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"Cleaning Up Consumer Products
...And Your Breast Milk Too!"

March/April Issue, 2004

Your computer is probably releasing flame retardants right now. And so is the foam cushion you’re sitting on. Those chemicals are ending up in the environment, in your house dust, and in the breast milk of lactating women. While flame retardants help save lives, they are not all equal. Some don’t break down -- remaining in the environment or our bodies for years, and they can build up in living things. We’re just learning about the health effects of these chemicals, but preliminary evidence is raising a sea of red flags. The Ecology Center, along with allies in the state and across the nation, is working to encourage the development and use of safer materials.

Those efforts got a boost recently with the release of a report by Michigan PIRGIM in February, the campaigning efforts of the Center, and increased warnings from the scientific community that a public health crisis may be looming.

The PIRGIM report calls for Congress and state leaders to phase out the use of Deca and all other brominated flame retardants known as PBDEs (polybrominated diphenyl ethers). The report cites “several recent groundbreaking studies that found Deca in human blood and breast milk of women in the general population, as well as in the bodies of electronics workers.”

The report points to a Sept. 2003 Environmental Working Group study that found the average levels of brominated fire retardants in breast milk samples of women in the U.S. was 75 times higher than the average for Swedish women, “at levels associated with toxic effects in several studies using laboratory animals” (see Toxic Fire Retardants Found in U.S. Women’s Breast Milk, From the Ground Up, Oct./Nov. 2003).

Toxic flame retardants like Deca are widely used in a variety of common consumer products, including the hard plastic casings of computers and TVs, foam cushions, textiles, and carpets.

“This appears to be a public health crisis, possibly an emergency,” Arnold Schecter told the Scripps Howard News Service (“An emerging health crisis involving flame retardants,” Feb. 18, 2004). Schecter is a professor of public health at the University of Texas-Houston Health Sciences Center who has been researching human exposure to flame retardants.

“Anything we do that degrades the quality of the perfect food (human breast milk) is just a colossal biological mistake,” said Richard Jackson, senior adviser to the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the same article.

The Ecology Center is currently working with state Representative Chris Kolb on legislation that would reduce Michigan residents’ exposure to Deca and other fire retardants by phasing out all PBDEs in Michigan by 2007 where there are viable alternatives.

For more information about the Ecology Center’s many campaigns to phase out the use of persistent bioaccumulative toxins (PBTs) like mercury, PCBs, and now PBDEs, go to our home page: www.ecocenter.org.

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