenomenon. Rachel Carson wrote about the poisons in her 1962 book Silent Spring, which is widely credited for jump-starting the environmental movement.

But until now, researchers were left mostly to guess exactly how much and how many of the toxins lingered in our bodies.

Several studies offer answers:

*In March, California researchers reported that San Francisco-area women have three to 10 times as much chemical flame retardant in their breast tissue as European or Japanese women.

*Indiana University researchers reported at the same time that levels in Indiana and California women and infants were 20 times higher than those in Sweden and Norway, which recently banned flame retardant.

*The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this year released data from 2,500 volunteers tested for 116 pollutants and found such chemicals as mercury, uranium and cotinine, a chemical broken down from nicotine.

The CDC also reported that Mexican-American children were found to have three times the amount of a chemical derived from DDT compared with other children. Scientists suspect that Mexico and Latin American countries may still be using the banned chemical.

Some fear that biomonitoring results could be misinterpreted and frighten new mothers from breast-feeding their babies.

''We are clearly concerned about what effects the stories of biomonitoring will have,'' said Barbara Brenner, executive director of the San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Action nonprofit advocacy group. ''Any rational woman will say to herself, 'Should I be breast-feeding?' ''

AP

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