Dear Sam, Gonneke, and everyone,

Sam, I am glad you are working with your LLL Area Professional Liaison. They
have a lot of experience with people wanting to test human milk samples.

Gonneke, I like your idea of testing more widely in the human environment.
Human milk is a guide to how much humans are exposed. Testing eggs, soil &
water, and farm animals can show how much everything is polluted, and how
humans are being exposed.

I think if they are collecting milk samples, they should get some semen
samples too. If they find C8 there, will they tell people to stop having sex
or making babies?

The subject of environmental pollutants keeps coming up and WILL continue to
come up because of the polluted world we live in. They are inventing new
pollutants all the time. It's called "progress."

And yes, it is a terrifically political issue, since of course the polluters
have a financial interest in continuing to pollute, or at least in not
acknowledging their responsibility. At the same time, governments are
reluctant to require polluters to clean up their act because the government
needs the jobs and the taxes they contribute to the local economy.
Meanwhile, who is the most vulnerable to pollutants? Babies, before and
after they are born, and young children. And what is one of the easiest ways
to test for the pollution of the human environment? Human milk!

So we can't ignore this issue or blithely assume that cows' milk is just as
polluted as human milk (since humans eat differently than cows do). And
whatever is or is not in cows' milk, a human baby is mainlining the
pollutants in his/her mother's bloodstream during gestation, so we are
already affected before we are even born.

Globally, environmental groups and breastfeeding advocates have been working
together on this issue for years. WABA is a member of IPEN, the
International POPs Elimination Network. ('POPs' are Persistent Organic
Pollutants.) See the WABA website <www.waba.org.my>, especially
<http://www.waba.org.my/environment/index.html> for more about their
collaboration. They issued an excellent joint statement in 2002.

In the USA, breastfeeding advocates in Washington State and California have
done especially good work with their local environmental activists. I will
copy here a 2004 note that physician MaryAnn O'Hara sent out to
breastfeeding advocates in advance of the announcement of a study of
pollution of the Puget Sound area with flame retardants. It shows the
benefit of understanding the issues and collaborating with the environmental
scientists to help people in the media and the general public understand the
implications for breastfeeding families.

*****************
Hello all you wonderful people who promote maternal-child health,

I'm writing to give you advance notice about a press release scheduled for
2-24-04 to report the findings of a study to quantify toxic flame retardants
in the milk of nursing mothers in the Puget Sound area.  It is similar to
and provides results similar to other studies that made national headlines
in the past several months.

My purpose in sending this info, and asking you to send it to all who you
know in the lactation support community, is so we will be prepared to
respond quickly and in a well-informed way to questions from moms, health
care providers, and reporters.  I also want to reassure you that the
researchers have demonstrated great care in collecting and reporting this
data so as to avoid sensationalism, particularly to help people keep
perspective on the reasons why breastfeeding remains the healthiest way to
nourish human infants, and focus attention on the need to clean up the
environment---not ditch breastfeeding.  As examples of this, they sought out
and have been very responsive to guidance from the lactation-support
community, maternal-child health experts, etc.  They plan to have nursing
mothers visible at the press release, including women who were found in the
study to have high levels of PBDEs.

2 Seattle-based nonprofit conducted the study to assess the burden of toxic
flame retardants, known as PBDEs, in Puget Sound residents.  As in studies
of PBDEs in other areas of the country, milk was chosen as the body fluid to
study for logistical reasons (because it is easiest and cheapest to study),
and because if offers a window on maternal body burden and thereby fetal
exposure, a time of particular sensitivity to many toxins.

Researchers suspect that PBDEs are fetal toxicants:  in laboratory animals,
exposure to PBDEs at a critical stage of early brain development causes
permanent behavior aberrations and learning deficits.  PBDE levels in the
United States appear to be rising quickly, and are already 10 to 100 times
as high as are found in Japan and Sweden.

The lead researcher wanted me to reassure you about 2 points.  First,
everyone involved with this study agrees that breastfeeding is healthiest
for babies and mothers; the problem is not breastmilk, it is a polluted
environment that exposes everyone--even developing fetus--to toxic
contaminants.  Great pains were taken in the report to emphasize that
breastfeeding is still the healthiest choice for babies and mothers, and
that public policy needs to discourage pollution while promoting
breastfeeding.  Second, there are resources and fact sheets that you can use
to answer questions that mothers may have questions about contaminants in
breast milk.  Among the best are:

Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility has several fact sheets
for both physicians and mothers about pollution and breastfeeding.  They are
available in both English and Spanish, at:
http://psr.igc.org/ihw-download-materials.htm#ihwFactSheetDwnld

The Breastfeeding Coalition of Washington's summer 2003 newsletter,
Breastfeeding Matters, has an excellent overview of the PBDE issue available
at: http://www.hmhbwa.org/pdfs/BCW_newsl_summer2003.pdf

The study report, press release, and related materials will be available at
the following website by the day of the press conference, if not the day
before: www.northwestwatch.org/pollution.

...
Best wishes, MaryAnn

MaryAnn O'Hara, MD, MPH, MSt, FABM
Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine
University of Washington
[log in to unmask]
***********************************

In New Jersey, our state Breastfeeding Task Force joined the New Jersey
Environmental Federation (NJEF), which has been very helpful to us. The
staff at NJEF are very supportive and protective of breastfeeding; one is a
LLL Leader. When some of our Task Force members were approached by a
researcher who was exploring the possibility of getting lactating subjects
for a study on perchlorate in human milk, we got back to him with the help
of NJEF to express our concerns and to ask to be included right from the
planning stages of any such study. 

In short, here's my opinion. The pollutants are out there and they are
inside us already. We can't be ostriches about this. But we are not alone.
There are lots of others fighting the fight on protecting the environment,
and we will gain a great deal by collaborating with them.


Chris Mulford, RN, IBCLC
LLL Leader Reserve
working for WIC in South Jersey (Eastern USA)
Co-coordinator, Women & Work Task Force, WABA
 

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