Site Presented By
Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
Insecticide? Flame retardant? PCBs? Dioxin? If you're curious, maybe it's time to get biomonitored.
Dec 10, 2003 | Charlotte Brody figured she wasn't completely pure. "I knew that dioxins were in every piece of cheese I'd ever eaten," she says. "I knew that mercury was in tuna fish." So when she volunteered samples of her blood and urine for a recent study of chemical contamination in humans, she didn't expect to be too surprised by the results.
But Brody was stunned by what turned up in her body fluids. Researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine found evidence of 85 contaminants, including more than two dozen types of PCBs, seven dioxins and -- most shocking to Brody -- the Dow-manufactured insecticide Dursban. High doses of Dursban cause neurological damage in animals and humans, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency has banned its indoor use.
Brody, a nurse and environmental activist who lives in Washington, D.C., attacks the weeds in her flower garden with trowels, not pesticides, and fills her shopping basket with organic produce. "If you could lifestyle your way out of Dursban, I've done it," she says. But her body told her the real story: Dursban had been sneaking into her life anyway.
"It was the biggest insult of all," she says. "This was completely outside my control. Dow put this chemical into me without any assistance on my part."
Such unsettling experiences might soon become a lot more familiar to California residents. Senate Bill 689, now wending its way through the state Legislature, would establish a "biomonitoring" program that would test humans for various types of chemical contamination. If the bill passes next year, people in selected communities could volunteer their blood, urine or breast milk for a battery of analyses. For the first time, they'd learn the exact nature and quantity of the pollutants in their bodies.
The rest of us could gain something, too. We've spent years arguing about the ultimate fate of the toxins in our environment, but we've never had a lot of information to go on. Biomonitoring efforts are collecting the most solid and detailed evidence we've ever had, and it's potentially powerful stuff. When combined with other research, it can help strengthen the environmental protections we've got -- and help quash new contaminants before they permeate the planet.
"In the absence of solid scientific information from biomonitoring, we're just groping in the dark," says Gina Solomon, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "When we do have that kind of information, we know if our regulatory policies are working, we know where to target public information campaigns, and we know which communities need to be cleaned up."
Get Salon in your mailbox!