Polution in New Borns Continued

Chemical exposures in the womb or during infancy can be dramatically more harmful than exposures later in life. Substantial scientific evidence demonstrates that children face amplified risks from their body
burden of pollution; the findings are particularly strong for many of
the chemicals found in this study, including mercury, PCBs and dioxins.
Children's vulnerability derives from both rapid development and
incomplete defense systems:

• A developing child's chemical exposures are greater pound-for-pound than those of adults.
• An immature, porous blood-brain barrier allows greater chemical exposures to the developing brain.
• Children have lower levels of some chemical-binding proteins, allowing more of a chemical to reach "target organs."
• A baby's organs and systems are rapidly developing, and thus are often more vulnerable to damage from chemical exposure.
• Systems that detoxify and excrete industrial chemicals are not fully developed.
• The longer future life span of a child compared to an adult allows more time for adverse effects to arise.

The 10 children in this study were chosen randomly, from among 2004's summer season of live births from mothers in Red Cross' volunteer, national cord blood collection program. They were not chosen because
their parents work in the chemical industry or because they were known
to bear problems from chemical exposures in the womb. Nevertheless, each
baby was born polluted with a broad array of contaminants.

U.S. industries manufacture and import approximately 75,000 chemicals, 3,000 of them at over a million pounds per year. Health officials do not know how many of these chemicals pollute fetal blood
and what the health consequences of in utero exposures may be.

Had we tested for a broader array of chemicals, we would almost certainly have detected far more than 287. But testing umbilical cord blood for industrial chemicals is technically challenging. Chemical
manufacturers are not required to divulge to the public or government
health officials methods to detect their chemicals in humans. Few labs
are equipped with the machines and expertise to run the tests or the
funding to develop the methods. Laboratories have yet to develop
methods to test human tissues for the vast majority of chemicals on the
market, and the few tests that labs are able to conduct are expensive.
Laboratory costs for the cord blood analyses reported here were $10,000
per sample.

A developing baby depends on adults for protection, nutrition, and, ultimately, survival. As a society we have a responsibility to ensure that babies do not enter this world pre-polluted, with 200 industrial
chemicals in their blood. Decades-old bans on a handful of chemicals
like PCBs, lead gas additives, DDT and other pesticides have led to
significant declines in people's blood levels of these pollutants. But
good news like this is hard to find for other chemicals.

The Toxic Substances Control Act, the 1976 federal law meant to ensure the safety of commercial chemicals, essentially deemed 63,000 existing chemicals "safe as used" the day the law was passed, through
mandated, en masse approval for use with no safety scrutiny. It
forces the government to approve new chemicals within 90 days of a
company's application at an average pace of seven per day. It has not
been improved for nearly 30 years — longer than any other major
environmental or public health statute — and does nothing to reduce or
ensure the safety of exposure to pollution in the womb.

Because the Toxic Substances Control Act fails to mandate safety studies, the government has initiated a number of voluntary programs to gather more information about chemicals, most notably the high
production volume (HPV) chemical screening program. But these efforts
have been largely ineffective at reducing human exposures to chemicals.
They are no substitute for a clear statutory requirement to protect
children from the toxic effects of chemical exposure.

In light of the findings in this study and a substantial body of supporting science on the toxicity of early life exposures to industrial chemicals, we strongly urge that federal laws and policies be reformed
to ensure that children are protected from chemicals, and that to the
maximum extent possible, exposures to industrial chemicals before birth
be eliminated. The sooner society takes action, the sooner we can
reduce or end pollution in the womb.