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.

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

[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.

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.

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/...

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.