National Toxicology Program Lists Dioxin As a Known Human Carcinogen

The Body Burden

Douglas Fischer -- ANG Newspapers

A casual observer of Rowan Hammond Holland sees a little towhead, devilishly cute, who grins impishly while tossing food at the family dog.

A pediatrician sees a child who's a bit small for his age: 30-odd inches tall, 22 pounds, about 10th percentile for 20-month-old boys.

But not even his mother could guess what's in his blood: flame retardants, at concentrations higher than measured almost anywhere in the world for someone not handling the stuff for a living.

He's a typical kid from a typical family, picked for a MediaNews investigation of chemical pollutants in our bodies.

The surprising result, scientists say, suggests infants and toddlers have vastly higher levels of some chemical pollutants than health officials suspect -- or even consider safe.

But no one can say. Rowan is the only toddler, at least in the United States, who's been tested for such things, despite evidence these compounds taint our blood, our food, our house dust, our kids.

This is our "body burden" -- our chemical legacy, picked up from our possessions, passed to our children and sown across the environment. It's the result, scientists say, of 50 years of increasing reliance on synthetic chemicals for every facet of our daily lives.

Only recently have regulators grasped its scope. Health officials have yet to fully comprehend its consequence.

We are all, in a sense, subjects of an experiment, with no way to buy your way out, eat your way out or exercise your way out. We are guinea pigs when it comes to the unknown long-term threat these chemicals pose in our bodies and, in particular, our children.

In the first study of its kind, Rowan and his family had their blood, hair and urine tested for a suite of chemical pollutants thought to be ubiquitous in our environment.

The tests showed PCBs, plasticizers, mercury, lead and cadmium in each family member. Chemicals used to make Teflon and GoreTex contaminated their blood. Mikaela, Rowan's 5-year-old sister, had more dibutyl phthalate -- a plasticizer found in nail polish and cosmetics -- in her urine than 90 percent of the 328 children age 6-11 tested so far in the United States.

The shock was the family's level of a class of flame retardants -- polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs -- used in everything from TV casings to rugs to foam cushions. In the United States, where levels are 10 to 100 times higher than the rest of the world, the average adult is thought to have 36 parts per billion in their blood.

A cocktail mixed at that concentration would have 36 drops of gin in a rail tank car of tonic.

Rowan's mom, Michele Hammond, had 138 ppb. His dad, Jeremiah Holland, 102. His sister, 490. And Rowan: 838 ppb. Scientists start to see thyroid problems in lab rats at 300 ppb.

"This is a very serious warning of very small children being heavily exposed," said Aake Bergman, professor of environmental chemistry at Stockholm University in Sweden and one of the world's foremost experts on human exposure to fire retardants. "We may have many more people being exposed at similar levels."

Proportions will vary, and indeed, a follow-up test of the Hammond Hollands found lower -- but still alarming -- PBDE levels in the children. A similar chemical stew can be found in every adult and child in the country, scientists say.

The exposure comes courtesy of our lifestyle, in which synthetic chemistry imbues the modern world with convenience beyond that of any generation in history.

We make perfume from petroleum and preserve food in plastic. Our chances of dying in a building fire are almost nil. We clean bathrooms without scrubbing, spill coffee without worry of a stain.

Yet these modern wonders come with a price. As synthetic chemicals have saturated our lives, so too have they permeated our bodies. We don't know the effect it has on our health. But scientists do have suspicions.

Childhood asthma rates have similarly exploded. One in 12 couples of reproductive age in the United States is infertile.

One may not cause the other; to draw such links remains, for now, beyond the grasp of science.

Industry and other scientists say exposure remains well below levels considered harmful the Hammond Holland's numbers notwithstanding. Our ability to detect these compounds, invisible even five years ago, has outstripped our ability to interpret the results.

Publishing body burden data, in other words, does little but make people worry.

But if it was your 2-year-old, would you want to know?

****

Monday night at the Hammond Holland's Berkeley home, and life is quiet.

Jeremiah, 35, a high school photography teacher and coach of the school's mountain biking team, is away leading a team cycling class at the Berkeley YMCA.

Mikaela started kindergarten last fall and has mastered the alphabet, small fingers scratching out letters as remnants of glittery nail polish catch the light.

Rowan is finishing dinner -- corn, carrots, pasta with tomato sauce, hard-boiled egg yolk and cheese. He's done when he shovels a handful of spaghetti off his high-chair tray onto the floor.

Michele, watching, doesn't mind. The dog will get it. And at least Rowan is eating.

In February 2004, Rowan fell off the growth charts, registering below the zero percentile for children his age. He's since held steady at the 10th percentile, but Michele, 36, says it's never been easy to get him to eat -- or sleep.

His location at the low end of normal and the upper end of active could be simple genetics. Or it could be his thyroid.

PBDEs, says Dr. Mark Miller, director of the Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit at the University of California, San Francisco, is that they act as developmental neurotoxins and disrupt thyroid activity in rats and other lab animals. And they do so at levels one-third of Rowan's, say scientists at the state Department of Health Services.

Michele, who figures her son is just a small, active child, tries not to dwell on that thought.

Doctors such as Miller who specialize in environmental contaminants see no reason the family should have such high exposures. Researchers at Albemarle, a Louisiana-based manufacturer of brominated flame retardants, are equally mystified.

"It's hard to interpret the results, yet so important," said Dr. Gina Solomon, associate director of Miller's UCSF clinic and a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The fact that (the family's) levels are on the high side is symptomatic of what's going on out there."

Swedish scientists such as Bergman first alerted the world to growing levels of PBDEs in our bodies. Researchers monitoring Swedish breast milk samples for a slew of contaminants found PBDE concentrations doubling every five years over the 1980s and 1990s.

The United States recently launched a similar program but it tracks only a handful of chemical families and won't release PBDE data until 2007.

Meanwhile, tipped off by the Swedes, researchers here found concentrations in wildlife, human blood and breast milk doubling even faster -- every 18 months.

***

Michele is angry, but not worried. Not yet. "If in the next year something goes wrong with Rowan, then I'm all of a sudden going to freak out about these numbers," she said.

She finds most frustrating her inability to protect her children from the pollutants. If she wanted to curb Rowan's and Mikaela's exposures, Michele wouldn't know where to start.

Sources are everywhere, yet impossible to track.

PBDEs show up in foam cushions and plastic casings. But which ones? One manufacturer might use a brominated flame retardant, another might use phosphorous. Or aluminum trihydrates. The label never says.

"You can't make a universal judgment that just because it's a plastic, it has flame retardant," said Paul Ranken, senior research and development adviser for Albemarle, one of three domestic manufacturers of decaBDE, a brominated flame retardant.

Phthalates (THAAL-ates) are similar. We need them to make plastics soft and flexible. Without them fragrances could not be dissolved into lotions and colognes. Ink would flake off bread bags. Your vinyl shower curtain would crack as you pulled it open.

Some products have them. Some don't. Good luck trying to tell the difference.

"The fact of life is that phthalates are a remarkably useful product that ... allow people without a lot of money to have a first-world lifestyle," said Marian Stanley, manager of the Phthalate Esters Panel for the American Chemical Council.

"The risk is a theoretical risk. If you had the smallest baby with the most exposure for the longest time, you theoretically have a risk. Practically, do you have a risk? Nobody's seen it yet."

But is anybody looking?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is conducting the only widespread biomonitoring program in the United States, looking at national exposure to pesticides, PCBs, dioxins and phthalates, among others. Its next report, cataloging some 148 compounds, is due later this spring.

About 85,000 compounds remain in commerce today.

"We're blind to what's going on out there," said Solomon, the UCSF physician, who with Miller met with the family and helped interpret their results.

***

Forty-seven minutes in and Jeremiah's heart is churning at close to 180 beats per minute. His legs blur against his stationary cycle, thighs and calves straining, as he leads his high school bike team through a Monday night "spin" class.

A furious beat thumps from the room's loudspeakers. Sweat pours off Jeremiah's nose. Flywheels spin, pedals whirl. Then the pitch jumps a notch as Jeremiah goads the teens and the pace, incredibly, picks up.

Two years ago Jeremiah weighed 237 pounds. Today he's 180. He went from a size 40 waistband to a size 34, which he last wore in high school.

He shed those pounds on the bike trails, trying to keep up with his students. He gave up alcohol and started eating better.

PCBs, dioxins, DDT, PBDEs, phthalates all love fat. Which is one reason many stick around so long, sequestered in our waistlines.

So as Jeremiah's fat burned off, so, too, did some of his body burden, doctors surmise. It could explain why his exposures, in many instances, are lower than his children's.

Michele, meanwhile, shed her body burden as only a woman can.

Breast milk is 4 percent fat. As Michele nursed Mikaela and then Rowan, she drained a life's accumulation of pollutants into her children.

Her PCB results show that most dramatically, doctors surmise: Mikaela has 207 ppb -- slightly more than her dad. Rowan has 355. But Michele has 69.

That's no reason to stop breast-feeding, cautioned Kim Hooper, the state PBDE expert who has done extensive work with breast milk. Quite the opposite. Because in addition to fat, breast milk contains essential vitamins, minerals, growth hormones, enzymes, proteins and antibodies.

Plenty of evidence also suggests Rowan and other children get a far bigger dose from their environment. Our household dust contains these contaminants at levels 100 to 1,000 times what's found in humans. We all ingest a little dust daily.

The other big route to our bodies is food.

Three years ago, Arnold Schecter, a professor at the University of Texas School of Public Health, set out to show how much our diets contribute to our body burden.

He pulled 30 everyday items off the shelves of three Dallas supermarkets. He found PBDEs in eggs, milk, steak and fish and soy infant formula.