Family Forum / Parenting / Adoption / May 2006

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MAY 10, 2006
10:31 AM
   

CONTACT: Environmental Working Group
Bill Walker, (510) 444-0973 x301; Lauren Sucher, (202) 667-6982

Across Generations:
The Chemical Pollution Mothers & Daughters Share and Inherit


SACRAMENTO, California - May 10 - The unique bond between a mother and daughter
starts in the womb and lasts a lifetime. This Mother’s Day, lab tests of mothers
and their daughters show that they share another, unwanted bond: a common body
burden of industrial chemicals that can be passed down across generations.

Tests commissioned by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) of four mothers and
their daughters found that each of the test subjects’ blood or urine was
contaminated with an average of 35 consumer product ingredients, including flame
retardants, plasticizers, and stain-proof coatings. These mixtures of compounds,
found in furniture, cosmetics, fabrics, and other consumer goods, have never
been tested for safety. The study is available at  www.ewg.org
<http://www.ewg.org/> .

Earlier EWG body burden testing, as well as tests by the Centers for Disease
Control and other researchers, has found these and many other chemicals are
building up in the bodies of all Americans. But these tests produced three
eye-opening findings about the pollutants that can pass through a mother's
placenta or breast milk into her daughter's body:

€ All four daughters tested had more chemicals in common with their mothers than
with a group of 16 other women who were tested. This underscores the
long-lasting influence of the pollution passed from mother to daughter, and
their shared exposures as the child grows up.

€ Much of the chemical burden inherited by daughters at birth will last for
decades, some for a lifetime. The daughters will likely pass on to their
children some of the very chemical molecules they inherited from their mothers.
The estimated age by which a daughter will purge 99 percent of the inherited
pollution found in this study ranges from one day for phthalate plasticizers, to
one year for mercury, to between adolescence and 60 years for common flame
retardants and stain-proofing chemicals, to 166 years for lead.


€ Chemicals that persist in the body were found at higher levels in mothers than
daughters, showing how chemicals can build up in the body over a lifetime.
Mothers had an average of 1.5 to 5.2 times more pollution than their daughters
for lead, methyl mercury, brominated flame retardants, and the Teflon- and
Scotchgard-related perfluorochemicals PFOA and PFOS.

The findings were released today at a briefing at the California State Capitol.
Joining public health advocates and four of the mothers and daughters were
Senate President Pro tem Don Perata, Sen. Deborah Ortiz and Assemblyman John
Laird, authors and co-sponsor of SB 1379, a bill to establish the nation’s first
state-level biomonitoring program to track pollution in people.

"We monitor the pollution in our air, our water, and even our fish. It's time to
start looking at the pollution in our bodies,” said Perata. “The report
discussed today, which shows how chemicals can be passed from mother to
daughter, is another vital reason Californians need the information provided by
SB 1379, which would create the nation's first statewide biomonitoring program
to measure chemical contaminants in humans."

The mothers and daughters in this study join 64 other people tested in six EWG
biomonitoring programs conducted between 2000 and 2006. In total, EWG
biomonitoring has found 455 different pollutants, pesticides, and industrial
chemicals in the bodies or cord blood of 72 different people – including 10
newborn babies with an average of 200 chemicals in each child.

This is a burden of pollution made even more troubling by the lack of health
studies or safeguards for the chemicals’ individual or combined toxic effects.
And exposures in early life heighten concerns over health risks.

“EPA studies show that children from birth to age two are 10 times more
sensitive to cancer-causing chemicals than adults,” said Jane Houlihan, EWG’s
vice president for research. “Scientists have found that chemicals’ toxic
effects can be passed down for four generations, by causing permanent genetic
changes that can be inherited.

A stew of toxic chemicals is not the legacy mothers want to hand down to their
children.”