Now in Your Drinking Water: Cocaine, Spices, and Hormones
February 1, 2010
Natural News
By E. Huff
A University of Washington research team recently released the results of a study it conducted on contaminant residue in the waters of Puget Sound in Washington State. Various spices, flavorings and other substances are being identified as making their way out of water treatment plants and back into the world’s water supply.
Winter holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas bring extra amounts of cinnamon while chocolate and vanilla are especially popular on the weekends. Likewise, caramel corn residue and waffle-cone pieces are particularly excessive around the Independence Day. The most popular contaminant found in the sound is artificial vanilla flavor which is found at an average of 14 milligrams per liter of water.
Around the world, scientists are finding all sorts of things from pharmaceutical drugs to illegal drugs in water supplies despite rigorous efforts to remove them at water treatment facilities. Piggy-backing a report from last year that found trace levels of pharmaceutical drugs in most U.S. water supplies, this report highlights even further how easily water is being contaminated by various human elements.
While spices and flavorings may not inflict any noticeable harm, the concept that traces of everything flushed end up in the water is what researchers wish to convey. Contaminant byproducts, also known as metabolites, regularly make their way out of water treatment plants back into natural waters. Experts hope that awareness of this will encourage people to be cautious about what they flush and engaged in working toward a solution.
Illegal drugs have become a problem in many water supplies where the residue is toxic to both animals and other humans. A 2008 study found that 92 percent of water samples at a Spanish treatment plant contained trace elements of cocaine. Italy’s longest river, the Po River, is also said to carry daily noticeable levels of the narcotic through its waterways as well as 44 pounds of daily pharmaceutical drugs which are also highly problematic.
Of notable concern is water contaminated by perchlorate, a chemical used in rocket fuel and fireworks that inhibits the uptake of iodine. Iodine is vital for proper thyroid gland function, and without it serious diseases like hypothroidism run rampant. Perchlorate is currently unregulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Current EPA guidelines require that more than 90 known contaminants be removed from water supplies, but the introduction of new chemicals as well as the use of ones that are not completely filtered out are becoming troublesome. Awareness of the issue will hopefully drive the effort to remedy the problem.
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Non-Stick Pans Linked to Thyroid Disease
January 22, 2010
Reuters
By Tim Pearce
A study by British researchers found that people with high levels of the chemical perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) in their blood have higher rates of thyroid diseases — conditions which affect the body’s metabolism.
PFOA is a common chemical, used in industrial and consumer products including non-stick cooking pans, stain-proof carpet coatings and waterproofing for fabrics.
The study, published in the Environmental Health Perspectives journal, did not establish whether PFOA was causing higher levels of thyroid disease.
The researchers said the link might be complex and indirect, and added that their work highlighted a need for further studies of the human health effects of low-level exposures to chemicals like PFOA.
“We need to know what they (these chemicals) are doing,” said Tamara Galloway, a professor of ecotoxicology at Exeter University, who led the research.
Previous studies of people living near sites where PFOA is manufactured have not found an association between exposure to these chemicals and thyroid function, and some other scientists advised caution about drawing conclusions from the study.
INDIRECT LINK?
“Studies like this cannot tell us that the two things are definitely linked,” said Ashley Grossman, professor of neuroendocrinology at Queen Mary, University of London.
“We also don’t know whether this chemical is directly affecting the thyroid. Thyroid disease is often caused by the body’s own immune system attacking the thyroid gland so perhaps this chemical is having some effect on the immune system, rather than directly on the thyroid.”
The thyroid, located in the neck, is a kind of master gland, secreting hormones affecting metabolism. People with low thyroid function may lose hair, gain weight and feel sluggish, while those with overactive thyroids may lose weight and feel their hearts race. Both conditions can be treated.
The British researchers looked at 3966 American adults aged 20 and above whose blood serum was sampled between 1999 and 2006 for PFOA. They found that those with the highest PFOA concentrations (above 5.7 nanograms per milliliter) were more than twice as likely to report current thyroid disease than individuals with the lowest levels (below 4.0ng/ml).
Thyroid diseases are much more common in women than men, but in terms of the link between PFOA and thyroid disease, the researchers found no difference between the sexes.
Galloway and colleagues stressed the need for more work but said their study suggested it is “plausible that the compounds could disrupt binding of thyroid hormones in the blood or alter their metabolism in the liver.”
“This new evidence does not rule out the possibility that having thyroid disease changes the way the body handles PFOA,” they added, and its presence “might also prove to be simply a marker for some other factor associated with thyroid disease.”
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BPAs in Food Packaging
January 18, 2010
The New York Times
By Denise Grady
In a shift of position, the Food and Drug Administration is expressing concerns about possible health risks from bisphenol-A, or BPA, a widely used component of plastic bottles and food packaging that it declared safe in 2008.
The agency said Friday that it had “some concern about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior and prostate gland of fetuses, infants and children,” and would join other federal health agencies in studying the chemical in both animals and humans.
The action is another example of the drug agency under the Obama administration becoming far more aggressive in taking hard looks at what it sees as threats to public health. In recent months, the agency has stepped up its oversight of food safety and has promised to tighten approval standards for medical devices.
Concerns about BPA are based on studies that have found harmful effects in animals, and on the recognition that the chemical seeps into food and baby formula, and that nearly everyone is exposed to it, starting in the womb.
But health officials said there was no proof that BPA was dangerous to humans.
“If we thought it was unsafe, we would be taking strong regulatory action,” said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, the principal deputy commissioner of the drug agency, at a news briefing.
Nonetheless, health officials suggested a number of things people could do to limit their exposure to BPA, like throwing away scratched or worn bottles or cups made with BPA (it can leak from the scratches), not putting very hot liquids into cups or bottles with BPA and checking the labels on containers to make sure they are microwave safe. The drug agency also recommended that mothers breastfeed their infants for at least 12 months; liquid formula contains traces of BPA.
BPA has been used since the 1960s to make hard plastic bottles, sippy cups for toddlers and the linings of food and beverage cans, including the cans used to hold infant formula and soda. Until recently, it was used in baby bottles, but major manufacturers are now making bottles without it. Plastic items containing BPA are generally marked with a 7 on the bottom for recycling purposes.
The chemical can leach into food, and a study of more than 2,000 people found that more than 90 percent of them had BPA in their urine. Traces have also been found in breast milk, the blood of pregnant women and umbilical cord blood.
Reports of potential health effects have made BPA notorious, especially among parents, and led to widespread shunning of products thought to contain the chemical. Canada, Chicago and Suffolk County, N.Y., have banned BPA from children’s products.
The government will spend $30 million on BPA research in humans and animals, to take place over 18 to 24 months, health officials said at a news briefing on Friday.
Dr. Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, said the research would involve potential effects on behavior, obesity, diabetes, reproductive disorders, cancer, asthma, heart disease and effects that could be carried from one generation to the next.
Activists on both sides of the passionately debated issue said they were disappointed in the government’s action. The American Chemical Council, which represents companies that make and use BPA, issued a statement saying BPA was safe, praising the health agencies as confirming that there was no proof of harm to people by it, but also saying, “We are disappointed that some of the recommendations are likely to worry consumers and are not well founded.”
Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Research Center for Women and Families, said the F.D.A. had not gone far enough, because its recommendations put the responsibility on families and not on companies making products containing BPA. In addition, Ms. Zuckerman said, the focus on safety should not be limited to children, because studies have linked the chemicals to heart and liver disease and other problems in adults.
Government evaluations of BPA have had a contentious history. The drug agency wrote a draft report calling it safe in 2008. But shortly after that, the National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health, said BPA was cause for “some concern,” citing the same issues that the drug agency is now agreeing to: potential effects on the brain, behavior and prostate in fetuses, infants and children.
Then the drug agency asked an independent panel of scientific advisers to review its draft report, and the panel gave it a scathing review. It accused the F.D.A. of ignoring important evidence and giving consumers a false sense of security about the chemical. The drug agency promised to reconsider BPA, and the announcement on Friday fulfilled that pledge.
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BPA Effects Getting Closer Looks
November 13, 2009
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
The Endocrine Society has issued an official statement expressing concern over the health effects of the common industrial chemical bisphenol A (BPA).
BPA is widely used to make plastics products hard and transparent, such as in water or baby bottles, and is also used to line cans of food or infant formula. Research has shown that the chemical can leach from these materials into food, however, and a number of tests have found high levels of BPA in the bodies of both adults and children.
This is an issue of particular concern because BPA is a known endocrine disruptor, disrupting the operation of vertebrate hormonal systems.
Although the FDA insists that BPA is safe, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences issued a report last year expressing concern over the chemical’s effects on the development of the brain and prostate gland.
In new research presented to the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting, scientists found that BPA can induce an uneven heart beat in female mice
“These effects are specific on the female heart. The male heart does not respond in this way and we understand why,” researcher Scott Belcher said.
BPA mimics the effects of the female sex hormone estrogen in the body.
Another study found that BPA can induce changes at the genetic level by binding to DNA and changing its function.
“We exposed some mice to bisphenol A and then we looked at their offspring,” researcher Hugh Taylor said. “We found that even when a they had a brief exposure during pregnancy … mice exposed to these chemicals as a fetus carried these changes throughout their lives.”
A third study raised concerns that BPA exposure may be even more widespread than previously believed. Researcher Frederick Vom Saal and colleagues from the University of Missouri found that monkeys are able to quickly clear BPA from their bodies, suggesting that humans with high blood levels are being repeatedly exposed to the chemical.
“We are really concerned that there is a very large amount of bisphenol A that must be coming from [unknown] sources,” Vom Saal said.
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