unknown effects—are building the pollution within staying

Thanks to modern chemistry,

eggs don’t stick to the pan,

underarms are fresh all day,

SUVs hit 60 in six seconds. But

such convenience has a price:

Chemicals that suffuse modern

life—from well-known toxins

to newer compounds with

unknown effects—are building

up in our bodies and sometimes

staying there for years. THE POLLUTION WITHIN

Lead paint chips speckle thegut of a two-year-old Cleve-land girl. Phased out decadesago, lead paint is still injuringchildren who swallow it.

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the pollution w ithin 119

FEAR IN THE AIR There’s no proof that chemicals wafting from an oil refinery triggeredbreast cancer in three women from Richmond, California. But Marleen Quint, withgraphic proof of her ordeal, suspects living in sight of the plant was a factor. “Mymother is 79 and has all her body parts,” she says. Quint, Wanna Wright, center,and Etta Lundy hope to force the Chevron plant to reduce “flaring” of excess gases.

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PHOTO OF QUINT: AMELIA DAVIS

120 national geo g raphic • o ctober 2006

the near-miraculous compounds that lurk just beneath the surface of modern

life, making shampoos fragrant, pans nonstick, and fabrics water-resistant and

fire-safe.

The tests are too expensive for most individuals—National Geographic paid

for mine, which would normally cost around $15,000—and only a few labs

have the technical expertise to detect the trace amounts involved.

I ran the tests to learn what substances build up in a typical American over a

lifetime, and where they might come from. I was also searching for a way to

think about risks, benefits, and uncertainty—the complex tradeoffs embodied

in the chemical “body burden” that swirls around inside all of us.

Now I’m learning more than I really want to know.

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My journalist-as-guinea-pig experiment is taking a disturbing turn.

A Swedish chemist is on the phone, talking about flame retardants, chemicals

added for safety to just about any product that can burn. Found in mattresses,

carpets, the plastic casing of televisions, electronic circuit boards, and auto-

mobiles, flame retardants save hundreds of lives a year in the United States

alone. These, however, are where they should not be: inside my body.

Åke Bergman of Stockholm University tells me he has received the results

of a chemical analysis of my blood, which measured levels of flame-retarding

compounds called polybrominated diphenyl ethers. In mice and rats, high dos-

es of PBDEs interfere with thyroid function, cause reproductive and neuro-

logical problems, and hamper neurological development. Little is known about

their impact on human health.

“I hope you are not nervous, but this concentration is very high,” Bergman

says with a light Swedish accent. My blood level of one particularly toxic PBDE,

found primarily in U.S.-made foam pads, mattresses, and furniture, is 10 times

the average found in a small study of U.S. residents and more than 200 times

the average in Sweden. The news about another PBDE variant—also toxic to

animals—is nearly as bad. My levels would be high even if I were a worker in

a factory making the stuff, Bergman says.

In fact I’m a writer engaged in a journey of chemical self-discovery. Last fall

I had myself tested for 320 chemicals I might have picked up from food, drink,

the air I breathe, and the products that touch my skin—my own secret stash

of compounds acquired by merely living. It includes older chemicals that I

might have been exposed to decades ago, such as DDT and PCBs; pollutants

like lead, mercury, and dioxins; newer pesticides and plastic ingredients; andAUTHOR DAVID EWING DUNCAN COOKS BREAKFAST AT HOME.

ON THE MENU: PBDES, PHTHALATES, PCBS, AND A SIDE OF PFAS.

By David Ewing Duncan

Photographs by Peter Essick

ranged from DDT and other pesticides to met-als, PCBs, and plastic ingredients, measured inthe blood and urine of several thousand people.The study said little about health impacts on thepeople tested or about how they might have encountered the chemicals. “The good news isthat we are getting real data about exposure lev-els,” says James Pirkle, the study’s lead author.“This gives us a place to start.”

I began my own chemical journey on anOctober morning at the Mount Sinai Hos-pital in New York City, where I gave urine andhad blood drawn under the supervision of LeoTrasande. Trasande specializes in childhood

the pollution w ithin 123122 national geo g raphic • o ctober 2006

Bergman wants to get to the bottom of myflame-retardant mystery. Have I recentlybought new furniture or rugs? No. Do Ispend a lot of time around computer monitors?No, I use a titanium laptop. Do I live near a fac-tory making flame retardants? Nope, the clos-est one is over a thousand miles away. Then Icome up with an idea.

“What about airplanes?” I ask.“Yah,” he says, “do you fly a lot?”“I flew almost 200,000 miles last year,” I say.

In fact, as I spoke to Bergman, I was sitting inan airport waiting for a flight from my home-town of San Francisco to London.

“Interesting,” Bergman says, telling me thathe has long been curious about PBDE exposureinside airplanes, whose plastic and fabric inte-riors are drenched in flame retardants to meetsafety standards set by the Federal Aviation Administration and its counterparts overseas.“I have been wanting to apply for a grant to testpilots and flight attendants for PBDEs,” Bergmansays as I hear my flight announced overhead.But for now the airplane connection is only ahypothesis. Where I picked up this chemical thatI had not even heard of until a few weeks agoremains a mystery. And there’s the bigger ques-tion: How worried should I be?

The same can be asked of other chemicals I’veabsorbed from air, water, the nonstick pan I usedto scramble my eggs this morning, my faintlyscented shampoo, the sleek curve of my cellphone. I’m healthy, and as far as I know have nosymptoms associated with chemical exposure.In large doses, some of these substances, frommercury to PCBs and dioxins, the notoriouscontaminants in Agent Orange, have horrific effects (“A World of Hurt,” page 139). But manytoxicologists—and not just those who have tiesto the chemical industry—insist that the minus-cule smidgens of chemicals inside us are mostly nothing to worry about.

“In toxicology, dose is everything,” says KarlRozman, a toxicologist at the University of KansasMedical Center, “and these doses are too low tobe dangerous.” One part per billion (ppb), a stan-dard unit for measuring most chemicals insideus, is like putting half a teaspoon of red dye into

an Olympic-size swimming pool. What’s more,some of the most feared substances, such as mer-cury, dissipate within days or weeks—or wouldif we weren’t constantly re-exposed.

Yet even though many health statistics havebeen improving over the past few decades, a fewillnesses are rising mysteriously. From the early1980s through the late 1990s, autism increasedten-fold, one type of leukemia was up 62 per-cent, male birth defects doubled, and childhoodbrain cancer was up 40 percent. Some expertssuspect a link to the manmade chemicals thatpervade our food, water, and air. There’s littlefirm evidence. But over the years, one chemicalafter another that was thought to be harmlessturned out otherwise once the facts were in.

The classic example is lead. In 1970 the U.S.Surgeon General declared that lead levels of 40micrograms per deciliter of blood were safe. It’snow known that any detectable lead can causeneurological damage in children, shaving off IQpoints. From DDT to PCBs, the chemical indus-try has released compounds first and discovereddamaging health effects later. Regulators haveoften allowed a standard of innocent untilproven guilty in what Leo Trasande, a pediatri-cian and environmental health specialist atMount Sinai Hospital in New York City, calls “anuncontrolled experiment on America’s children.”

Each year the U.S. Environmental ProtectionAgency reviews an average of 1,700 new com-pounds that industry is seeking to introduce. Yetthe 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act requiresthat they be tested for any ill effects before approval only if evidence of potential harm exists—which is seldom the case for new chem-icals. The agency approves about 90 percent ofthe new compounds without restrictions. Onlya quarter of the 82,000 chemicals in use in theU.S. have ever been tested for toxicity.

Until recently, no one had even measured average levels of exposure among large numbersof ordinary Americans. No regulations requiredit, the tests are expensive, and technology sen-sitive enough to measure tiny levels didn’t exist.

Last year the Centers for Disease Control andPrevention took a step toward closing that gapwhen it released data on 148 substances that

exposures to mercury and other brain toxins.He had agreed to be one of several expert advis-ers on this project, which began as a Sinai phle-botomist extracted 14 vials of blood—so muchthat at vial 12 I felt woozy and went into a coldsweat. At vial 13 Trasande grabbed smelling salts,which hit my nostrils like a whiff of fire and allowed me to finish.

From New York my samples were shipped toAxys Analytical Services on Vancouver Island inCanada, one of a handful of state-of-the-art labsspecializing in subtle chemical detection, ana-lyzing everything from eagle’s eggs to humantissue for researchers and government agencies.A few weeks later, I followed my samples to

EVERYDAY EXPOSURE Ruby Alcorn, three,inhales fire-retarding chemicals indust from fabrics, furniture, and otherhome products—adding to the doseshe took in as a breast-fed baby.Another class of chemicals, called phthalates, is added to plastics, in-cluding some food wraps (right), forpliability. Both can cause develop-mental problems in lab animals, evenin the low doses people encounter.

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Canada to see how Axys teased out the tiny loadsof compounds inside me.

I watched the specimens go through multiple stages of processing, which slowly separated setsof target chemicals from the thousands of other compounds, natural and unnatural, in my bloodand urine. The extracts then went into a high-tech clean room containing mass spectrometers,sleek, freezer-size devices that work by flingingthe components of a sample through a vacuum,down a long tube. Along the way, a magneticfield deflects the molecules, with lightermolecules swerving the most. The exact amountof deflection indicates each molecule’s size andidentity.

A few weeks later, Axys sent me my results—a grid of numbers in parts per billion or tril-lion—and I set out to learn, as best I could,where those toxic traces came from.

Some of them date back to my time in thewomb, when my mother downloaded part ofher own chemical burden through the placentaand the umbilical cord. More came after I wasborn, in her breast milk.

Once weaned, I began collecting my ownchemicals as I grew up in northeastern Kansas,a few miles outside Kansas City. There I spentcountless hot, muggy summer days playing in adump near the Kansas River. Situated on a highlimestone bluff above the fast brown water linedby cottonwoods and railroad tracks, the dumpwas a mother lode of old bottles, broken ma-chines, steering wheels, and other items onlyboys can fully appreciate.

This was the late 1960s, and my friends and Ihad no way of knowing that this dump wouldlater be declared an EPA superfund site, on theNational Priority List for hazardous places. Itturned out that for years, companies and indi-viduals in this corner of Johnson County haddumped thousands of pounds of material con-taminated with toxic chemicals here. “It wasstarted as a landfill before there were any rulesand regulations on how landfills were done,” saysDenise Jordan-Izaguirre, the regional represen-tative for the federal Agency for Toxic Substancesand Disease Registry. “There were metal tailingsand heavy metals dumped in there. It was

unfenced, unrestricted, so kids had access to it.”Kids like me.Now capped, sealed, and closely monitored,

the dump, called the Doepke-Holliday Site, alsohappens to be half a mile upriver from a coun-ty water intake that supplied drinking water formy family and 45,000 other households. “Fromwhat we can gather, there were contaminantsgoing into the river,” says Shelley Brodie, the EPARemedial Project Manager for Doepke. In the1960s, the county treated water drawn from theriver, but not for all contaminants. Drinking water also came from 21 wells that tapped theaquifer near Doepke.

When I was a boy, my corner of Kansaswas filthy, and the dump wasn’t the onlysource of toxins. Factories owned by Ford,Colgate-Palmolive, the Kansas Power and LightCompany, Bayer CropScience, and many otherslined the river a few miles away. When we drovepast the plants toward downtown Kansas City,we plunged into a noxious cloud that engulfedthe car with smoke and an awful chemical stench.Flames rose from fertilizer plant stacks, burningoff mustard-yellow plumes of sodium, and rawsewage poured into the river. In the nearby farm-land, trucks and crop dusters sprayed DDT andother pesticides in great, puffy clouds that wekids sometimes rode our bikes through, holdingour breath and feeling very brave.

Today the air is clear, and the river free ofeffluents—a visible testament to the success ofthe U.S. environmental cleanup, spurred by theClean Air and Clean Water Acts of the 1970s.But my Axys test results read like a chemical diary from 40 years ago. My blood containstraces of several chemicals now banned or restricted, including DDT (in the form of DDE,one of its breakdown products) and other pes-ticides such as the termite-killers chlordane andheptachlor. The levels are about what you wouldexpect decades after exposure, says Rozman, thetoxicologist at the University of Kansas MedicalCenter. My childhood playing in the dump,drinking the water, and breathing the pollutedair could also explain some of the lead and diox-ins in my blood, he says.


What’s inside David EwingDuncan? To find out, hesubmitted to a huge batteryof blood and urine tests todetect traces of industrialchemicals, dangerous met-als, and pollutants he haspicked up over a lifetime.As it turns out, Duncan cango toe-to-toe with a mid-western corn field for pesti-cide variety—16 of the 26tested for were found.Don’t try to set him on fireeither, as his blood is rich in PBDE-47, a common fireretardant. Does this makeDuncan a freak of thechemical age? Hardly. Infact there may be nothingunusual about his chemicalprofile. Many of his resultswere no higher than theCDC mean levels for Ameri-cans. So what’s in you?

OUR AUTHOR’SCHEMICALREPORT CARD

DIOXINS17 TESTED

PFAS13 TESTED

PHTHALATES7 TESTED

METALS4 TESTED

BISPHENOLS2 TESTED

PESTICIDES28 TESTED

PBDES40 TESTED

PCBS209 TESTED

97 DETECTED

25DETECTED

16DETECTED

10DETECTED

7DETECTED

7DETECTED

3DETECTED

0DETECTED

RESULTS OF CONCERN

• Dieldrin Test Result: 5.11 ppb* CDC Mean: n/a

HEALTH EFFECTS

• neurological • reproductive

A pesticide once used tokill termites and othersoil insects, it still lingersin the environment.

• p,p-DDE Test Result: 256 ppb CDC Mean: 295 ppb

HEALTH EFFECTS

• neurological • liver

A breakdown product ofDDT (now banned), ithas the same harmfuleffects as the formerlypopular pesticide.

• mMeP Test Result: 34.8 ppb CDC Mean: 1.15 ppb

HEALTH EFFECTS (SUSPECTED)• reproductive

It’s a member of a classcalled phthalates, usedfor texture in a wide array of products.

• BDE-47 (Tetra) Test Result: 249 ppb CDC Mean: n/a

HEALTH EFFECTS (SUSPECTED)• liver • neurodevelopmental

Now being phased out,this fire retardant is inmany plastic productsand resists environmen-tal degradation.

• Mercury Test 1 Result: 5 micrograms/l Test 2: 12 micrograms/l CDC poisoning level: 10

HEALTH EFFECTS

• neurological • reproductive

Duncan’s blood level ofthe toxic metal morethan doubled after heate two meals of sword-fish and halibut.

*PARTS PER BILLION

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PHOTO BY CATHERINE KARNOW

320CHEMICALS

TESTED

165 CHEMICALSDETECTED


I went to college at a place and time thatput me at the height of exposure for an-other set of chemicals found inside me—PCBs, once used as electrical insulators and heat-exchange fluids in transformers and otherproducts. PCBs can lurk in the soil anywherethere’s a dump or an old factory. But some ofthe largest releases took place along New York’sHudson River from the 1940s to the 1970s, whenGeneral Electric used PCBs at factories in thetowns of Hudson Falls and Fort Edward. About140 miles downstream is the city of Poughkeep-sie, where I attended Vassar College in the late1970s.

PCBs, oily liquids or solids, can persist in the environment for decades. In animals, they impair liver function, raise blood lipids, andcause cancers. Some PCBs—there are 209 ofthem—chemically resemble dioxins and causeother mischief in lab animals: reproductive andnervous system damage, as well as developmen-tal problems. By 1976, the toxicity of PCBs wasunmistakable; the United States banned them,and GE stopped using them. But until then, GElegally dumped excess PCBs into the Hudson,which swept them all the way downriver toPoughkeepsie, one of eight cities that draw theirdrinking water from the Hudson.

In 1984, a 200-mile stretch of the Hudson,from Hudson Falls to New York City, was declared a superfund site, and plans to rid theriver of PCBs were set in motion. GE has spent300 million dollars on the cleanup so far, dredg-ing up and disposing of PCBs in the river sedi-ment under the supervision of the EPA. It is alsoworking to stop the seepage of PCBs into theriver from the factories.

Birds and other wildlife along the Hudson arethought to have suffered from the pollution, butits impact on humans is less definitive. Onestudy in Hudson River communities found a 20percent increase in the rate of respiratory dis-eases, while another, more reassuringly, foundno increase in cancer deaths in the contami-nated region. But among many of the locals, thefear is palpable.

“I grew up a block from the Fort Edwardplant,” says Dennis Prevost, a retired Army officer

and public health advocate, who blames PCBsfor the brain cancers that killed his brother atage 46 and a neighbor in her 20s. “The PCBshave migrated under the parking lot and intothe community aquifer,” which Prevost says wasthe source of Fort Edward’s drinking water until municipal water replaced wells in 1984.

Ed Fitzgerald of the State University of NewYork at Albany, a former staff scientist at the statedepartment of health, is conducting the mostthorough study yet of the health effects of PCBsin the area. He says he has explained to Prevostand other residents that the risk from the wellswas probably small because PCBs tend to settleto the bottom of an aquifer. Eating contami-nated fish caught in the Hudson is a more like-ly exposure route, he says.

I didn’t eat much Hudson River fish duringmy college days in the 1970s, but the drinkingwater in my dorm could have contained tracesof the PCBs pouring into the river far upstream.That may be how I picked up my PCB body bur-den, which was about average for an American.Or maybe not. “PCBs are everywhere,” says LeoRosales, a local EPA official, “so who knowswhere you got it.”

Back home in San Francisco, I step intomy shower, which is loaded with a newergeneration of industrial chemicals—com-pounds that are not banned, and, like flame retardants, are increasing year by year in the environment and in my body. Lathering my hair,I’m probably exposing myself to bisphenol A,an ingredient in plastics from shampoo contain-ers to shower curtains. Bisphenol A causes reproductive system abnormalities in animals.My levels were so low they were undetectable—a rare moment of relief in my toxic odyssey.

And that faint lavender scent as I wash out thesuds? Credit it to phthalates, molecules that dis-solve fragrances, thicken lotions, and add flexi-bility to PVC, vinyl, and some intravenous tubesin hospitals. The dashboards of most cars areloaded with phthalates, and so is some plasticfood wrap. Heat and wear can release phthalatemolecules, and humans swallow them or absorbthem through the skin. Because they dissipate

after a few minutes to a few hours in the body,most people’s levels fluctuate during the day.

Like bisphenol A, phthalates disrupt repro-ductive development in mice. An expert panelconvened by the National Toxicology Programrecently concluded that although the evidenceso far doesn’t prove that phthalates pose any riskto people, it does raise “concern,” especially aboutpotential effects on infants. “We don’t have thedata in humans to know if the current levels aresafe,” says Antonia Calafat, a CDC phthalates expert. I scored higher than the mean in five outof seven phthalates tested. One of them,monomethyl phthalate, came in at 34.8 ppb, inthe top 5 percent for Americans—perhaps,says Leo Trasande, because I gave my urine sam-ple in the morning, just after I had showeredand washed my hair.

My inventory of household chemicals also includes PFAs—tough, chemically resistant com-pounds that go into making nonstick and stain-resistant coatings. 3M also used them in itsScotchgard protector products until it foundthat the specific PFA compounds in Scotchgard

were escaping into the environment and phasedthem out. In animals these chemicals damagethe liver and thyroid and cause birth defects andperhaps cancer, but not much is known aboutthem in humans.

Long-range pollution left its mark on my results as well: My blood contained low, prob-ably harmless, levels of dioxins, which escapefrom paper mills, certain chemical plants, andincinerators. Out in the environment, dioxinssettle on soil and in the water, then pass intothe food chain. They build up in animal fat, andmost people pick them up from meat and dairyproducts.

And then there is mercury, a neurotoxin thatcan permanently impair memory, learning cen-ters, and behavior. Coal-burning power plantsare a major source of mercury, sending it outtheir stacks into the atmosphere, where it dis-perses in the wind, falls in rain, and eventuallywashes into lakes, streams, or oceans. There bac-teria transform it into a compound calledmethylmercury, which moves up the food chainafter plankton absorb it from the water and are


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GANTLET OF FRESHNESS A whiff of household products sends Betty Kreeger into fits ofwheezing, nausea, and confusion. Like other multiple chemical sensitivity sufferers,she flees fragrances when she can and dons an air-filtering mask when she can’t.


eaten by small fish. Large predatory fish at thetop of the marine food chain, like tuna andswordfish, accumulate the highest concentra-tions of methylmercury—and pass it on toseafood lovers.

For people in northern California, mercuryexposure is also a legacy of the gold rush a cen-tury and a half ago, when miners used quicksil-ver, or liquid mercury, to separate the gold fromother ores in the hodgepodge of mines in theSierra Nevada. Over the decades, streams andgroundwater washed mercury-laden sedimentout of the old mine tailings and swept it intoSan Francisco Bay.

I don’t eat much fish, and the levels of mer-cury in my blood were modest. But I wonderedwhat would happen if I gorged on large fish fora meal or two. So one afternoon I bought somehalibut and swordfish at a fish market in the oldFerry Building on San Francisco Bay, bothcaught in the ocean just outside the Golden Gate.That night I ate the halibut with basil and a dashof soy sauce; I downed the swordfish for break-fast with eggs (cooked in my nonstick pan).

Twenty-four hours later I had my blooddrawn and retested, and the effect of those oldmines was plain to see: My level of mercury hadmore than doubled, from 5 micrograms per literto a higher-than-recommended 12. Mercury at70 or 80 micrograms per liter is dangerous foradults, says Leo Trasande, and much lower lev-els can affect children. “Children have sufferedlosses in IQ at 5.8 micrograms.” He advises meto avoid repeating the gorge experiment.

It’s a lot harder to dodge the PBDE flameretardants responsible for the most wor-risome of my test results. My world—andyours—has become saturated with them sincethey were introduced about 30 years ago.

Scientists have found the compounds plan-etwide, in polar bears in the Arctic, cormorantsin England, and killer whales in the Pacific.Bergman, the Swedish chemist, and his col-leagues first called attention to potential healthrisks in 1998 when they reported an alarmingincrease in PBDEs in human breast milk, fromnone in milk preserved in 1972 to an average offour ppb in 1997.

The compounds escape from treated plasticand fabrics in dust particles or as gases that clingto dust. People inhale the dust; infants crawling


NOT SAFE AT HOME When Christine Larson was six months old, her blood lead was overtwice the level the government says is safe; even lower levels can reduce IQ, stuntgrowth, and cause behavior problems. The vintage Cleveland-area house her par-ents had recently bought had lead paint, illegal for residential use since 1978. Thelead sources are now gone, and Christina is “smart as a whip,” her mother says.

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comprehensive study of PBDE levels in the U.S.on a fast track, with results due out late this year.Pirkle, who is running the study, says my seem-ingly extreme levels may no longer be out of theordinary. “We’ll let you know,” he says.

Given the stakes, why take a chance on thesechemicals? Why not immediately ban them? In2004, Europe did just that for the penta- andocta-BDEs, which animal tests suggest are themost toxic of the compounds. California willalso ban these forms by 2008, and in 2004Chemtura, an Indiana company that is the onlyU.S. maker of pentas and octas, agreed to phasethem out. Currently, there are no plans to banthe much more prevalent deca-BDEs. They reportedly break down more quickly in the environment and in people, although theirbreakdown products may include the same oldpentas and octas.

Nor is it clear that banning a suspect chemi-cal is always the best option. Flaming beds andairplane seats are not an inviting prospect either. The University of Surrey in England recently assessed the risks and benefits of flameretardants in consumer products. The reportconcluded: “The benefits of many flame retar-dants in reducing the risk from fire outweighthe risks to human health.”

Except for some pollutants, after all, every in-dustrial chemical was created for a purpose. EvenDDT, the arch-villain of Rachel Carson’s 1962classic book Silent Spring, which launched themodern environmental movement, was oncehailed as a miracle substance because it killedthe mosquitoes that carry malaria, yellow fever,and other scourges. It saved countless lives be-fore it was banned in much of the world becauseof its toxicity to wildlife. “Chemicals are not allbad,” says Scott Phillips, a medical toxicologistin Denver.“While we have seen cancer rates rise,”he says, “we also have seen a doubling of the human lifespan in the past century.”

The key is knowing more about these substances, so we are not blindsided by unex-pected hazards, says California State SenatorDeborah Ortiz, chair of the Senate Health Com-mittee and the author of a bill to monitor chem-ical exposure. “We benefit from these chemicals,

but there are consequences, and we need to un-derstand these consequences much better thanwe do now.” Sarah Brozena of the industry-supported American Chemistry Council, thinkssafeguards are adequate now, but she concedes:“That’s not to say this process was done right inthe past.”

The European Union last year gave initial approval to a measure called REACH—Regis-tration, Evaluation, and Authorization of Chem-icals—which would require companies to provethe substances they market or use are safe, orthat the benefits outweigh any risks. The bill,which the chemical industry and the U.S. gov-ernment oppose, would also encourage compa-nies to find safer alternatives to suspect flameretardants, pesticides, solvents, and other chem-icals. That would give a boost to the so-calledgreen chemistry movement, a search for alter-natives that is already under way in laboratorieson both sides of the Atlantic.

As unsettling as my journey down chem-ical lane was, it left out thousands of com-pounds, among them pesticides, plastics,solvents, and a rocket-fuel ingredient called per-chlorate that is polluting groundwater in manyregions of the country. Nor was I tested forchemical cocktails—mixtures of chemicals thatmay do little harm on their own but act togeth-er to damage human cells. Mixed together, pes-ticides, PCBs, phthalates, and others “might haveadditive effects, or they might be antagonistic,”says James Pirkle of the CDC, “or they may donothing. We don’t know.”

Soon after I receive my results, I show themto my internist, who admits that he too knowslittle about these chemicals, other than lead andmercury. But he confirms that I am healthy, asfar as he can tell. He tells me not to worry. So I’llkeep flying, and scrambling my eggs in Teflon,and using that scented shampoo. But I’ll neverfeel quite the same about the chemicals thatmake life better in so many ways.


on the floor get an especially high dose. Bergmandescribes a family, tested in Oakland, California,by the Oakland Tribune, whose two small chil-dren had blood levels far higher than mine. Whenhe and his colleagues summed up the test resultsfor all PBDE forms, they found total levels of 390ppb in the five-year-old girl and 650 ppb—twicemy total—in the 18-month-old boy.

In 2001, researchers in Sweden fed young micea PBDE mixture similar to one used in furni-ture and found that they did poorly on tests oflearning, memory, and behavior. Last year, sci-entists at Berlin’s Charité University MedicalSchool reported that pregnant female rats withPBDE levels no higher than mine gave birth to

male pups with impaired reproductive health.Linda Birnbaum, an EPA expert on these

flame retardants, says that humans would prob-ably start seeing detrimental effects at about fourtimes the baby boy’s level. She says I shouldn’tworry. Bergman isn’t so sure, and he says that ina pregnant woman my levels would be of con-cern. “Any level above 100 parts per billion is arisk to newborns,” he guesses. Neither he norBirnbaum really know for sure.

Any margin of safety may be narrowing. In areview of several studies, Ronald Hites of Indi-ana University found an exponential rise in peo-ple and animals, with the levels doubling everythree to five years. Now the CDC is putting a

SEEKING PURITY At a spa in MaharishiVedic City, Iowa, John Moore (above)hopes to speed the elimination ofPCBs, which are stored in fat foryears. Technicians ply him with oils ina purification process based on Indianayurveda tradition. At a Marin County,California, mall (right) teens takingpart in the Campaign for Safe Cosmet-ics show off makeup free of chemicalslinked to cancer and birth defects.

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O Home sick home Learn about the toxins we encounter every day in an interactive graphic, andexplore related links at ngm.com/0610.


BEDROOM / BATHROOM

• PBDES: Foam mattress and pillows, chair cushions, hairdryer, telephone

• PESTICIDES: Antimicrobial soap, pet flea collar

• METALS: Old lead paint

• PHTHALATES: Shower curtain, nail polish, shampoo, perfume, deodorants, lotion, soap, hair spray, medicines,vinyl flooring, toothpaste, plastic bath toys

OUR TOXIC HOMESWe can’t run home to escape chemicals that infiltrate our bodies. Our dwellings arerife with them—some clearly toxic, others only suspected of being harmful.

KITCHEN / DINING ROOM

• PHTHALATES: Plastic containers and bottles, some foodwraps, vinyl flooring

• DIOXINS: Fatty meats, dairy products, fish

• PCBS: Food

• METALS: Mercury-contaminated fish

• BISPHENOLS: Plastic containers, lining of canned foods

• PFAS: Nonstick pans

• PBDES: Coffee maker, blender, microwave, toaster

OUTDOORS

• METALS: Pressure-treated wood table (arsenic andchromium), power plant emissions (mercury)

• PESTICIDES: On lawn and garden

• DIOXINS: Grilled fatty meats and fish

• PHTHALATES: Water bottles, lawn furniture, garden hose,vinyl toys, roof membrane with PVC, outdoor extensioncord with PVC

• PBDES: TV, boom box

LIVING ROOM

• PBDEs: Couch cushions, chair cushions, electronics (TV, computer), carpets and carpet padding, electronicgames, pet bed

• BISPHENOLS: Plastic baby bottle

• PHTHALATES: Extension cords, vinyl wallpaper and blinds

• PESTICIDES: Tracked indoors, drifting in window, on petflea collar

• PFAS: Furniture fabric, microwave popcorn bag

PHTHALATES

The chemical additivefor all seasons

These chemicals have ahuge array of uses, frommaking baby chew toys softto giving lotions the rightconsistency. In lab animals,they have caused problemsin the sexual developmentof males, and recent humanstudies suggest that thesame things might be hap-pening to baby boys.

HOW TO AVOID

A few cosmetics companieshave made a point of shun-ning them, but there aremyriad sources of exposure.

PESTICIDES

They’re harming morethan just the bugs

Some, like DDT, havebeen banned, while others,such as atrazine, arerestricted. But the list ofthose still commonly in usefor killing everything fromhousehold roaches to exoticcrop fungi is long, andresearchers have linkedsome to asthma and neuro-logical, developmental, andimmunological problems.

HOW TO AVOID

Wash produce well, or buyorganic. In agricultural areas, limit buildup at homeby frequent vacuuming.

PFAS

Convenient but maybecarcinogenic

Used in scratch- andstain-resistant coatings,they take years for the bodyto eliminate. The 3MCorporation phased out onetype, perfluorooctane sul-fonate (PFOS), the mainingredient of Scotchgard,after it was found to per-vade the global environ-ment. Another type, per-fluorooctane acid (PFOA), isstill used in fabrics and tomake nonstick pans and is asuspected carcinogen.

HOW TO AVOID

Found in air, water, andfood, they are unavoidable.

PCBS

Long banned, they are still around

Polychlorinatedbiphenyls (PCBs) were won-der substances. Hard to setaflame, they were commoncoolants and insulators inelectrical systems. Theirdurability has a dark side:They don’t break down inthe environment, and theybuild up in animal andhuman tissues. The effectsinclude liver damage andcancer in lab animals.

HOW TO AVOID

Now banned, they remainpervasive. Avoid eating fishor game from areas knownto be contaminated.

DIOXINS

Industrial by-product,presidential poison

Similar in toxicity toPCBs, dioxins result fromindustrial activities andfires. They enter the foodchain in contaminatedareas and build up in plantand animal fats.Deliberately tainted soupmay have been the vehicleused to poison UkrainianPresident VictorYushchenko, leaving hisface disfigured. Cancer andbirth defects are amongother likely dioxin effects.

HOW TO AVOID

Avoid fatty meats and areasknown to be contaminated.

BISPHENOLS

Hormones in your water bottle

Polycarbonate plastics,found in some rigid plasticbottles, are made withbisphenol-A, a syntheticestrogen that may leachinto liquid over time as the plastic degrades.Researchers have foundevidence in lab animals thatthese estrogen mimics maycause reproductive harm tomale and female fetuses.

HOW TO AVOID

Avoid hard plastic bottles.That may not eliminate allrisk if, as some researchsuggests, background levelsare now high enough to beharmful.

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ART BY BONNIE TIMMONS

METALS

Deadly poisons hidingin plain sight

Toxic metals are someof the most common indus-trial poisons in the home.Old paint contains lead, fishlike tuna contains mercury,and your pressure-treateddeck can expose your fami-ly to arsenic. The effects onyoung children can be pro-found, ranging from subtledevelopmental delays todeath.

HOW TO AVOID

Remove or seal up old paintand pressure-treated lum-ber. Pregnant women andchildren should be cautiousabout eating certain fish.

PBDES

They stop fires butstay around in people

Polybrominateddiphenyl ethers (PBDEs),used as flame retardants,are building up rapidly inpeople’s bodies. They causedevelopmental problems inlab animals. The most worri-some of these compoundshave been phased out, butthe PBDE varieties still usedin the U.S. may also beharmful.

HOW TO AVOID

PBDEs are found in manyappliances and some fab-rics, and are unavoidable.

• • • • • • • •

More than the roar of motorbikes fills the air in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet-nam, where bicyclists are now a minority. There’s also acrid smoke, or astoxicologists would say, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs): chem-icals from incompletely burned fuel that can cause cancer in lab animals.

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For most people, tiny residues of pesticidein food are a nagging worry. But for bananaplantation workers in Central America duringthe 1970s and 1980s, pesticide exposure had dev-astating consequences. A chemical called DBCP,used to control root worms, left as many as30,000 men sterile for life.

This is the dark side of industrial chemistry,which gives us convenient products and abun-dant food but exacts a human cost. The cost isnever more apparent than when accidents orchemical “hot spots” expose people to pesticides,heavy metals, and other substances at levels manytimes higher than most of us experience. The vic-tims are often the world’s poor and powerless—people who live close to the smokestacks anddumps and work in the riskiest jobs. Tragic in themselves, these high exposures also raisetroubling questions about the much smaller,parts-per-billion traces we all pick up in daily life(“The Pollution Within,” page 116).

To find out whether or not these chemicaltraces are dangerous, scientists give high dosesto animals, looking for threshold levels at whichsigns of toxicity appear and trying to understandthe nature of the damage. But extreme humanexposures also provide clues. “These tragediesprovide us with information that comes frompeople,” says John Osterloh, chief medical officerfor the National Center for EnvironmentalHealth at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

Wake-up calls about the dangers of methyl-mercury, the form of mercury found in waterand seafood, came decades ago from accidentsand hot spot exposures. In a notorious case fromthe 1950s, 68 people living on Japan’s Minama-ta Bay died and hundreds suffered brain dam-age after eating fish contaminated with mercurydumped by a nearby chemical plant. In 1971-72,

A WORLDOF HURT

For most of us, environmental chemicals come in tiny doses, and any

harm is hard to discern. But accidents and contaminated hotpsots can

deluge people with toxins. The effects are anything but subtle.

WAR VICTIM? A young girl lies helplessin a Ho Chi Minh City facility for chil-

dren thought to be victims of thedioxin-containing defoliant Agent

Orange, with which the United Statescontaminated large areas of Vietnam.She suffers from Fraser syndrome, agenetic disorder marked by deformi-ties including fused eyelids and dig-

its. It can’t be definitely linked to diox-in, but the Vietnamese are convinced.

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at least 459 people died and 6,500 were hospital-ized in Iraq during a famine, when they ate breadmade from seed grain that had been treated witha methylmercury-containing fungicide to holddown mold growth. The seeds were safe to plant,but not to eat. In Denmark’s Faroe Islands, wherepeople eat whale meat and fish containing highlevels of mercury, studies of the cognitive devel-opment of children born to mercury-exposedwomen helped other countries set standards forsafe levels of mercury.

Tragedy has also provided graphic evidenceof the dangers of dioxin, a pollutant emitted byburning wood and trash and generated by chem-ical plants. During the Vietnam War, U.S. forcessprayed millions of acres of jungle with AgentOrange, which stripped foliage from trees. Thespray was tainted with dioxin, a by-product ofthe manufacturing process. Over the years,people living in the defoliated areas and soldierswho applied the Agent Orange or marchedthrough afterwards have developed cancer anddiabetes in unusual numbers. In 1976, a tank exploded in a chemical factory in Seveso, Italy,releasing a cloud of dioxin that led to a long-term increase in cancer among the 37,000 people exposed. These disasters helped promptmeasures that reduced dioxin emissions fromU.S. and European factories by more than half.

Related to dioxins are PCBs, once so widelyused as coolants and electrical insulators that theU.S. was producing 85 million pounds a year inthe mid-1970s. By then, however, the warningsigns were hard to ignore. In 1968 thousands ofpeople on the island of Kyushu, Japan, had eat-en rice oil contaminated with PCBs during man-ufacture. Nearly 1800 fell ill, and 112 died of acute

poisoning, cancer, and other ailments. Childrenborn to the victims had immune system and developmental problems. News of disaster anda drumbeat of reports about PCB contamina-tion of water, food, and wildlife alarmed the pub-lic, and the U.S banned the compounds in 1977.

Toxic exposures aren’t always due to accidentsor ignorance about a chemical’s true dangers. TheU.S. banned the pesticide DBCP in 1977 aftersuch heavy use that traces still linger in ground-water across much of the country. Yet CentralAmerica’s banana growers continued to apply itfor years, and workers there still spray toxic pes-ticides without protective clothing or masks.

In 1987, 6 percent of paid banana workers inCosta Rica acknowledged a pesticide accident,the highest rate of reported on-the-job accidentsin the world, according to the World Health Organization. Injuries included head pains,dizziness, faintness, burns, eye inflammation,and respiratory problems. Today workers in thedeveloping world continue to be exposed tochemicals banned in the U.S. and Europe, andto toxic waste and pollution at levels unaccept-able in the developed world.

For newer chemicals, such as the phthalatesfound in cosmetics and plastics and the flameretardants in fabrics and electronics, headline-grabbing accidents and worker poisonings arerare—perhaps because safety measures have improved, or because the chemicals are not asacutely toxic as older compounds. Whether theyare less harmful in the long run is not clear.

Scott Philips, a medical toxicologist in Den-ver, cautions against comparing the effects ofhigh doses with the smidgens inside us. “Anysubstance, even seemingly harmless ones, canbe dangerous in certain quantities and underthe right circumstances,” he says. Leo Trasande,a toxicologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in NewYork City, thinks it can be equally risky to ignore the lessons from high exposures. “Theextreme cases show us what can happen,” he says.

While science searches for answers, one thingis certain: The known horrors inflicted by highdoses of chemicals make the small amounts inside each of us even more unsettling.

—David Ewing Duncan


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HEALTHY CROP To raise tobacco fit for export cigars, workers at a Nicaragua farm (above)wade through clouds of fungicide. A few days after falling ill from fumes, sprayerMedardo Bellorini (below, washing off chemicals after work) was back in the fields. Pesticides have been linked to cancer and endocrine and nervous system disorders.

This is the dark side of

industrial chemistry. The

victims are often the world’s

poor and powerless—people

who live close to the

smokestacks and dumps and

work in the riskiest jobs.

142 national geo g raphic • o ctober 2006 the pollution w ithin 143

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UNDER DARK CLOUDS A rustic brick kiln in SanLuis Potosí, Mexico (left), belches black smokeat brick makers, who sustain invisible damagewith each day of work. The smoke is rich inPAHs from incompletely burned wood and oilused to heat the furnace. Scientists have doc-umented DNA damage in some children atthe site, likely caused by toxic exposure.

Along with pollution from decades of PCBproduction in their city, Anniston, Alabama,residents learned in recent years of anotherhazard: decommissioned chemical weaponsat a nearby military depot. Sha-Nekia Pittmanand her daughter, Tikyia Jackson (above),practice donning government-issued gasmasks, their sole defense against a leak. j

unknown effects—are building the pollution within staying

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