Over the course of the past decade, while reading many, many studies and articles about the FDA and EPA (you know, the government agencies meant to protect us) I have become cynical. And depressed. The agencies are not doing a good job protecting ordinary people (us), especially from endocrine disruptors and pesticides. There is too much corruption and too much money involved, with the bottom line being that Big Business is protected and does as it wants.
One example is why paraquat is still used in the US. This pesticide is a weed-killer that researchers link to a wide variety of diseases, including Parkinson's disease. It is widely used in the US, but banned in more than 70 countries. The EPA won't take action, and keeps saying the evidence for harms is "weak" and "insufficient", and they'll have to reassess the pesticide. But neuroscientists say:
“We know from animal work—and this is convincing and consistent—that paraquat isn’t safe,” says Bas Bloem, a neurologist at Radboud University Medical Center. The compound can pass from the bloodstream to the brain, he notes, and kills dopaminergic neurons, the loss of which drives Parkinson’s; indeed, paraquat is used to create laboratory animals with Parkinson-like disease. It also enhances the buildup of a misfolded, toxic version of the protein alpha-synuclein that’s a hallmark of the disease."
This relationship between Big Business (Big $$) was summed up by Dr. Theo Colborn back in 2014: “Our government operates via the stakeholder approach,” says (Theo) Colborn, “where those who are creating the problem are invited to solve the problem.” Yup.
Theo Colborn was an absolutely amazing person. She is the main reason that endocrine disruptors are even being discussed these days. [Go read Our Stolen Future, published in 1997]. And, of course, Big Business (Big $$) went after her. But she (and others) persisted, and nowadays endocrine disruptors are taken very seriously by researchers and the general public.
Some good resources for up-to-date information about endocrine disruptors and pesticides: Collaborative About Health and the Environment (CHE) (up-to-date research, including research webinars), Silent Spring Institute, Environmental Working Group (EWG), PFAS Central, Beyond Pesticides (including their Daily News Blog), and Environmental Health News (EHN).
Excerpts from an interview 10 years ago, a few months before her death in Dec. 2014, in Terrain.org: Scientist, Uninterrupted: Interview with Dr. Theo Colborn
More than 25 years ago, Dr. Theo Colborn blazed the trail in endocrine disruption research, facing detractors at every turn. In 2013, at 86, Colborn announced she would step down as president of the nonprofit she founded, The Endocrine Disruption Exchange (TEDX), to promote chemical safety. But she’s still working.
In the D.C. offices of the World Wildlife Fund, Colborn assimilated some 24,000 reports. What she found surprised and troubled her. Yes, everyday synthetic chemicals caused cancer in laboratory animals. But even in trace amounts—amounts so small they’d never been tested by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency—DDT, PCBs, and other synthetic chemicals containing chlorine appeared to overwhelm natural hormone systems in wildlife and laboratory animals, causing neurological, metabolic, and behavioral abnormalities, as well as freakish genitals. More disturbing, the hormone-disrupting chemicals appearing in wildlife could also be found in humans at increasing rates, in places as remote as the Arctic Circle. And the population most severely affected appeared to be the children of mothers who’d been exposed.
One of the studies that Colborn considered reported that children of mothers who had eaten two to three meals of Great Lakes fish a month were born sooner, weighed less, and had visible changes in their brains (as demonstrated by MRIs). The more PCBs found in umbilical cord blood, the more poorly the child tested for neurological development.
In 1996, writing with journalist Dianne Dumanoski and scientist John Peterson Myers, Colborn reported the new science on synthetic chemicals in the book Our Stolen Future. Described as “a frightening, detective-style narrative” by The Wall Street Journal, Our Stolen Future was aggressively vilified by industry insiders—“innuendo on top of hypothesis on top of theory,” wrote one. So, too, was Colborn.
But Colborn kept pushing, publishing hotly contested papers and advocating better monitoring on boards and committees, including EPA’s Science Advisory Board, the Ecosystem Health Committee of the International Joint Commission of the U.S. and Canada, and EPA’s Endocrine Disruption Methods and Validation Subcommittee.
It has now been nearly 20 years since Colborn sat on the EPA’s first Endocrine Disruptor Screening and Testing Advisory Committee, yet the EPA still has not approved suggested testing protocols. How could this happen?
“Our government operates via the stakeholder approach,” says Colborn, “where those who are creating the problem are invited to solve the problem.”
Since WWII, she says, some 100,000 chemicals have been manufactured and sold to make plastics, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, fire retardants, herbicides, pesticides, toys, food storage containers, furniture, carpets, computers, phones, appliances, and more. But “only a pittance have been thoroughly tested for their effects on the endocrine system.” Currently, TEDX’s list of potential endocrine disruptors is 1,000 chemicals long.
“The government requires industry to test for cancer,” she says, “but not for any connection with the increasing epidemics of endocrine system-related disorders.” Colborn’s list includes attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, intelligence and behavioral problems, diabetes, obesity, cancers, abnormal genitalia, infertility, and Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. “Disorders connected with endocrine disrupting chemicals are costing families and governments a fortune,” she says.
Colborn stresses the difficult nature of the research and testing, and the risk and repercussions of pushing for data and accountability. In a February 2014 New Yorker article about Syngenta, the manufacturer of the herbicide atrazine (suspected of causing birth defects in animals and humans), journalist Rachel Aviv described Colborn as the scientist who “popularized the theory that industrial chemicals could alter hormones.” Aviv also detailed how Syngenta pursued Tyrone Hayes, a researcher and one-time colleague of Colborn’s. “[W]hile Hayes was studying atrazine, Syngenta was studying him,” Aviv reported. The company “drafted a list of four goals. The first was ‘discredit Hayes.’”
And yet, to do nothing in the face of the weight of the evidence is not an option, says Colborn.