News Coverage
New Studies Show Americans Have Scores of Toxin in Their Bodies
Published February 6, 2003
Michael Lerner and Sharyle Patton avoid red meat, buy organic produce and keep pesticides out of their Northern California home. Yet chemical analyses of their blood and urine found lots of toxins 105 different ones for her, 101 for him.
He's got worrisome amounts of mercury, arsenic and lead. She's troubled by measurable levels of dozens of different forms of two industrial chemicals linked to cancer, dioxins and PCBs.
Two studies, one released Thursday by a New York hospital and a Washington environmental group, the other coming Friday from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, look at the prevalence of low levels of industrial and agricultural chemicals in Americans' bodies. The chemicals' presence is not necessarily harmful, but it raises questions about how they got there and what effects they have.
"We really made choices to avoid chemical exposures, yet as my wife said, what these tests demonstrate is that we all live in the same chemical neighborhood," Lerner said Thursday from his Bolinas, Calif., home.
Lerner and Patton were part of a $200,000 two-year "Body Burden" study by the Environmental Working Group and New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital. It tested for 210 chemicals in the bodies of eight environmental and health activists, plus journalist Bill Moyers _ an unusually small sample.
In those nine people including a two-time cancer survivor who'd received chemotherapy 167 different industrial and agricultural chemicals were found. The chemicals including heavy metals, phosphate and chlorine compounds from insecticides, dioxins and PCBs have been linked to cancers, nervous system malfunctions and birth defects.
Friday's CDC study will examine the issue differently. The CDC looked at a larger and more representative sample of 5,000 random Americans, but searched for only 116 chemicals. Last year, looking at only 27 chemicals, the CDC found nothing alarming.
Philip Landrigan, community and preventative medicine chief at Mt. Sinai, said his study illustrates the need for answers to serious questions about what these chemicals are doing in bodies when they interact with each other, and what doses are low enough to be safe. While the Landrigan study is of a tiny sample, its findings fit previous CDC and Environmental Protection Agency analyses, said University of Oregon biology professor Joe Thornton. He reviewed Landrigan's work for the journal Public Health Reports.
"It shows the universality of chemical contamination of people's bodies," Thornton said.
All the studies "confirm the general message that everybody in our society has these chemicals building up. Some people have it worse than others, but everyone has it. No one is clean anymore."
So what, say other scientists.
"Hey, our body is full of chemicals. That to me isn't a concern," said Bernard Goldstein dean of the University of Pittsburgh's Public Health School and a former research chief for the EPA in the 1980s. "It's a chemical era that we live in and there are trade-offs."
Some of these chemicals are harmful in low doses, but many are not, Goldstein said. More than anything else, these studies show that scientists have improved tests to detect chemicals, he said. Still, he added, it makes sense to do what the CDC is doing: watching how chemical loads in the body change over many years.
Not everyone agrees.
Elizabeth Whelan, president of the American Council on Science and Health, a business-oriented group that tries, it says, to "quell health fears," contends that the government shouldn't waste time or money on chemical contamination. Public health efforts should concentrate on fighting smoking and obesity and avoiding auto injuries, which claim more lives than chemicals, she said.
