Putting the Next Generation of Brains In Danger

An anonymous reader sends this news from CNN: "The number of chemicals known to be toxic to children's developing brains has doubled over the last seven years, researchers said. Dr. Philip Landrigan at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and Dr. Philippe Grandjean from Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, authors of the review published Friday in The Lancet Neurology journal say the news is so troubling they are calling for a worldwide overhaul of the regulatory process in order to protect children's brains. 'We know from clinical information on poisoned adult patients that these chemicals can enter the brain through the blood brain barrier and cause neurological symptoms,' said Grandjean. 'When this happens in children or during pregnancy, those chemicals are extremely toxic, because we now know that the developing brain is a uniquely vulnerable organ. Also, the effects are permanent.'"

Comments

Prepare the industry stonewalling.

[Anonymous Coward]

The impact is not limited to loss of IQ points.

"Beyond IQ, we're talking about behavior problems -- shortening of attention span, increased risk of ADHD," Landrigan said.

Things that make it harder for people to do well in school and later on the job. And in extreme cases, contributes to being a poor and on the dole.

Remember that folks when you or you hear someone bitch about the EPA and environmental regulations. We pay for it one way or another.

Of course, industry will have their own scientists - like the cigarette industry - that will show this is "junk science" or some other critique to prevent or at the very least, slow down any sort of regulation.

Profit and money is all that seems to matter to some people in our society.

Re:Prepare the industry stonewalling.

[nbauman]

Pregnant women can take care of tobacco, alcohol, and cocaine themselves.

(The numbers of women in that age group who smoke has gone down dramatically in the last generation, the women I know quit alcohol during pregnancy, and cocaine among pregnant women turned out to be exaggerated.)

How can a pregnant woman protect herself against lead, if auto exhaust from leaded gasoline fills the air with it? Only government can do that job.

Similarly, General Electric dumped hundreds of tons of PCBs into the Hudson River, where it's impossible to remove. Is that supposed to be the woman's responsibility and not GE's responsibility?

Do you believe that every pregnant woman should get a degree in analytical chemistry and a home lab?

Some things are individual responsibilities, and some things are government responsibilities. Actually, some things are corporate responsibilities, but the U.S. corporations don't accept those responsibilities so the government has to clean up after them.

Re:Prepare the industry stonewalling.

[nbauman]

GE's fault was that they irresponsibly polluted the Hudson River in the first place. Yes, everybody was doing it at the time, but that's the problem. We had an irresponsible chemical industry, and electrical industry, and if the government isn't watching them, they'll do some of the stupidest, most dangerous things imaginable that cost them much more money, and harm many uninvolved people, in the long run. GE didn't even admit that PCBs were harmful until they wound up in the courts, and all their remediation was the result of court settlements. And this company was building nuclear power plants.

I went to a panel at the New York bar association on PCBs. There was a guy from GE who was still arguing that we didn't have evidence that PCBs were harmful. His argument was that there was a factory in Italy that blew up where people were exposed to higher levels of PCBs without apparent harm. Actually, the factory was producing a different PCB. It turned out that PCBs are a whole class of compounds, and you can't extrapolate from one PCB to another. If one PCB happens to be shaped to wrap around your DNA, it could cause cancer. You can't dismiss that possibility.

Bottom line: GE contaminated the Hudson River with low levels of PCBs of all kinds, and nobody can figure out definitely how dangerous it is to be exposed to low levels of each PCB over long periods of time. GE spent a lot of money, and $1/2 billion sounds right, but they still couldn't undo the damage and they couldn't restore the Hudson River to its original state. There used to be commercial fishing on the Hudson River, and because of the uncertainty, that industry is gone. They (and we) were lucky that over time it didn't turn out to be as bad as some of the Japanese pollution cases.

GE shouldn't have contaminated the Hudson River in the first place. Upstate New York was an industrial area, and there was a lot of dumping pollution like that, of which Love Canal is another case.

I knew chemists from those days, and there was an attitude of, "By the time this becomes a problem, I'll be retired and gone." They knew the mess that they were creating.

I knew an editor from one of the McGraw-Hill electrical industry magazines who insisted to the end, in articles and editorials, that PCBs were harmless. Yeah, PCBs had great dielectric properties and they didn't burn. I was sorry to see them go. But what about the toxicity?

I'm reluctantly forced to let the individuals and corporations off the hook and escape their personal responsibility. It's the whole industry and their attitude up to the 1960s that was responsible. They provided lots of jobs, and created lots of useful modern products like electrical components and appliances, and GE commendably paid taxes, supported the community, and promoted science education (unlike tax-avoiding tech companies today). But they fucked up royally with their toxic waste disposal and we should at least acknowledge that and learn from it.

My conclusion: I don't want to hear about how the wonderful free market and personal responsibility will keep us safe, and government regulation will drag us into poverty. We can't trust corporate executives who are getting bonuses for their quarterly performance to be just greedy enough but not too greedy.

We need government monitoring and regulation to keep an eye on them, and make sure they don't fuck up again, and kill a lot of people, and incidentally go bankrupt (as the asbestos companies did).

Unfortunately, we have an entire political party, the Republicans, who have gone crazy and want to destroy government oversight. We also have a Democratic Party that is often ready to follow them over the cliff, in return for some (admittedly huge) campaign contributions.

Re:Prepare the industry stonewalling.

[TapeCutter]

Do not assume the government will protect you - protect yourself.

Supporting anti-pollution, clean food/water laws is an important part of protecting yourself from others who demonstrably lack personal responsibility.

Number of _known_ dangers

[gnasher719]

Glancing through the article, there don't seem to be any new dangers to children. There seem to be more things that are _known_ to be dangerous, but these things obviously were dangerous even when we didn't know they were. So no need to panic.

Re:Number of _known_ dangers

[mcgrew]

Indeed. The worst of them have/had been in use for a century or more. Paint and gasoline used to have lead. I remember reading about a mushroom hunter who had gotten sick after eating some wild mushrooms she'd found on the side of the road. They weren't a toxic species; she'd gotten lead poisoning from gasoline fumes the fungi had absorbed. Kids were rendered mentally retarded from eating paint chips. Thermometers contained mercury, and when one broke us kids would play with the amazing metal. Yet at one point in school my IQ was measured at 150 (I'm sure I'm a lot dumber now, I've been exposed to toxins all my life).

The biggest danger to children's brains is women drinking while pregnant. I've seen it all too many times in my six decades, it's incredibly sad. Other, more dangerous dangers are blows to the head, and mental and physical abuse.

Rather than the sky falling, it's continually improving; most of the substances listed have already either been banned, or their use curtailed voluntarily. From TFA:

The American Chemistry Council, meanwhile, called the review a "rehash" of the authors' first review.

"This iteration is as highly flawed as the first, as once again the authors ignore the fundamental scientific principles of exposure and potency," said council spokesman Scott Jensen.

"What is most concerning is that the authors focus largely on chemicals and heavy metals that are well understood to be inappropriate for children's exposure, are highly regulated and/or are restricted or being phased out. They then extrapolate that similar conclusions should be applied to chemicals that are more widely used in consumer products without evidence to support their claims. Such assertions do nothing to advance true scientific understanding and only create confusion and alarm."

Re:Number of _known_ dangers

[nbauman]

Glancing through the article, there don't seem to be any new dangers to children. There seem to be more things that are _known_ to be dangerous, but these things obviously were dangerous even when we didn't know they were. So no need to panic.

"No need to panic" is one of the stupidest phrases in the English language.

Of course there's no need to panic. There's never a need to panic. The house is on fire? No need to panic. Your wife got shot in the head? No need to panic. The World Trade Center got hit by an airliner? No need to panic.

"Panic" is just a word to diminish a legitimate concern for a serious potential danger that is supported by scientific evidence that is about as solid as you usually get in real life.

Of course there are no new dangers to children. These are all old dangers, that are well-known to scientists, and have been denied by the industries that are selling these products. What's new here is that the evidence for these dangers is getting stronger and stronger, and the industry shills are looking more and more ridiculous when they try to argue that "the science is unproven" or "there's no need to panic."

For example, Herbert Needleman first published the dangers of lead toxicity in the 1970s. There was strong evidence that lead was causing damage to children's brains that you could measure in IQ tests and correlate with their blood lead levels. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

At the same time, the lead industry was selling tetraethyl lead as a gasoline additive, which was the best way imaginable to distribute lead into the environment in a way that nobody could escape it. They were also selling lead paints, which were a good way to target lead to children, and to painters, and to the construction workers who finally demolished the houses at the end of their cycle.

The lead industry launched a well-funded campaign including lawsuits to discredit Needleman, which finally collapsed as the evidence for the dangers of lead grew and finally become overwhelming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Now we have an article in one of the top 4 medical journals (which I read every week) in which the authors (endorsed by their peer-reviewers) say basically that we told you so, the evidence for the toxicity of these 11 industrial chemicals is even stronger now, and it's reasonable to conclude that these widespread industrial chemicals are causing measurable, significant neurological damage, especially in children, just like lead was doing, and we should do something about it now, rather than let industry lobbyists run the world and continue to harm people.

(And BTW they're talking about industrial chemicals, which are manufactured in quantities of hundreds of tons, and wind up being distributed widely in the environment, and have measurable and significant cognitive effects at parts per million. This isn't chemical phobia.)

Re:Number of _known_ dangers

[enharmonix]

There seem to be more things that are _known_ to be dangerous, but these things obviously were dangerous even when we didn't know they were.

I moderated a really controversial article once and as a result I stopped getting moderator points (as I expect did anybody else who moderated in that discussion, because I promoted comments on both sides of the issue). Since I can't mod you up, I'll just say "good point" in hopes that you get modded up some more.

Taking your comment a step further, this is "Good news, everyone!" because when we know these chemicals are bad, we avoid them. Not all of them are regulated, but manufacturers know people care about their kids safety so they avoid using chemicals shown to be bad (like BPA). That doesn't mean kids are no longer exposed to all of them, but I'd wager they're exposed to significantly fewer of them in smaller amounts than we were as kids.

Re:Number of _known_ dangers

[AthanasiusKircher]

The biggest danger to children's brains is women drinking while pregnant. I've seen it all too many times in my six decades, it's incredibly sad.

While it is true that heavy drinking is a severe danger to kids' brains during pregnancy, this has only really been established for alcoholic-level abuse. A few years ago, when my wife was pregnant, I spent a significant amount of time reading hundreds of articles on all the supposed pregnancy dangers, and, to my knowledge, there's not a single case of fetal alcohol syndrome/spectrum disorders or malformed infants that has been reported in numerous studies (involving hundreds of thousands of pregnancies) for alcohol consumption less than about 10-14 drinks per week during pregnancy.

Most studies that claim effects for "any" alcohol consumption don't bother to differentiate light/moderate/heavy drinkers. For the few that do, only a handful have shown any significant cognitive differences for light or moderate drinking vs. women who abstain completely. And of those studies that show statistical differences among these groups, they tend to be small effects. And roughly half of those studies show some sort of minor cognitive benefit to light drinking compared to abstaining completely.

After reviewing the literature, I frankly don't believe that alcohol actually has a benefit (even a small one) on developing brains, but I do know there are other studies showing that mother's stress levels and other things can have significant effects during pregnancy. So, for some women, if they have an occasional drink, it may be enough of a benefit to the mother's feeling of well-being overall that it may also help fetal development.

The point is -- being an alcoholic or drinking heavily during pregnancy is indeed a sad and terrible thing. But all the pressure we put on mothers now to abstain from ALL alcohol and soft cheeses and caffeine and cold cuts and whatever else can also have negative repercussions on fetuses in terms of stress and general happiness for mothers. (Plus, many of the risks are much less than doctors tend to imply -- in many cases, you're much, much more likely to be hit by a bus or even struck by lightning than to cause harm to your baby by eating some of the "banned" items.)

Other, more dangerous dangers are blows to the head, and mental and physical abuse.

Absolutely. Physical abuse is a problem. But other big risks for kids under 18 are car accidents, accidental drowning (swimming pools, in particular), suffocation, and fire. Head injuries playing football and such are also a serious concern for older kids. The common worries like guns, drinking poison, etc. are much less of a concern than your swimming pool or safety during your daily commute.

Re:TOTC

[ColdWetDog]

If an AC whooshes in the forest, does it make a sound?

Observer bias

[argStyopa]

Like most histrionic headlines, that first line is meant to be read as "The number of chemicals known to be toxic to children's developing brains has doubled over the last seven years," (the bold are the letters you're supposed to mentally 'land on'.

I read it, and of course have the same reaction, initially.

But then I look again, and read it differently: "The number of chemicals known to be toxic to children 's developing brains has doubled over the last seven years,"

Big difference in meaning conveyed, and ultimately conclusion.

So I read TFA (I know, crazy, and almost disqualifies me from commenting on slashdot, but I'm a rebel).

Here's the money shot: "...In 2006, we did a systematic review and identified five industrial chemicals as developmental neurotoxicants: lead, methylmercury, polychlorinated biphenyls, arsenic, and toluene. Since 2006, epidemiological studies have documented six additional developmental neurotoxicantsâ"manganese, fluoride, chlorpyrifos, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, tetrachloroethylene, and the polybrominated diphenyl ethers. We postulate that even more neurotoxicants remain undiscovered...."

"DOUBLED IN ONLY 7 YEARS?" yeah, from 5 to 10, and most of those have entirely natural sources. Arsenic is bad for baby's brains? Really? And that "...there are more undiscovered"? More than 10 neurotoxologically dangerous substances in the world? PhD material, that. (In fact, here, I'll give them a few to start with: methane, ethane, propane and down the list. Most aqueous solvents. Iron. Chlorine....holy crap, the list took 7 years to double, and I just likely tripled it in 5 minutes!!)

Look, I *agree* with the idea that there should be a register of neurotoxicity levels for commonly-used chemicals, and that it would be useful that newly-synthesized compounds are tested to determine toxicity levels for neurological development like they are for basic toxicity. Saying this, I have no idea of how complex, slow, or expensive this testing is.

Finally, let's all remember that a lot of chemicals are intrinsic to our way of life; it's unreasonable to compare our chemical environment against a cleanroom utopia where there are somehow no external chemicals filtering into a developing child's body....that's just nonsensical. "Fear of 'dangerous' chemicals" is one of the more commonly-encountered FUD items in the news today.

Life is a tradeoff. I prefer drinking from glass bottles, but there's no way I'd give up the convenience, safety, and economy of plastic bottled for water. I understand that burning meat leaves a host of carcinogens in the carbon, but I'm simply not going to give up delightful steak. I suspect that eventually we'll find that living in cages of shifting electrical current our whole lives likewise has an impact on us, but I'm not giving up living in a home wired for electricity.
This all seems utterly obvious to me. I wish it was to others, so we could have a sensible discussion instead of freaking out all the time.

Re:Observer bias

[AtariEric]

Life is a tradeoff.

Be that as it may, most people want to do their own choosing what to trade - with many forms of pollution, that decision is made by other people, with the victim allowed no input.

Toxin influences are also multi-generational

[voxelman]

As the following article about biologist Michael Skinner's findings describes, the effects of toxins may not be limited to a single generation of offspring. This may be the smoking gun that explains the step rise in such diverse diseases as cancer and ADHD.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

You are the guinea pig!

[mspohr]

The basic problem is that industry gets to invent new chemicals and to use them with very little testing. Since it can easily take 10 or 20 years to discover toxicities, this means that we are all participating in a giant uncontrolled experiment to discover which chemicals are bad for us. There are about 100,000 industrial chemicals in use today and very few of these have been rigorously tested. The rest are being tested on us. Of course, it is very difficult to sort out which of the thousands of chemicals we are exposed to are causing which of our many toxic effects so lots of opportunity for psychopathic corporations to perseverate and keep their profits flowing.
A good case in point is California TB117 which required flame retardants in furniture starting in 1975. Over the years TDCPP (chlorinated Tris... listed as a carcinogen by California in 2011), PentaBDE, (pentabrominated diphenyl ether, globally banned due to toxicity and environmental persistence) and Firemaster 550, (associated with obesity and anxiety in one animal study) were used in massive quantities causing untold damage (and no real improvement in flame resistance). After years of studies and lots of resistance from chemical companies (fake studies, astroturf groups, etc.) California finally allowed furniture to be made without fire retardants (although they were not banned). BTW, since it is inconvenient for manufacturers to make California specific furniture, everyone in the country was exposed to these chemicals.
There have been federal and state attempts to pass legislation requiring more testing of chemicals but, of course, these are going nowhere since it would interfere with chemical industry profits and they can bribe legislators to get their way.

Re:You are the guinea pig!

[mspohr]

This is the problem.
You state that there is "zero evidence" that TDCPP leads to cancer in humans.
The NIH, OTOH, says this: "In recent years, animal studies have suggested that TDCPP is neurotoxic, an endocrine disruptor, and a reproductive toxicant.4,5,6 The National Research Council has reported TDCPP to be linked to cancer in rats,7 and the chemical is on California’s Proposition 65 list of substances known to cause cancer.8 However, its potential carcinogencity has not been classified by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the International Agency for Research on Cancer, or the National Toxicology Program."
The problem is that you may say that this NIH statement is not based on evidence or that the evidence is equivocal. Most people would think otherwise. Since chemical manufacturers are allowed to make and sell anything without proving that it is safe, they can continue to promote TDCPP until somebody (funded by ?) proves it is dangerous.
Since chemicals can be produced and used without proof of their safety, we are all part of a large uncontrolled experiment. Some of us will get sick and die. Chemical companies get rich.

Not News - Get back to Nature

[pubwvj]

This is not really news. I was aware of this back when I was a child in the 1970's. People are screaming in the media about global warming but they're missing the real issue which is toxic pollution. Climate change is merely a distraction.

The solution is to take control over the inputs as much as possible. I pasture raise my children far out in the country raising much of our own food so I know it is good. I make sure we have good water and I limit our exposure to unnecessary chemical toxins. Very little is actually necessary.

In addition to the chemical toxins there are also social toxins. Turn off the TV and get a grip on the other media you expose yourself and your children to on a daily basis. Teach them to question these things and understand the devious psychology behind advertising. Don't be a sheep.

biased report

[jklovanc]

So two doctors did a report in 2006 which found five out of the thousands of chemicals that exist in the world can cause brain issues in children. Five is a pretty low number. There are probably more.
Take a look at their "new" list.

Manganese is a known toxin with exposure limits.
Floride a known toxin. I would like to see the report they are citing. Maybe at high levels beyound what is allowed in most places there is an issue. Floride has been a target of many scare studies.
Tetrachloroethylene not a nice chemical to begin with.
Polybrominated diphenyl ethers have been studied for years and some types banned before 2006.
chlorpyrifos should have been included in the 2006 study.
DDT , a chemical with more problems than infant development.
So even the chemicals they found to have issues has many more issues before 2006.

This study uses one of the most obvious tactic to sensationalize their report; percentage growth in small numbers. They could have said "the number of chemicals increased by 5" nut that would be seen by most people as insignificant considering the number of chemicals in the world. The word "doubling" has much more impact. They hope people won't see that even doubled, the number is insif=gnificant.

We know there are many more chemicals in the world that cause brain development issues that are not on that list. An obvious example is alcohol which causes Fetal alcohol syndrome. How many did they miss? How many more years can they get funding to find issues that have already been found?