Measuring Pollution In Humans

CHaN_316 writes "Scientists have begun measuring pollutants in our body and the results sound like a chemical clean-up site. They've found things such as flame retardants, chemicals derived from DDTs, mercury, uranium, cotinine, and many more. The concern is a lot of this stuff is ending up in mother's milk. But hey, at least in the event of spontaneous combustion, I'll be partially protected."

And people say smoking causes cancer!

[Natestradamus]

Man, stepping off the porch and taking a deep breath in the morning will give you cancer in this country. Unless you live out in the boondocks somewhere, in which case, the mudslide will be along shortly.

Re:I inquired with my county about testing my wate

[nharmon]

When you say 'county', I'm assuming you were refering to your county's health department, or equivalent. If so, then to answer your question, no it is not. The only way they will step in is if there is major contamination.

Concerns involving the purity of drinking water should be addressed to your water department. But even then, the standards they have to meet are not very strict, and they will probably tell you the same thing.

As for me, I am a firm believer that no tap water is safe for human consumption, so I've decided to purify drinking water at home. Food tastes much better when cooked in clean water.

The resilient body

[Tempelherr]

Honestly, I am rather amazed at the human body's ability to seemingly tolerate the presence of these toxic chemicals for at least the short term.

Unfortunately, it is rather difficult to say what will happen in the long term.

With such chemicals like DDT, which continues to remain at high levels in the surrounding environment despite having been banned in 1970. I wrote a couple papers on the role of DDT in the decline of the Californian Condor, and it is really a scary chemical.

Some scientists are even beginning to look at a link between DDT levels and breast cancer, as DDT and several other pesticides, which are absorbed and stored long-term in fat, also are capable of causing hormonal changes by acting much like estrogen. The unnatural changes caused by the continuing presence and buildup of DDT in mammary tissue could understandably be a large factor in the rising occurence of breast cancer. It could also have some particularly negative affect in men as well, as it acts as a blocker to the normal male hormones.

And that is just one of the chemicals commonly found in the body, as described in the article...

Product of our environment?

[blankmange]

Enough to give you a bit of a pause, isn't it? All of these pollutants that we have dumped into the environment, now coming home to roost in us.

As far as a solution - how to clean yourself up?? It may be too late for that; water is contaminated, air is contaminated, food is contaminated --- time to set up that vacuum-pod in some sort of earth orbit....

Utterly pointless article

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a chemist, and I am certain that there is no content of value in this article. We have analytical techniques that can detect chemicals at parts per trillion or less. Pointing out that we can find traces of the breakdown products of nicotine, flame retardents, DDT, etc is meaningless unless you actually say:

1: How much
2: How toxic it is

The truth is, you are a thousand times more likely to die driving to the store to buy your fruits and veges than you are to die from the trace amounts of pesticides on the food. Everything you eat contains hundreds of toxic chemicals in some amount. Every drop of sea water contains 50 BILLION gold atoms, for perspective. Do people farm the ocean for gold?

Do not let chemical scare-stories alarm you. 99% of them are full of it.

Here come the lawyers!

[jebell]

Just you wait, as these tests become cheaper and easier, a whole new round of law suits will ensue.

Re:Healthy future ...

[lobsterGun]

I read something about this a few years ago.

According to the author, while life expectancy has gone up in the last hunderd years, it isn't happending because people are living any longer than before. The rise is a result of dramatically reduced rates of infant mortality.

Once the infant mortality rates are removed from the life expectancy formula, people are only living a few years longer than they did a hundred years ago.

Re:Healthy future ...

[jc42]

... is that life expectancy has increased tremendously over the past hundred years,

And, of course, this is one of the primary examples in intro statistics courses to explain why you need to know more than just such a sound-bite claim. It turns out that "life expectancy" is generally defined as the mean age at death, and almost all the change has been in eliminating causes of death before age 5. Life expectancy at ages 20 and up haven't changed all that much, despite all the medical advances. There has been a small improvement in advanced countries, mostly due to the elimination of some infectious diseases. OTOH, in some parts of the world, life expectancy past childhood has decreased in the past few decades.

My wife, whose specialy in grad school was medical economics & statistics, likes to invite people to take a stroll through graveyards around here (New England) and note the ages at death. She actually did this for a class, and found that for people who lived past 50, the mean age of death was the same 100, 200 and 300 years ago as it is today. The difference is that there are now very few child graves.

She also had a bit of fun in class by pointing out all the problems with her own "study", such as the question of what portion of the population was buried in graves that still exist. Such problems are rife in every such statistical claim.

None of us are getting out of here alive

[Anonymous Coward]

While I am glad that there are people that get worried about this stuff (it's fun to watch and who knows, they might even be right about something) I can't think of one major food health scare that held up under scruntiny.

Alar on apples. Bogus [acsh.org]

Silicon Breast Implants Bogus [drnein.com]

DDT Mostly Bogus [21stcentur...cetech.com]

Somewhere along the way we lost our ability to actually use science and facts to evaluate things and have fallen back on a faith based consensus [crichton-official.com] pseudo-science.

Remember, None of us are getting out of here alive. Life - A sexually transmitted terminal disease. Always fatal.

FYI

[Joe U]

"Everyone's exposed to substances and there's no evidence that the low levels people are exposed to are harming anybody," said Steven Milloy, author of "Junk Science Judo: Self Defense Against Health Scares and Scams." "It's a waste of time and money that only serves to scare people."

Why do I get the feeling similar quotes were heard just before the Roman Empire fell?

Most likely it was something like, 'The lead in our drinking cups don't have any harmful side effects that we can see.'

Old analytical chemistry cliche

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

"Everything is in everything else".

The sensitivity of today's measurement techniques is stunning. But even decades ago, it was common knowledge among chemists that if you started looking at trace contaminants the results were like cleaning out your garage -- "what's THAT doing there?!".

What's interesting is whether the odds and ends are in significant quantities. When you define "significant", remember that your body is a huge detoxification machine designed to survive consuming carrion, plants full of natural insecticides, and even unchlorinated water.

Re:Utterly pointless article

[Emexies]

Pointing out that we can find traces of the breakdown products of nicotine, flame retardents, DDT, etc is meaningless unless you actually say:

1: How much
2: How toxic it is

OK, so in order to believe something, we need solid facts. I'm with you so far.

The truth is, you are a thousand times more likely to die driving to the store to buy your fruits and veges than you are to die from the trace amounts of pesticides on the food. Everything you eat contains hundreds of toxic chemicals in some amount.

Didn't you just point out that we shouldn't believe things unless we're given facts, yet you still try to tell us that what you're saying is the truth, without backing it up?

So, your statement is as believable as the article?

Re:Utterly pointless article

[Firethorn]

Don't forget the trade-offs of using something. If you look at the banning of flame-retardant on the idea that it might cause harm*. You need to look at the positive benefits like how many lives are saved, fires prevented or controlled, and injuries prevented or reduced

*Hazard studies have not yet been completed for the flame retardant. All I could find was that it has been found in breast milk (no mention of concentration), and is bioaccumulative (meaning it doesn't really leave the body). The only mention of a specific harm was a quote from a california politician stating that it may be associated with learning disabilities, specifically ADD. Now, I think that ADD is one of the most overdiagnosed 'disorders', mostly for keeping kids quiet for bad teachers and schoolsystems. Also, these chemicals are so widely used that any trends for a technological society will show a positive correlation with these chemicals.

Re:Talk about worrying about the symptom...

[jub]

Unfortunately, there will probably be women who don't breastfeed because of news like this. The benefits of breastfeeding are far better than most people realize - as one recent example, our 2-month-old daughter beat a cold within 2 days that the rest of us had for a week. There will never be a formula that provides the mix of nutrition, fat and antibodies that breastmilk does.

The real message of a study like this should be that pregnant or nursing mothers need to improve the quality of food they eat, along with avoiding tobacco and alcohol. Organic food is best, but just eating pasture-raised meat is a great start.

People blow this stuff off, but the health impact is significant, not to mention the other amazing things about nursing; the bond with the child, the reduction of allergies, better brain development, leaner children, etc. etc.

Dammit. Let's try that again.

[porkchop_d_clown]

"These chemicals prevent thousands of deaths each year, but we must ban them because they might be causing tens of deaths each year."

And, no, "my kind" are the people who say that you must compare the benefits with the risks before making a decision. "My kind" are the kind of people who actually know chemistry, for example.

Oh, and some cites that cancer rates are really increasing (as opposed to the cancer detection rate) might be nice.

Re:Utterly pointless article

[Fnkmaster]

Are they carcinogens? Isn't cancer (in its many forms) the second largest cause of death in the country? I don't know if we know enough to say that changes in environmental factors have or haven't had effects. As others have pointed out, people are less likely these days to die of other factors at a young age, and thus, more people reach old age and are susceptible to death from heart disease and cancer. Do we know that controlling for other factors, cancer rates have not increased with industrialization?

I'm not one of those tree-hugger types, but I do think it's reasonable to ask these questions.

Re:Healthy future ...

[jc42]

Such as the question whether someone having the means for their gravestone to last 300 years would have had better access to healthcare?

Indeed. It's a special case of her general observation that the surviving graveyards are not a random sample of earlier populations.

But then, there is the conventional reply to that, the old observation that until 1900 or so, residents of North America would have been (slightly) better off going to the local native medicine man than to a white doctor. It was only around then that "Western" medicine reached the point that it was significantly better than no treatment at all.

Another related suggestion is that such graveyards would typically be filled with local long-term residents, i.e., mostly property owners. Having a permanent structure to call "home" implies better protection from the elements than the average person might have had.

All of this is seriously lacking in statistically significant data. This should lead to a certain skepticism over claims that human life expectancy has really changed, for the better or for the worse.

Re:as a chemist...

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us stopped flying because we don't want to go through all the useless bullshit they make you do nowadays. Not only do I have a problem with authority, I have a big problem with idiots with authority.

Sorry for the OT rant, it was just a random inspiration.

Autism on the rise

[PetoskeyGuy]

My brother has autism. Once we found out about it, we started researching and there has been a huge increase in children born with autism in recent years. Wired magazine even published an article trying to suggest that autism was on the rise in California relating autism to being smart. All hubris asside, there is something happening and we need to find out what it is.

One theory suggests that Thirmosal used in childhood inoculations may trigger autism in some children because it contains Mercury which is a known toxin being injected into most children. There is even a provision in the Homeland Security bill which prevents companies such as Eli Lilly from being sued by parents if thirmosal is found to be the cause of autism.

Even if it is not mercury in innoculations, autism is on the rise and for those of us with kids or planning on having them, this is a scary thing. I watched my brother revert from a normal 3 year old to ... well himself now, but trapped by autism. Hard to explain, but scary as hell now that I'm having kids of my own.

The study mentioned in the article only included 9 people. Obviously not statistically relavant, but the findings found enough chemicals in the body that more studies analysis must be done to determine the effects on the body, and especially the developing young ones.

Re:Please stop spreading the mercury myth.

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay you astroturfer, I had AUTISM *induced* *post-puberty* by mercury fillings!

Now my mercury load is down, I'm normal again.

Mercury does _not_ have "superficially" similar symptoms to autism, it has 99% similar symptoms because _they_are_the_same_damn_thing_.

The reason why mercury in vaccines do help to cause autism is thusly:

1) there're often ten doses to a vial of vaccine, and the mercury sinks to the bottom: whomever receves the last dosage receives a heap more mercury than the others do.
2) a baby is a baby and not an adult. A baby can't handle anywhere as much mercury as an adult

oh, and there is a 50% higher incidence of autism in babies that have been vaccinated with a mercury-laden vaccine over babies that haven't been.