It’s not news that getting anything substantive through Congress these days is like pushing very big rocks uphill, even when there is remarkable consensus on the topic.

That’s why a broad array of organizations that care about people’s health came together this week to thank Administrator Lisa Jackson of the Environmental Protection Agency for her principled and vigorous efforts to advance comprehensive reform of our broken system for regulating hazardous chemicals. In a letter dated March 10, they wrote:

We welcome the core principles you announced on September 29, 2009 in San Francisco that outlined the Obama Administration’s plan to overhaul the nation’s chemical regulatory program and give EPA greater authority to protect the public. Our organizations and supporters applaud the Administration’s intention to transform our country’s chemical regulatory system and decision to make TSCA reform a top priority.

The letter’s signers, who represent millions of members and supporters, have been urging members of Congress in hearings and through personal contact to introduce and take prompt action on a bill to correct the well-known failings of the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act.

Environmental Working Group, which led the effort to recognize Administrator Jackson’s initiative and commitment to reform, has long advocated for a thorough rewriting of the outdated law. In particular, EWG is urging adoption of a risk-based approach that gives priority to controlling all substances known to contaminate human bodies, particularly those chemicals detected in umbilical cord blood of newborn infants – the most vulnerable members of society.

So thank you, Lisa Jackson. We’ll help in every way we can.

The full text of the letter and list of signers follows.

*                *              *

Allergy Kids • American Academy of Environmental Medicine • Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses • Autism One • Autism Society of Illinois • Autism Society of Western New York • Breast Cancer Network of Western New York • Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future • Citizens for Environmental Justice • Community Against Pollution • Deep South Center for Environmental Justice • Deirdre Imus Environmental Center for Pediatric Oncology • Developmental Delay Resources • Doug Flutie Jr. Foundation for Autism • Environmental Working Group • First Signs, Inc. • Iowa Breast Cancer Edu-action • National Autism Association • Oregon Environmental Council • Plains Justice • Schafer Autism Report • The Rachel Carson Homestead Association • The United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation • US Autism & Asperger Association

The Honorable Lisa P. Jackson
Administrator
United States Environmental Protection Agency
Ariel Rios Building, Room 300
1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20460

March 10, 2010

Dear Administrator Jackson:

We, the undersigned organizations, sincerely thank you for your announced commitment to reforming the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Collectively, our groups represent millions of members, supporters and activists.

As you are aware, studies examining umbilical cord blood show American infants are being born with hundreds of industrial chemicals, pesticides and other pollutants already in their bodies. Some of these chemicals have been linked to a variety of adverse health effects including asthma, allergies, childhood cancer, obesity, infertility, birth defects and neurological disorders. These children are living proof that the current law is failing our country’s most vulnerable.

In January 2009, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) identified TSCA as a government program in urgent need of reform and placed it on its “High Risk” list. The GAO report recommended the EPA be given more authority to obtain information critical to assessing the risks chemicals pose to human health and found:

• TSCA’s regulatory structure impedes EPA’s efforts to control toxic chemicals.
• EPA lacks sufficient data on potential health and environment risks of toxic chemicals.
• Under current law, chemicals are considered safe until proven otherwise.

Recognizing the consequences of this regulatory failure, government leaders, health professionals, children’s health experts, environmental, consumer advocacy groups and faith-based organizations are supporting congressional efforts to reform TSCA.

We welcome the core principles you announced on September 29, 2009 in San Francisco that outlined the Obama Administration’s plan to overhaul the nation’s chemical regulatory program and give EPA greater authority to protect the public.

Our organizations and supporters applaud the Administration’s intention to transform our country’s chemical regulatory system and decision to make TSCA reform a top priority.

We appreciate and look forward to your continued leadership as we embark on passing historic legislation aimed at providing greater protection for all Americans in the near future and for generations to come.

If you have any questions about this letter, please contact Jason Rano with Environmental Working Group at 202.667.6982.

Respectfully,

Allergy Kids
American Academy of Environmental Medicine
Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses
Autism One
Autism Society of Illinois
Autism Society of Western New York
Breast Cancer Network of Western New York
Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future
Citizens for Environmental Justice
Community Against Pollution
Deep South Center for Environmental Justice
Deirdre Imus Environmental Center for Pediatric Oncology
Developmental Delay Resources
Doug Flutie Jr. Foundation for Autism
Environmental Working Group
First Signs, Inc.
Iowa Breast Cancer Edu-action
National Autism Association
Oregon Environmental Council
Plains Justice
Schafer Autism Report
The Rachel Carson Homestead Association
The United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation
US Autism & Asperger Association

That’s why the Environmental Working Group, which enthusiastically supported the bill in 2008, is getting involved again. On Monday (Jan. 11), EWG wrote to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection to applaud Maine’s leadership on the issue and to urge state officials to frame the regulations in ways that will fulfill the act’s promise. You can read the full letter here.

EWG thinks the Maine DEP is taking exactly the right approach in writing a broad definition of “children’s products” to include “any chemical of high concern” that “will likely result in a child or a fetus being exposed to that chemical.” Our letter noted that biomonitoring studies led by EWG have found 100’s of industrial chemicals, pollutants and pesticides in umbilical cord blood from American babies and that some toxic chemicals have been found at higher levels in toddlers than in their mothers. That’s because little kids tend to put their hands and objects in their mouths.

We also urged the Maine DEP to publish on its website a list of its priority chemicals – the ones that raise the greatest concerns – and the products that contain them. The law as passed has a loophole that limits the ability of state officials to restrict the use of hazardous chemicals unless it can identify a safe and cost-effective alternative. That provision gives companies an incentive to defend their existing and potentially dangerous products rather than developing safer alternatives.

Among other things, EWG also urged Maine regulators to make the rules apply to anyone up to age 18, to protect teens against chemicals that may disrupt or alter puberty.  As well, EWG proposed  a petition process so that citizens can request the listing of new priority chemicals or suggest safer alternatives. EWG also thinks Maine should take steps to curb companies to keep information about their products away from the public under the secrecy cloak of “confidential business information.”

Of course, it’s crucial for the Congress to follow Maine’s lead and pass a national KidSafe bill to reform chemical regulation and protect all American children from toxic chemicals. As the letter said:

“A federal bill would tackle the problem of children’s exposures more comprehensively and produce new information about the safety of the thousands of untested chemicals used in consumer products.”

EWG’s letter was signed by President Ken Cook, Senior V-P for Research Jane Houlihan and Senior Analyst Sonya Lunder.

Sure, it’s an act, but it beats watching a bunch of suits standing at a lectern in the Congressional press gallery. In a video he posted recently on YouTube, Rep. Steve Israel gets down and dirty – actually, he gets down and cleans. Wearing a yellow tie and the sleeves of his blue shirt rolled up, the Long Island congressman grabs a rag and a spray bottle and makes like he’s cleaning around a sink “after a tough day of legislating.”

Then he launches into a pitch for the bill he introduced last year to require makers of household cleaners and other produces to disclose their ingredients on the labels – something that few currently do.

Steve Israel will be trying to get action on his bill, the Household Product Labeling Act (H.R. 3057), when Congress gets back to work. And we at EWG will be rooting for him because, as he says at the end of the one-minute video, “It’s time for big chemical companies to come clean.”

EWG staffers put our heads together to come up with this list of bad news environmental stories over the last decade that people might have missed. But there were plenty of big stories that hardly anyone could have missed, such as climate change. What’s on your list of the biggest environmental stories of the last 10 years?

1. Secret Gas Drilling Chemical Almost Kills Colorado nurse
Doctors ran into a medical mystery — and a stone wall from industry — when they tried to find what was in a gas drilling chemical that nearly killed a Colorado nurse. Aren’t you glad that Congress exempted these “fracking” chemicals from regulation under the Safe Water Drinking Act?

2. Intersex Fish Turn Up All Over
Are you a boy or are you a girl? That’s the question that scientists are asking as they study the organs of supposedly male fish from coast to coast and find eggs in many of them. The chief suspects: endocrine-disrupting pollutants that even in tiny amounts can mimic hormones and affect sexual development.

3. Prescription Drugs in Your Drinking Water
Take a swallow and call me in the morning. Antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones – they’ve all turned up in tests of drinking water around the country. Could there be health risks from decades of drinking water laced with combinations of potent drugs?

4. And Rocket Fuel, Too
Perchlorate — the stuff is used in rocket fuel and explosives and turns up not just in water but also in milk, lettuce, other foods – and in our bodies. It’s been linked to thyroid problems in pregnant women, newborns and infants. The EPA is reconsidering its earlier decision not to regulate it in water. Stand by.

5. Ethanol — Bad for Your Health, Too
There are a lot of reasons to question the drive for biofuels, especially corn-based ethanol, but there has been much less attention paid to what it means for air pollution and health. For people who like to breathe clean air, the balance doesn’t look promising.

6. Non-stick, No-Stain and No-Good
They were the miracle products that were supposed to make life easier – keeping spills from staining our couches and making it easy to clean our pots without scrubbing — until it all went sour. Chemicals in the original Teflon and now off-the-market Scotchgard were linked to cancer and developmental problems. They have a way of polluting everything and they refuse to go away.

7. Monsanto owns corn (and soybeans, too)
80% of the corn and 95% percent of the soybeans grown in America contain genes inserted by Monsanto scientists, and the company writes tough – and secret – licensing agreements to maintain control and lock out competitors. Now the Justice Department and some states are thinking these practices might violate anti-trust laws. Turnips, anyone?

8. Occupational Hazard: Microwave Popcorn
This fun food turned to be no fun for people who make it. A strange lung malady that sickened workers in plants that make microwave popcorn was traced to a widely used butter flavoring. And one popcorn-crazy consumer was felled, too. It took a while, but OSHA finally took a look, and the stuff is being phased out.

9. Dead (Zone) on Arrival
In the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere, vast expanses of ocean have been turned into biological deserts as fertilizer runoff from farms washes downstream and nourish runaway algae growth, which deplete most of the oxygen when the tiny organisms die and decompose. The Gulf dead zone has more than doubled in size since the 1980s – accelerated by the boom in crops grown to make biofuels. In 2009, it was smaller than predicted, but more intense, in 2009.

10. The (Not So) Great Pacific Trash Gyre
It’s hard to spot from the water or even from space, but an estimated 3.5 million tons of mostly plastic trash from all over the world floats just below the surface of the Pacific, swirling slowly around in an area of circular currents twice the size of Texas. It’s devastating to birds and sea creatures that think the plastic bits are food. It’s time to stop adding to the mess – and then see if there’s any way to clean it up.

What stories top your list of the decade’s biggest environmental news??

The voluntary agreement would end production, importation and sales of Deca for most uses except for transportation and military needs by December 2012 and for remaining uses by the end of 2013.

Companies involved in the deal are the two U.S. manufacturers of Deca – Albemarle Corporation of Baton Rouge and Chemtura Corporation of Middlebury, CT – and ICL Industrial Products of Israel, the largest U.S importer of Deca.

Japan’s Tosoh Corporation is the only Deca manufacturer not part of the arrangement with EPA.

Steve Owens, EPA assistant administrator for the Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances, said:

“Though DecaBDE has been used as a flame retardant for years, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has long been concerned about its impact on human health and the environment.”

The deal came just two days after Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) introduced a bill to force a Deca phase-out. Pingree’s Decabromine Elimination and Control Act of 200 (H.R. 4394) would ban Deca in all products, including those designed for children, by the end of 2013. The bill mirrors Maine’s state-wide Deca phase-out, passed in 2007.

EPA’s Owens said that EPA had determined that DECA poses significant risks to human health. “Studies have shown that decaBDE persists in the environment, potentially causes cancer and may impact brain function,” he said.

In the environment, Owens said, “DecaBDE … can degrade to more toxic chemicals that are frequently found in the environment and are hazardous to wildlife.”

Children appear to absorb higher levels of the chemical. In 2008, pioneering research by Environmental Working Group produced the first-ever detection of Deca in the blood of American children. The children in the study had higher blood concentrations of Deca than their mothers.

The EPA-industry agreement doesn’t limit Deca imports by Tosoh or any other manufacturer. It also allows Deca to be imported in finished products. Pingree’s bill, if enacted would end these uses and ensure that substitutes for Deca are thoroughly tested and are safe. Most important, action by Congress would give the phase-out the force of law.

Later this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will cast the issue of pollution and health into sharp focus with the release of the fourth and most ambitious edition of the National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals.

212 Chemicals in 8,000 Americans

The CDC biomonitoring report, expected to report finding 212 contaminants in the blood and urine of 8,000 Americans, will constitute the most extensive assessment of the American body burden ever conducted by the federal government.

The latest CDC survey will include, for the first time, analysis of umbilical cord blood.  CDC has tested 500 mother/infant pairs, an effort that may offer important new insights into the extent to which fetuses are being polluted by pregnant women’s environmental chemical exposures.

CDC follows EWG model

Until now, the CDC’s surveys have concentrated on adults and older children.  To fill the research gap, since 2005,  Environmental Working Group has  commissioned laboratories to search for several hundred possible pollutants in newborns.  On Dec. 2, EWG released test results showing that 232 contaminants, including the plastic chemical bisphenol A, had been found in the cord blood of 10 minority infants born in 2007 and 2008.

Direct evidence of contamination

Biomonitoring techniques pioneered by CDC, academic scientists and groups like EWG are considered the gold standard of the environmental health field, because they eliminate the guesswork when scientists and regulators need to know which contaminants are actually getting into people and should be given top priority for pollution controls.

Want to know more?    This in-depth story by Harvey Black, a Madison, WI,  journalist specializing in environmental health, explains what biomonitoring has accomplished and where it’s headed.

New frontiers – and limitations – in testing
people’s bodies for chemicals

By Harvey Black
Environmental Health News
December 2, 2009

For scientists, it’s a treasure trove of data, one that might help unravel some of the world’s most enduring medical mysteries.

New horizons in biomonitoring – which measures chemicals that people carry in their bodies – are identifying environmental exposures that may play a role in health problems, including cancer, neurological disorders and diabetes.

At their fingertips, researchers already have precise measurements of nearly 150 chemicals in several thousand American adults and children. Now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is preparing to release even more extensive data, and expand its reach by testing 500 umbilical cords, which will allow scientists to determine which chemicals babies are exposed to in the womb.

Biomonitoring “is a game changer in environmental health,” said Thomas Burke, professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University and head of a National Research Council panel that examined its potential.

We didn’t have this lens 20 years ago,” he said. “Not very long ago in my career in New Jersey, when we were trying to figure out if there were health effects from hazardous waste sites, we had very limited measures of who’s exposed and to what they are exposed. This is a tremendous breakthrough. It could redirect environmental policy.”

Read the full article on biomonitoring at this link.

As a scientist specializing in environmental health, I’m quite concerned about new Environmental Working Group-commissioned research that has detected more than 200 environmental pollutants in the cord blood of 10 American newborns from racial and ethnic minority groups.

Worse, many of the chemicals identified in the cord blood samples cause irreversible changes in the brains, reproductive systems and other vital organs of fetal and newborn test animals. Among the worst actors:

• Bisphenol A, a hormone-disrupting plastic chemical now under federal scrutiny for a possible ban in baby bottles, infant formula cans and other food packaging;
• Perchlorate, a rocket fuel component and ubiquitous water pollutant that undermines thyroid function crucial to brain development ;
• Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), probable human carcinogens and endocrine disruptors effectively banned during the Carter administration, yet still showing up in human and animal tissue worldwide;
• Lead, found in older pipes and paint, toxic to the brain and nervous system;
• Mercury, another neurotoxin, commonly ingested in contaminated seafood like tuna.

Scientists are just beginning to explore how any one of these chemicals might undermine human development. The compounding effect of chemical mixtures on human health is uncharted territory. For example, both perchlorate and PCBs are known to affect the thyroid gland in humans. Their synergistic and/or cumulative impact on thyroid function is unknown.

What little we know about exposure to chemical mixtures, from animal studies, isn’t reassuring. In July 2009, researchers in Denmark and the United Kingdom reported that when they fed pregnant rats up to four hormone-disrupting chemicals — a common plasticizer, two fungicides that often contaminate food and a treatment for prostate cancer – the male pups were born with misshapen external sex organs. The more complex the mixture, the more striking the malformation.

Obviously much more research is critical. As a scientist, I’ll be keenly interested.

But as a physician, I am aware of the increasing burden of chronic disease among American children. As we learn more about how prenatal exposures to chemicals may set the stage for illness later in life, this study is one more powerful argument for immediate action to reform our nation’s policy on toxic substances.

Current federal law is so weak that it has allowed countless children to be born pre-polluted by toxic chemicals. We need to act quickly and decisively to protect future generations from these substances.

It’s titled “Toxic Environmental Threats to Children’s Development: What We Know and What We Can Do.” The Saturday program will include presentations by several nationally prominent experts in environmental medicine, not exactly standard fare for psychiatrists and psychologists.

But increasingly it should be, says Dean Abby, director of continuing education at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, who helped organize the course. In an interview with Environmental Working Group, he noted that science has advanced in ways that now make it possible to study the often-subtle effects of chemical and other exposures on our bodies and on children’s vulnerable bodies. It’s important to make connections between those exposures and the behavioral and emotional problems that get treated by mental health professionals, he says:

It’s the same thrust that has come in the last 25 years in developing a scientific understanding of the mind-body connection. It just made sense to try to push the envelope a little bit, since developmental issues concern us. We train school psychologists particularly, who work in an environment where they see all kinds of developmental threats and problems whose source is hard to pin down.

The course is co-sponsored by the Boston Institute for the Development of Infants and Parents (BIDIP) and the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society. It is open to the public for a fee about half of what professionals, who can earn credit toward continuing education requirements, must pay. Among those who have registered in advance are parents and day care professionals. Said Abby:

Anybody today who’s not looking at this stuff with a bigger and broader perspective is missing something critically important. It’s designed to force people who have concerns about these questions to codify their thinking.

The invited speakers are pediatrician Philip Landrigan, M.D. of New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine; toxicologist Bernard Weiss, Ph.D. of the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry; neurologist David Bellinger of Boston’s Children’s Hospital; Megan Sandel, M.D. National Medical Director of the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership in Boston; and Barbara Brenner, executive director of San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Action.

EWG, a leader in documenting the effects of toxics such as bisphenol-A — and in the fight to reform the federal government’s regulation of chemicals — wishes it could be there.

Now a ground-breaking study released in the journal Human Reproduction offers what its authors call “the first evidence that exposure to BPA in the workplace could have an adverse effect on male sexual dysfunction.”

BPA factory workers suffer sexual problems

The scientific team, underwritten by Kaiser Permanente’s Division of Research in Oakland, CA., spent five years studying 634 Chinese factory workers whose bodies had been severely contaminated with BPA.

Animal studies link BPA to extraordinary array of subtle but serious chronic health problems, including impairment of the ability to think and behave normally, reproductive and cardiovascular system damage, cancer, diabetes, asthma and obesity. Evidence of BPA’s impact on human health has been more elusive – which is why the Kaiser Permanente study is making headlines around the globe.

After a year of being bombarded with BPA, the Chinese workers reported disturbing sexual problems: four times as much erectile dysfunction and seven times as many ejaculation difficulties as a control group, the Kaiser team found.

Nearly all Americans are BPA-positive

Most people don’t experience BPA exposure nearly as intense as the factory workers. But nearly all Americans test positive for low-level BPA contamination, as evidenced by body burden testing by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Environmental Working Group and other academic and non-profit organizations.

As Kaiser research team leader De-Kun Li, MD, Ph.D., put it, the China workers study “raises the question: Is there a safe level for BPA exposure, and what is that level?”

AMA takes up BPA battle

Many scientists specializing in hormonal and reproductive systems say there’s no such thing as a “safe” dose of BPA, a powerful endocrine-disrupting chemical. Earlier this week, the American Medical Association Board of Delegates resolved to work with the federal government to minimize the public’s exposure to BPA and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals. The measure was proposed by the Endocrine Society, which, with 14,000 hormone researchers and medical specialists in more than 100 countries, recently warned that “even infinitesimally low levels of exposure [to endocrine-disrupting chemicals] –indeed, any level of exposure at all– may cause endocrine or reproductive abnormalities, particularly if exposure occurs during a critical developmental window. Surprisingly, low doses may even exert more potent effects than higher doses.”

“The AMA represents a very important constituency of physicians who have a lot of credibility and clout,” says Andrea Gore, Ph.D., a University of Texas-Austin researcher who co-authored the Endocrine Society statement. “If members of the AMA can now get behind the statement and actually affect regulations, then I think we can consider it a victory.”

It’s in the cans

Most of the BPA in Americans’ bodies is believed to come from leaching from BPA-based epoxy food can linings and polycarbonate baby and drink bottles, sippy cups and other food containers. Under pressure from EWG and other scientific and environmental health groups, the federal Food and Drug Administration is weighing proposals to ban the chemical in food packaging.

Because of FDA inaction, last October EWG president Ken Cook wrote major infant formula and canned food producers urging them to take voluntary measures to remove BPA from their can linings.

20 of 28 canned food brands contaminated

Laboratory tests commissioned by EWG in 2007 found BPA in 20 out of 28 brands of canned food and drink, including B&M, Bush’s Best, Campbell’s Condensed (soup), Campbell’s Chunky, Campbell’s SpaghettiOs, Chef Boyardee, Chicken of the Sea, Coca-Cola, Del Monte, Dole, Ensure, Green Giant, Kroger store brand, Libby’s, Nestle Carnation, Pepsi-Cola, Progresso, S&W, Slim-Fast, Swanson and Wolfgang Puck.

An EWG survey found that all four leading makers of liquid infant formula sold in North America used BPA to line their cans. These included Nestle (Good Start), Ross-Abbot (Similac and Isomil), Mead Johnson (Enfamil), and PBM (maker of store-brand formulas sold at Target, Kroger and dozens of other retailers).

Last week, Consumers Union, an advocacy organization, reported that its laboratory tests had found BPA in canned food packaged under the brand names Campbell’s Condensed, Progresso, Del Monte and Nestle.

Top environmental regulator, scientist act on BPA

The FDA’s plans are, as yet, unclear. But other top administration scientists and regulators are zeroing in on BPA. Lisa Jackson, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, has identified BPA as a priority for regulatory action. And Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, has recently committed $30 million in federal stimulus funds to research the many unanswered questions about BPA.

We know this much: with every day that passes, the cases against BPA hardens, like the plastics it makes.

We’re also blogging on Huffington Post. Visit us there.

Photo credit: abarndweller

The Campaign’s tests also found 6 of 10 face paints contaminated with nickel, cobalt or chromium, known skin allergens.

Of course, the timing of this report wasn’t an accident. Three days from now, on Halloween, millions of small trick-or-treaters will roam their neighborhoods with painted faces. Those who wear face paints will be exposed to toxic substances as a result of lax federal safety standards for the cosmetics industry.

Not the trick they and their parents should expect.

The personal care and cosmetics industries have been allowed to load up their products with almost any chemical ingredient they wish without first testing for safety. As a result, every day, people of all ages are slathering on all sorts of stuff laced with hazardous materials.

You can read the entire study here: Pretty Scary: Heavy Metals in Face Paints