Dear LactNet friends,
The story on the growing presence of flame retardants in breast milk
an important one. Those of us who study breast milk contamination
professionally have known about this problem for a couple of years.
New data that came out last fall was ignored by the press, probably
another casualty of Sept. 11 events. Just yesterday, however, both
the AP and New York Times ran stories describing the problem.
Here are the main points, as I understand them:
Brominated flame retardants include hundreds of chemicals dangerous
to the environment, which are used in large amounts in electronic
equipment. They are also used to flame-retard furniture and foam
pads. One of them is called PBDE.
Many other toxic chemicals are now (happily) decreasing in mother's
milk, thanks to the dogged efforts of environmental activists over
the past three decades to outlaw their production and use These
include PCBs, DDT, and dioxins. However, levels of PBDE are still
increasing in mothers' milk.
Our best souce of information on PBDE in human milk is Sweden. The
Swedish breast milk monitoring program has documented exponential
increases in PBDE over the past thirty years. I.e. concentrations of
PBDE the breast milk of Swedish mothers have been doubling every five
years.
Here in the U.S., where we have no national monitoring program, the
levels of PBDE in the population of nursing mothers are anybody's
guess. However, Dr. Kim Hooper of the EPA in Berkeley, CA has
measured PBDE in the breast milk of women living in the SF Bay area
and found them even higher than in Swedish milk. Marine mammals,
such as seals, are also now being checked for PBDE in their milk.
Levels are high. Obviously, this is a problem affecting mammals
across the board.
PBDE is known to cause brain damage in newborn mice and has hormonal
effects in rats. The compounds are also thought to be connected with
spontaneous abortions and changes to the immune system. PBDE seems
most similar in toxicological properties to PCBs, which were outlawed
for production in the 1970s here in the U.S.
No one knows yet if levels of PBDE in human milk is sufficient to
cause health problems in nursed human babies. The studies have not
been done.
The compounds are persistent, so they become widely dispersed in the
environment.
Routes of exposure are unclear. PBDE evaporates out of furniture,
computers, and other electronic devices, so we lactating mothers are
undoubtedly inhaling them. However, they also accumulate in the
human food chain, so we get a dose when eat, as well. At this point,
no one really knows whether inhalation, skin contact, or diet is the
biggest route of exposure. No one knows whether your couch or your
laptop poses the most risk. No one knows how long it takes PBDE to
evaporate out of consumer products and reach some "safe" level, that
is, do old furniture and old computers pose significantly less risk
than new ones for breast milk? No answers yet.
While Europe has taken steps to ban some of these flame retardants, the US
has not followed suit. One of the U.S. organizations working hardest
to get PBDE phased out of production here is the Silicon Valley
Toxics Coalition. To obtain more information on their efforts,
contact Olga Meydbray at
[log in to unmask] or 408.287.6707. (I have no professional or
financial stake in this organization. I do think they do good work
and have been impressed in the past by their advocacy of computer
chip workers who suffer high rates of miscarriage, perhaps linked to
their exposure to solvents on the job. They are very
mother-friendly.)
A website to learn more is
http://stores.us.ohio-state.edu/~steen/ei/flame_retardants.html.
This is an excerpt of a series of articles in the Danish Engineering Weekly
about the health problems associated with the use of flame redardants in
computers and consumer electronics.
Hope this helps.
--
--
Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor
Program on Breast Cancer and Environmental Risk Factors
110 Rice Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
[log in to unmask]
www.steingraber.com
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