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Measuring Pollution In Humans
CHaN_316 writes "Scientists have begun measuring pollutants in our body and the results sound like a chemical clean-up site. They've found things such as flame retardants, chemicals derived from DDTs, mercury, uranium, cotinine, and many more. The concern is a lot of this stuff is ending up in mother's milk. But hey, at least in the event of spontaneous combustion, I'll be partially protected."
Unfortunately, it is rather difficult to say what will happen in the long term.
With such chemicals like DDT, which continues to remain at high levels in the surrounding environment despite having been banned in 1970. I wrote a couple papers on the role of DDT in the decline of the Californian Condor, and it is really a scary chemical.
Some scientists are even beginning to look at a link between DDT levels and breast cancer, as DDT and several other pesticides, which are absorbed and stored long-term in fat, also are capable of causing hormonal changes by acting much like estrogen. The unnatural changes caused by the continuing presence and buildup of DDT in mammary tissue could understandably be a large factor in the rising occurence of breast cancer. It could also have some particularly negative affect in men as well, as it acts as a blocker to the normal male hormones.
And that is just one of the chemicals commonly found in the body, as described in the article...
I am a chemist, and I am certain that there is no content of value in this article. We have analytical techniques that can detect chemicals at parts per trillion or less. Pointing out that we can find traces of the breakdown products of nicotine, flame retardents, DDT, etc is meaningless unless you actually say:
1: How much
2: How toxic it is
The truth is, you are a thousand times more likely to die driving to the store to buy your fruits and veges than you are to die from the trace amounts of pesticides on the food. Everything you eat contains hundreds of toxic chemicals in some amount. Every drop of sea water contains 50 BILLION gold atoms, for perspective. Do people farm the ocean for gold?
Do not let chemical scare-stories alarm you. 99% of them are full of it.
... is that life expectancy has increased tremendously over the past hundred years,
And, of course, this is one of the primary examples in intro statistics courses to explain why you need to know more than just such a sound-bite claim. It turns out that "life expectancy" is generally defined as the mean age at death, and almost all the change has been in eliminating causes of death before age 5. Life expectancy at ages 20 and up haven't changed all that much, despite all the medical advances. There has been a small improvement in advanced countries, mostly due to the elimination of some infectious diseases. OTOH, in some parts of the world, life expectancy past childhood has decreased in the past few decades.
My wife, whose specialy in grad school was medical economics & statistics, likes to invite people to take a stroll through graveyards around here (New England) and note the ages at death. She actually did this for a class, and found that for people who lived past 50, the mean age of death was the same 100, 200 and 300 years ago as it is today. The difference is that there are now very few child graves.
She also had a bit of fun in class by pointing out all the problems with her own "study", such as the question of what portion of the population was buried in graves that still exist. Such problems are rife in every such statistical claim.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Alar on apples. Bogus
Silicon Breast Implants Bogus
DDT Mostly Bogus
Somewhere along the way we lost our ability to actually use science and facts to evaluate things and have fallen back on a faith based consensus pseudo-science.
Remember, None of us are getting out of here alive. Life - A sexually transmitted terminal disease. Always fatal.