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

We’ll be reacting to the ACC proposal in the days ahead.

Ken Cook, Environmental Working Group

*Updated*

USA Today has written a story on the ACC proposal that you can read here.

The study, published July 20 in the online edition of the journal Pediatrics, reported that five-year-olds scored more than four points lower than peers on IQ tests if their mothers had been exposed to as little as 2.26 nanograms per cubic meter — two and a quarter billionths of a gram of pollutants in a space roughly the size of restaurant refrigerator — of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Unlike smog and soot, PAH pollution — vapors and fine particles generated by vehicle emissions, coal burning and second-hand smoke — is too fine and sparse to be seen, smelled or felt.

Yet, as the Columbia researchers showed, PAHs can affect neurodevelopment, even in miniscule doses.

“The study underscores the importance of protecting that window of vulnerability in the in utero period,” said lead author Frederica Perera, Dr.P.H, director of the center and professor of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. “It provides evidence that air pollutants at the levels commonly found in urban settings are harmful in terms of children’s intellectual development.”

The IQ loss, Perera told Environmental Working Group, is similar to that observed in children exposed to low levels of lead, a potent neurotoxin sometimes found in old water pipes and chipping paint.

The scientists conducted the study by monitoring 249 children born to non-smoking black and Dominican-American women living in New York City’s Washington Heights, Harlem and the South Bronx, urban neighborhoods near the Columbia campus. The women wore personal air monitors during the last trimester of their pregnancies to determine their PAH exposures.

As well, the researchers collected and analyzed umbilical cord blood for pollutants that had crossed the placenta.

Researchers followed the children to age five, at which point they administered standardized intelligence tests. Mathematical calculations adjusted for extraneous factors such as maternal intelligence, quality of home environment and smoking in the home and came up with associations between general air pollution and test performance. The scientists intend to continue studying the children to age 11 and perhaps longer.

The study does not predict the eventual success or failure of specific children. In many cases, a strong educational environment may help them compensate for any learning deficits caused by exposure to PAH pollution.

Nor does the study determine the physical mechanisms by which PAH exposure undermines normal neurodevelopment. One possibility, the study suggests, is that the chemicals may disrupt the endocrine system and reduce fetal access to oxygen and nutrients. Another possibility is that they may damage DNA, altering development in other ways. Much more research is needed to establish the answers.

There’s a bright note: Perera says that policymakers in New York have already used Columbia’s extensive research on children and air quality to reduce air pollution, for instance, by attempting to limit traffic generally, reduce idling time for diesel trucks and buses and make sure the city’s buses have effective emission controls.

As a result, Perera says, between 1998 and 2003, the researchers observed “a modest but steady and significant decline in PAH levels.”

Other reforms, such as new strictures on coal-burning power plants and cleaner energy alternatives, could further reduce urban air pollution.

The Columbia study bolsters the case for making environmental health a major national priority. It shows that:

• The placenta is not a protective barrier that shields the fetus from the outside world. The tiniest and most insidious pollutants, like PAHs. easily transgress it and pollute the unborn child.

• Prenatal exposure to pollution is extraoridinarily, perhaps uniquely, perilous. “Humans pass more biological milestones before birth than at any other time in their lives, “ the Columbia scientists wrote, “and the prenatal period is highly sensitive to neurotoxic effects of environmental chemicals.”

“This research clearly shows that environmental PAHs at levels encountered in an urban setting can adversely affect a child’s IQ,” said Linda Birnbaum, Ph.D., director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, which funded the Columbia study.

“This is the first study to report an association between PAH exposure and IQ, and it should serve as a warning bell to us all,” Birnbaum said, referring to her announced intent to pour more grant money into research into pre-and peri-natal exposures to toxic environmental chemicals. “We need to do more to prevent environmental exposures from harming our children.”

Tough call, and now you don’t have to make it.

Not, at least, when you’re picking up a bottle of water for the drink-holder of your Prius/Mini/Trek Madone.

Environmental Working Group’s research staff has just released a bottled water scorecard that grades close to 200 brands for labels or websites that disclose their sources, treatment methods and results of contaminant testing. (No matter what words the ads use – “pure,” “sparkling,” “essential,” no water is completely free of trace pollutants.)

Well, guess what. A bunch of humble, big-box-store, mass-market brands like Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Choice (B), Nestlé’s Pure Life (B) and Ozarka (B), and Walgreens (C) scored best for disclosure AND advanced treatment.

Pricey Perrier and S.Pellegrino scored Fs. These high-end brands’ labels and websites, our researchers found, were especially opaque. Elite Evian rated a C – good info on testing and source, partial data on purification method and no clue on advance treatment.

I keep thinking about the ad campaign, featuring leggy Euro supermodels.

“Hi, I’m Gisele. Where was I last week? I’ll never tell. Neither will my Perrier.”

“Kate here. Can you keep a secret? My Pellegrino can.”

Mystery can be alluring, but here at EWG, we’re old school when it comes to consumer products that make dazzling profits for big corporations like Nestlé, which produces Perrier and Pellegrino, and Coca-Cola, which owns Evian. We’re all about people’s right to know, so we investigate, the way newspapers used to. Newspapers. They were big bundles of paper with a lot of black printing…

Silliest bottled water: Aquamantra. It scored an F for zero testing info, zero purification info and an ad claim that the affirmative mantras on the label “actually change the molecular structure of the water, and most definitely change the flavor of the water.”

“Hi, I’m Claudia. When I want lychee-flavored water, I just chant for it.”

We find it particularly interesting that Sam’s Choice turns out to be one of the more consumer-friendly labels. That squares with Wal-Mart’s new eco-labeling program that aims to rate products for “sustainability.”

Sustainability — that’s a term environmentalists, lawyers, philosophers and students of modern culture struggle to define. We sure hope Wal-Mart’s initiative is true green, not a greenwash, and amounts to a net plus for the planet. We’ll be doing the numbers later.

But it’s a good idea if it works. We’re all for eco-labeling, as long as it’s solid, checkable and makes sense in the bigger scheme of things.

That’s why no bottled water brand aced the EWG report. Grade A goes only to filtered tap water, because municipal water utilities make extensive disclosures and because their product arrives in pipes, not little plastic bottles that clog the ocean and landfills. Like Mama said, green is as green does.

According to the Container Recycling Institute, Americans throw away 60 million bottles a day.

DIY chic is hot. So invest in a decent filtration system and do your own tap water bottling with a reusable BPA-free bottle. Many of them have fashion-forward designs and cool colors.

What are your favorite haute luxe, yet cleverly thrifty ideas for greening, really, our water and the rest of our stuff? We’d love to hear from you and also on Huffington Post.

Commanded by researchers and technicians in clean suits seated at computer keyboards, these exquisitely sensitive instruments spin out findings that show how the chemicals we rely on to make life easier and more convenient have the unintended effect of polluting us.

The measurements, called biomonitoring, tell a sobering story: The U.S. population is widely exposed to the phthalates in plastic, the bisphenol A in food and beverage cans and the flame retardants in furniture. Indeed, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – home of the state-of-the-art biomonitoring lab described above — has so far reported on 148 chemicals or their byproducts in the blood or urine of a representative sample of the U.S. population.

A new CDC report that will include about 100 additional chemicals is expected before the end of the year.

We’ve learned from biomonitoring that we’re all poster children for the era of “better living through chemistry.” This unsettling information has helped set the stage for the Kid Safe Chemical Act, which Sen. Frank Lautenberg, chairman of the Superfund, Toxics and Environmental Health subcommittee, promises to introduce soon.

Kid Safe, in part, would put the burden on chemical manufacturers to prove that chemicals are safe for infants, children, the developing fetus and others who are especially vulnerable. It is the first real attempt to update our lamentably inadequate toxics laws in more than 30 years.

Last week, we heard from the U.S. Government Accountability Office that the Environmental Protection Agency could do much more to incorporate biomonitoring into the process of determining threats posed by our unwitting exposures to hazardous chemicals in everyday things.

Indeed, the GAO recommended that the EPA develop a comprehensive research strategy to improve its ability to use biomonitoring data in risk assessments. It also urged the agency to request authority from Congress, if necessary, to obtain biomonitoring data from chemical manufacturers.

Sen. Lautenberg called the GAO report “proof positive” we need a law like Kid Safe, which would unquestionably give the EPA better tools – including the use of biomonitoring – to protect Americans from toxic chemicals. Another key policymaker, Sen. Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, is eager to see the EPA do more to incorporate biomonitoring into assessing toxic risks.

Getting industry to cooperate on biomonitoring may not be easy. The American Chemistry Council, whose members include Dow, DuPont, Monsanto and dozens of other chemical companies, issued a statement last week describing as “problematic” the GAO’s call for the EPA to consider having companies conduct extensive human biomonitoring.

Nevertheless, biomonitoring data is essential to chemical policy reform. For too long, the chemical industry has been shielded by toothless toxics laws that have kept us in the dark about the risks of everyday toxics. Under our current system, ignorance equals safety.

While the presence of a chemical in the human body does not, alone, mean it causes harm, biomonitoring data gives risk assessors essential information for determining if it does.

We not only have a right to know what’s in us, but this knowledge, no matter how disturbing, is essential for public health.

Nena Baker is an investigative journalist and the author of “The Body Toxic: How the Hazardous Chemistry of Everyday Things Threatens Our Health and Well-being” (North Point Press, 2008). She lives in Portland, Oregon. For more information, visit www.thebodytoxic.com.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, biomonitoring is the testing of blood, urine, breast milk, hair or other tissue for the presence of industrial chemicals and pollutants.

What could be worse for industry than people actually finding out how many industrial chemicals pollute their bodies?  A June 11 report on the subject by the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s investigative arm, won’t calm industry’s nerves.

The GAO report, entitled EPA Chemical Assessments, made clear, among other things that:

• We need more biomonitoring data: “One major reason for the agency’s limited use of such data,” GAO says, “ is that, to date, there are no biomonitoring data for most commercial chemicals.”
• The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) must be overhauled to give the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the authority to require biomonitoring studies for all chemicals that could reasonably be expected to end up in people  and to empower EPA with clear authority to demand from industry any study it needs to determine a suspect chemical’s toxicity.

Biomonitoring is the gold standard for measuring toxic chemical exposure in a large population.  It is by far and away the most critical piece of information that regulators currently lack in deciding which chemicals to target for restrictions.

When government officials have high quality biomonitoring data to combine with strong toxicity studies, as is the case with lead, mercury and the Teflon chemical PFOA, they use it.

That’s why chemical industry spinmeisters are trying to discount the value of biomonitoring by characterizing the technique as a one-time snapshot that does not convey the complexity of a chemical’s interaction with the population.

“Biomonitoring provides a snapshot of substances present in the body at a single point in time,” says the ACC website, “but it alone does not tell us where a substance came from, when a person was exposed to it, the amount of exposure over time, or if there will be any health effects.”

It’s true that biomonitoring provides a snapshot of the body burden of each individual who has volunteered to be tested.  And of course finding an industrial chemical in a newborn’s cord blood doesn’t tell us where it came from or whether or not it is toxic.  But it puts that chemical in the regulatory crosshairs and makes our ignorance about how it got there and how dangerous it is that much more deplorable.

When researchers from U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) assemble “snapshots” from more than a thousand people in a statistically rigorous study protocol, the result is a broad, deep, almost three-dimensional portrait of chemical exposures throughout the population.

CDC biomonitoring studies have found that:

• 93 percent of the U.S. population is polluted with bisphenol A, the endocrine-disrupting heavily used plastics chemical
• 100 percent of the U.S. population is contaminated with perchlorate, a thyroid toxin and explosive component of rocket fuel.
• 84 percent of the U.S. population is contaminated with at least six different phthalates at any given time.  Phthalates are plastic softeners that are common in pliable plastic products.  They are linked to birth defects of the reproductive system in baby boys.

This is the big picture, quite literally, that health officials too often lack when deciding whether to target a chemical.

Because it’s so clear and convincing – so true, in the profoundest sense — it’s the chemical industry’s worst nightmare.   Like the old saw about a picture that’s worth a thousand words, a biomonitoring report lets people know, more vividly than any long-winded narrative, just how severely they, their kids, their friends and neighbors and millions of people they don’t know are polluted with industrial chemicals.

We took a unique approach.  Instead of testing for chemical pollutants emitted from heavy industries where the women live, we targeted more subtle threats:  toxic chemicals in everyday consumer products that have escaped effective regulation under the antiquated Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).  The goal was to highlight chemical exposures we all share and to discuss the double jeopardy faced by people beset by blatant industrial pollution and invisible hazards at home.

Though the five women live thousands of miles apart, come from distinctive cultural traditions and confront different environmental hazards outside their homes, the mix of consumer product-generated chemicals found in their bodies was strikingly similar and roughly equivalent to the body burdens of other Americans surveyed by governmental and independent research organizations.

All 5 were contaminated with flame retardants, Teflon chemicals, synthetic fragrances, the plastics ingredient bisphenol A (BPA) and the rocket fuel component perchlorate.

Each had a high body burden of at least one controversial chemical whose lack of regulation and widespread presence in American life is fueling debate over reform of the nation’s toxic chemical policies.

Overall the women tested positive for 48 of 75 chemicals for which EWG-commissioned laboratories searched, with a range from 26 to 45 per person.

In addition, several of these women face serious pollution threats in their communities, which put them at elevated risk.

Federal policies offer only the slimmest of safeguards for people in communities with heavy pollution loads, forcing them to carry the extra burden of industrial pollution on top of the hundreds of chemicals to which we are all exposed in daily life.