What goes around ... How chemical toxins have accumulated in our bodies

By Katherine Jamieson

In the late 1800s, “neurasthenia” was the name given to a class of illnesses that caused people, largely women, to lose their minds, see ghosts and end up locked away in sanitariums. Doctors believed that it was the stressful, fast pace of life that caused the hallucinations, and Victorian literature is replete with characters plagued by “haunted house syndrome.” Albert Donnay, a toxicologist trained at Johns Hopkins, identifies a different cause for this 19th-century mental instability: carbon monoxide from gas-fired lamps.
In “What’s Gotten Into Us? Staying Healthy in a Toxic World,” by McKay Jenkins (Random House, 2011) Jenkins reports on Donnay’s belief that we’re in a similar — though much more severe — predicament today, when chronic exposure to pesticides, formadelhyde and carbon monoxide is at a record level. The toxic assault on our systems is so constant, and often unavoidable, Donnay argues, that we’ve become “neurologically habituated.” One of Donnay’s techniques to help clients recognize the pollution in their own homes is to have them the members of each household put all their products that smell — laundry detergents, bug sprays, air fresheners, dryer sheets — into a large garbage bag and tie it shut. After a month, clients the family opens the bag and can finally detect the distinct chemical odor that’s been permeating their home for years.
The problem is that just because we’ve become desensitized to toxins in our environment doesn’t mean they aren’t causing us trouble. Jenkins — an athlete, hiker and organic gardener who came to write this book after being diagnosed with a tumor the size of an orange in his abdomen — provides compelling evidence that we are all unwitting guinea pigs of the chemical industry. Eighty thousand chemicals are thought to be in use today, he writes, but the EPA has a full set of toxicity information for only 7 percent of these; 99 percent have never been tested for their effects on human health. And evidence shows that these chemicals are accumulating in alarming rates in our bodies: our tissues, blood, breast milk and organs.
This begs the question: How have we gotten to this point? Jenkins, who teaches English and journalism at the University of Delaware, highlights the fact that we’ve been infiltrated by “not just chemicals but culture”: We’re saturated by, “products, and marketing, and advertising, and political lobbying,” all of which has led to a false sense of trust in the companies that make our shampoos, paints, carpets and baby bottles. Jenkins believes that we’re paying the price for our naivete. He blames toxic chemicals for increased rates of cancer, attention deficit disorder, chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia.
Of course, chemical companies will tell you otherwise. Just as Big Tobacco has hired scientists and funded studies to obscure proven connections between smoking and cancer, so Big Chemical has funded studies that aim to prove that toxins their products are harmless. Their work stands in contrast to major studies conducted by medical institutions, such as a 2010 Mount Sinai School of Medicine study that links exposure to toxic chemicals and autism. In 2007, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reviewed 258 scientific studies of bisphenol A and found that “an overwhelming majority” showed that it has been linked to diabetes, hyperactivity, breast and testicular cancer and a variety of other “reproductive failures” in laboratory animals. In contrast, the few studies that found bisphenol A to be harmless were funded or written in part by scientists hired by companies like Dow Chemical and Shell Chemicals.
Critics of the book might point out that many of the chemicals that Jenkins discusses have not been proven beyond a doubt to cause the diseases they are linked to. This is a major challenge in general for advocates of chemical regulation, as many of these compounds are so new that there hasn’t been adequate time, or funding, to study their impacts. Jenkins proposes that the European REACH legislation (for registration, evaluation, authorization and restriction of chemical substances) is an alternative, and more effective, way of approaching the regulation of toxic chemicals.
REACH follows the European standard of proving “exposure” rather than risk, meaning that if a chemical is made in sufficiently high volume or is detected in people or in wildlife, companies must divulge its presence and purpose in their products, as well as the chances it will be released. If safer alternatives are available “at a comparable cost,” the state can ban the products that contain the chemical. As Jenkins writes, this legislation effectively pushes the “burden of proving a chemical’s safety onto the shoulders of the manufacturers”; in 2008, a similar bill was passed in Maine, making it the state with the most comprehensive law on toxic chemicals.
The pervasive and persistent nature of toxic chemicals is one of Jenkins’ most disturbing theses. Petrochemicals, and resulting breast cancer, have been found in Canada’s beluga whales. PCBs, a class of banned organic compounds once used in everything from electrical transformers to window caulk, have shown up in snow on the highest mountain in the Andes. Seals living far above the Artic Circle carry flame retardants in their blubber. In 2003, DDT, a common synthetic pesticide banned for 30 years, was found along with 65 other chemicals in common household dust. A Centers for Disease Control study concluded that 95 percent of Americans tested had traces of bisphenol A — a compound linked to infertility, genital tract malformations and breast cancer — in their bodies.
What to do?
Sweden prohibited the use of flame retardants in late 1999, and a follow-up study found that levels in breast milk dropped 30 percent in just three years. Canada has basically banned all lawn pesticides, particularly in public spaces. In 2006, the REACH legislation in Europe strengthened the oversight of 302,000 chemicals, which public health analysts estimated would prevent 4,500 occupational cancer cases per year, and $69 billion in medical expenses over three decades.
Here in the United States, with little government regulation, we’re not so lucky.
Katherine Jamieson is a freelance writer with a background in alternative health and nutrition.