Moms-to-be carrying toxins too

A study from the University of California-San Francisco, published today in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives finds an overwhelming percentage of moms-to-be have multiple no-no chemicals in their systems.

Tracey Woodruff, an author on the study and director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at UCSF, says her team tested 163 chemicals, many of which are known to be detrimental to health and found that multiple chemicals were present in almost all the moms.

Of the 163 chemicals measured, 43 were found in more than 99 percent of the pregnant women in the study.  Here are some of the chemicals she found (get ready to re-think your PJ’s, sunscreen, cans, and non-stick omelet pan): Continue reading »

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No safety data on most chemicals

There are approximately 84,000 chemicals on the market today (many that we come into daily contact with), but only 1 percent have been tested for safety, a New Jersey Senator told the Senate Subcommittee on Superfund, Toxics and Environmental Health yesterday.

The subcommittee is talking about accumulating evidence that says we are exposed to potential toxins every day that affect our children, even before they are born (growing data suggests concern for chemicals that make their way into the womb from mom’s exposure).

Testing by researchers like Frederica Perera, director of the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health, has shown that many concerning chemicals, for example, air pollutants and pesticides, show up in a baby’s uterine environment.

An EPA administrator told the hearing she was concerned that children born today are exposed to many more chemicals than any generation before them.

And CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta told the subcommittee he was surprised to find (as research for a special on “Toxic America”) that only 200 chemicals in everyday use have undergone testing supposedly required by the EPA.

So what has been proposed as a fix? Continue reading »

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Babies tend to spend a lot of time with their faces just inches from the floor. Whether they are scooting, crawling or just hanging out on a play mat, a baby placed on the floor is a baby who cannot fall to the floor.  But while floor play may indeed be the safest play, it has a downside.  According to experts, the air down there is far dirtier than the air up where we grownups breathe.

Alan Greene, a pediatrician at Stanford University’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, says that a baby who spends a lot of time on the floor (and what baby doesn’t?) is exposed to nearly five times the household dust that adults are.  And that dust, he says, is most likely full of toxins that could seriously compromise a little one’s health. Continue reading »

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Lead poisoning in American children has decreased so radically over the past generation that the CDC set a goal of eradicating it by 2010. Sadly, like polio, the final pockets of it have proven harder to combat.

Lead poisoning has become rare, but it’s by no means extinct yet. The main risk isn’t toys from China or contaminated soil. It’s our old nemesis, lead paint.

Continue reading »

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Two new studies off some insight into asthma risk in childhood.

The first lets parents with less-than-perfectly-clean homes off the hook:  Early exposure to dust mites and cockroaches doesn’t appear to raise asthma risk.

But when pregnant mice were exposed to BPA, that ever-present chemical found in everything from baby bottles to soup cans, their offspring were at higher risk of developing allergic asthma.

Continue reading »

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Somehow this news is not surprising, albeit absolutely awful. Researchers have found that children suffering from acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) were “significantly” more likely to have been exposed to household pesticides than a control group. Continue reading »

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I have been waiting for this kind of news to come out: a study at the University of California, San Francisco has purported a possible link between the PCBs and PBDEs showing up in breastmilk and the development of autism.

Scary? Here’s where it gets even scarier: Continue reading »

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