31 December 2011

Human bodies contain too many damaging chemicals

The International Year of Chemistry failed to tackle the worrying proliferation of potentially damaging chemical

By Geoffrey Lean | The Telegraph | 30 Dec 2011
Peter Cushing in 'The Curse of Frankenstein' (1957). On average our bodies harbour 27 hazardous chemicals - There’s bad chemistry in our bodiesPeter Cushing in 'The Curse of Frankenstein' (1957). On average our bodies harbour 27 hazardous chemicals Photo: EVERETT COLLECTION / REX FEATURES

You would be forgiven for not noticing, but today marks the end of an official year of “worldwide celebration”, designed to “generate enthusiasm” and “reach across the globe”. For despite its hopeful hype, the UN’s International Year of Chemistry appears to have had far less public impact in Britain even than its 2008 predecessor – the International Year of the Potato.

The spotlight on spuds did at least attract some national press attention: this year’s science one got scarcely a mention – though it did make 350 words in the Baluchistan Times on Thursday.

It’s not as if nothing was happening. The Swiss issued a commemorative postage stamp; there was an international conference on the remote Lord Howe Island in the Pacific; 10-year-old Poorvie Choudhary set a new world record for reciting the 118 elements in the periodic table in 27.6 seconds in Rajasthan; and two weeks ago there was a “Chemistry Caroling Event” in San Francisco (“I am dreaming of a white precipate”, “Deck the labs with rubber tubing”, and so on). But all to little avail.

It is a shame, for there is much to celebrate. Chemicals have brought us enormous benefits, swelling our harvests, beating back previously unconquerable diseases, and producing a host of consumer goods that underpin modern life.

And the year has also been a missed opportunity for tackling, as had been hoped at its outset, the downside of this chemical revolution – what Yale Professor John Wargo describes as “an unexpected side effect” of our prosperity, “a change in the chemistry of the human body”. For many of the substances that have built our economies are now embedded in our tissues and coursing through our veins: some, it seems, are up to no good.

Tests for a hundred particularly hazardous substances have revealed that – on average – we each harbour 27 of them in our blood, though the chemical cocktail varies from person to person. Children have been found to be more contaminated than their parents or grandparents, while mothers pass on the poisons to babies in the womb. Researchers have found potentially dangerous chemicals in every one of 14 basic foodstuffs they took from supermarket shelves, and in the air of every home they visited.

Findings like these spurred 200 eminent scientists from five continents some years ago to issue a joint warning that exposure to common chemicals skewed the development of critical organs in foetuses and newborns, increasing their chances of developing diabetes, cancer, attention deficit disorders, thyroid damage, diminished fertility, and other conditions in later life.

The Standing Committee of European Doctors – which brings together the continent’s top physicians’ bodies, including the BMA – has added: “Chemical pollution represents a serious threat to children, and to Man’s survival.” And the usually cautious US President’s Cancer Panel has reported that synthetic chemicals can cause “grievous harm” and that the number of cancers for which they are responsible had been “grossly underestimated”.

In yet another warning, researchers from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and the University of Southern Denmark predicted a “silent pandemic” of brain conditions such as autism, cerebral palsy and attention deficit disorders, identifying 202 substances known to poison the brain as “the tip of a very large iceberg”.

But perhaps there is most concern over endrocrine disrupters, the “gender-benders”, which interfere with hormones. These have had feminising effects on wildlife: half the male fish in Britain’s lowland rivers have been found to be developing eggs in their testes. And they are increasingly blamed for a precipitate decline in human sperm counts: measurements in more than 20 countries show that, on average, they have fallen from 150 to 60 million per millilitre of sperm fluid in five decades.

Yet all this is still only a small part of the potential problem. There are some 100,000 chemicals in use, but we only have good information on how safe – or otherwise – 15 per cent of them are. The proportion that is adequately regulated is even smaller. It is a massively neglected environmental and public health issue. “It’s time to tackle chemicals,” wrote the then Danish environment minister, Karen Ellemann, as the International Year of Chemistry opened.

However, little happened during what Dr Gwynne Lyons, director of the independent Chemicals, Health and Environmental Monitoring Trust, has described a “damp squib”.

But year or no year, the change in the chemistry of our bodies will continue to intensify. Is it too much to hope that we will finally get to grips with it during our next orbit round the Sun?

Big stomach, big beard and a carbon footprint to match

FEW PEOPLE escape pressure to examine their carbon footprint and shrink it. American environmentalists are now targeting Father Christmas for emitting as much carbon dioxide during a single night’s work as an oil sheikhdom does in a year – and are telling him how to clean up his act.

Those reindeer, for example, emit the equivalent of 40,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide in methane from both ends of their digestive tract, calculates Ethical Ocean, an online green marketplace. Producing and transporting the drink and snacks left out in fireplaces around the world account for another 9,000 tonnes. And St Nicholas’s polar workshop puffs out nearly a million.

If 80 per cent of the world’s children have been good enough to get presents, 68 million tonnes will be emitted in producing, packaging and eventually disposing of them, says the firm, plus another 280,000 from making the wrapping paper. And mining the 75,000 tonnes of coal needed for the stockings of the naughty remainder releases methane equivalent to 37,000 tonnes of C02; burning it would add another 194,000.

It all adds up to a polluting bootprint the size of Qatar’s, says the firm, urging Father Christmas next year to take advantage of 24-hour sunlight to power his workshop, leave toy windmills instead of lumps of coal, and give eco-friendly toys wrapped in recycled paper. Mostly purchased from its catalogue, no doubt.

Here’s to a green new year

PREDICTION, AS they say, is tough – especially when it’s about the future. But this is the time of year to have a punt, so here are mine for 2012.

Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will reach a record, but international negotiations on cutting emissions will make slow progress. Poor people in developing countries will continue to suffer from a changing climate, even as many in comfortable circumstances carry on arguing over whether it is happening.

At home, the EU will start legal proceedings against Britain for failing to meet air pollution standards. Badger lovers will go to law to stop culling, starting in the autumn. And ministers will struggle to amend their controversial planning reforms sufficiently to satisfy their supporters.

Electric cars will proliferate, Israel and Denmark starting nationwide programmes, but they will not catch on here. Ministers will launch the biggest drive for insulating houses and some firms will achieve carbon neutrality.

The Treasury will bear down hard on green measures, as conventional wisdom holds them irrelevant in harsh times. But grassroots initiatives will emerge, as the public becomes increasingly convinced that the world is changing and that the path back to prosperity must be greener. See you then.

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2011

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