Killing You Softly - Part I

Nothing Safe. Nothing Sacred.

It’s difficult to find the word that best describes the emotion I felt. Surprised? Too weak. Flabbergasted? Too nineteenth century. Taken aback? Two words. Aghast? Yes. I was aghast.

I was aghast on that day in the coffee shop in 2003, as I read the article explaining that breast milk of nursing mothers was contaminated with polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). News of a man made chemical polluting the essential gift of life and love from a mother to her child was more than offensive to me. Poisoning the very first food a child ingests was a high crime. Over the next year and two I followed this story, and became angry.

A nationwide study by the U.S. Environmental Working Group (EWG) had found levels of bromine based fire retardants in the breast milk of first time mothers 75 times higher than reported in European studies. And 21.5 times higher than levels that had triggered phase outs of PBDEs as far back as 1990 in Sweden, and thereafter in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands. Katrina Friedman was one of the nursing mothers who participated in the EWG study, “You try to do everything right for your baby. I try to eat organic food, you berate yourself for having a glass of wine or cup of coffee, and then I find out these invisible chemicals have been seeping into my life and into my baby”, she said.

Later research would confirm the disproportionate risks the chemical peddlers had placed on our youngest and most vulnerable – in 19 out of 20 cases studied, toddlers have 3.2 times more PBDEs in their blood than their mothers.

Cross referencing the EWG study with other studies painted a dark picture of PBDEs. This tissue invasive fire retardant had been found to mimic hormones, disrupt the endocrine system, interfere with the thyroid gland, delay neurological development, induce hyperactivity, adversely affect fetal development and decrease sperm counts.

PBDEs were first confirmed in living organisms in 1981. Since then levels have increased exponentially and they’ve been found everywhere in fish, animals, mammals, even in vegetables. Ingestion of food is one source of entry into humans. Research also demonstrated that PBDEs evaporate into indoor air from household furnishings such as sofas, chairs, carpet underlay and beds. Foam dust mixes with household dust, gets into the air and then migrates into the human body. Heat from radiant heated floors or from the human body itself assists in releasing the minute airborne particulate. And the very act of sitting on a fire retardant laced polyurethane sofa creates a bellows effect in the seat cushions that helps propel the contaminant into the air and from there into the lungs.

Finding out that the form of PBDEs appearing in breast milk was the same form found in flexible polyurethane foam used to make furniture gave me cause for quiet reflection.

At about the same time, studies on women in the San Francisco area linked high levels of PBDE exposure to dramatically higher incidences of breast cancer. This was no great leap considering that PBDEs had been found not only in breast milk but also in human blood, fatty tissue, and umbilical cord blood. Marin County in particular recorded a 37% increase in breast cancer in just one decade.

Commenting on the studies, Dr. Ana Soto of the Tufts Medical School told Reuters: “I believe it is high time to seriously consider environmental chemicals as the most likely source of this sudden increase in risk”. And, “The increasing risk of breast cancer and other cancers has paralleled the proliferation of synthetic chemicals since World War II”. Dr. Soto added that only seven percent of the estimated 85,000 synthetic chemicals registered for use in the United States have been subjected to toxicological screening.

Spokespersons for two of the largest manufacturers of PBDEs, Great Lakes Chemical Co. and Albemarle Chemical Co., dismissed the concerns of Bay area women claiming there were no peer reviewed studies proving ill health effects in humans.

Although the news media was presenting this story as new, I learned that studies reporting PBDEs in breast milk had been surfacing as far back as the 1970s. In the long time in between, these warning signs including phase outs of the product in Scandanavia and Europe, were not enough reasons to give North American polyurethane foam manufacturers any cause for introspection.

Why would they? The chemical companies, the manufacturers who process these raw chemicals into polyurethane foam, the foam distributors, the furniture manufacturers and the retailers who sell them are free to trespass into your body without your knowledge, without your consent. So long as the harm caused occurs slowly over time, they face no consequence. If you are diagnosed with cancer ten years on, they know you can’t finger the culprit with certainty. You have scant protection when a company, as a consequence of pursuing profit, violates your body.

As with all industrial chemicals, this chemical had been given the benefit of the doubt at every turn. And until legislators located their testicles, or until sufficient numbers of sick, dead or contaminated humans could be evidenced in a court of law, it was business as usual for polyurethane foam manufacturers.

I had reasons for being interested in this story. I owned a furniture manufacturing company. My employees , including women I’d known and respected for years, were exposed daily to polyurethane foam. However unwittingly, I was responsible for sending carcinogenic chemicals into peoples homes, to offices, universities, even the odd daycare centre. Now that I knew it, conscience would not permit it.

There was the family too. I was only one degree of separation from breast cancer. When my wife Sharon was only a girl of thirteen, her mother was taken by breast cancer - an especially hard age to face the loss of a parent. And there was Eli. Every father wants a kinder, better world for his son. I did not want to continue contributing to the spread of harmful chemicals in his world. Could I influence events in the right direction? Pay it forward as they say?

Lastly, there was the really big picture. Before Al Gore’s documentary and concurrent with these events, I’d been reading up on global warming and weighing the contradictory news reports. I had connected the dots between human health and the health of this planet.

As it turned out, the intense media heat about PBDEs from Bay area mothers, women’s groups and professional women was too intense for California lawmakers to evade. Belatedly they enacted a partial ban on some forms of PBDEs to take effect by 2008.

This had a domino effect throughout a number of North American jurisdictions. With the writing now on the wall, Great West Chemical issued a press release announcing it was ‘voluntarily’ removing the offending chemical formulation from the market. Conspicuously absent from their press release was any information about which new chemical stew would replace PBDEs. As welcome as the partial PBDE ban was, there would be no happy ending.

When the breast milk contamination story found me in 2003, it caused me to question myself. One question has a way of leading to another and that is just what happened. In all that deep digging into PBDEs, I had come across other troubling questions about synthetic chemicals in furniture and polyurethane foam. The genie was out of the bottle. Len Laycock

Coming Soon, Part II. The Carcinogens Within.