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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/countryside/8985039/Human-bodies-contain-too-many-damaging-chemicals.html"The International Year of Chemistry failed to tackle the worrying proliferation of potentially damaging chemicals
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?"
