LA Weekly

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A couple weeks ago I read this on the UK's Edie Web site:

"[S]everal fish species, such as Atlantic salmon, sea trout, cod and turbot, have shown signs of reproductive problems in recent decades, and that the level of brominated flame retardants (PDBEs) in the Baltic Sea herring is 50 times higher than in the Atlantic.

Which made me wonder if I should give up my increasingly meager ration of fish and just go vegan.

But now there's a peculiar and perplexing story out about at PDBEs, which for unknown reasons have been rapidly accumulating in human breast milk in the last few years, even though they were used for decades before. According to the Los Angeles Times this morning, PDBEs from natural sources -- "methoxylated" PDBEs, perhaps from sea sponges -- are more prevalent in fish than the synthesized, "halogenated" kind:

"Halogenated chemicals, formed when chlorine or bromine are added to hydrocarbons, can endure in nature for decades, maginfy in the food chain and reach high levels in people, whales and other top predators."

What does it all mean? "The finding is significant," says the article, because it raises questions about whether creatures can adapt to toxic substances that they encounter in the ocean." And whether we can adapt to the man-made ones.

PDBEs, which have been shown to affect reproductive hormones in lab mice, are banned in California and no longer made the U.S.

Meanwhile, there's a bill that's just been introduced in the California legislature requiring the manufacturers of the 750,000,000 pounds of some 85,0000 toxic chemicals, many of them known to cause cancer and damage to reproductive and nervous systems, to pay for biomonitoring:

"In the interests of human health, it should be the responsibility of those who manufacture a chemical to produce test methods to determine the matrices by which that chemical is transported into humans and biota, and to determine which of the breakdown products or metabolites of the chemical are best suited to be used as chemical biomarkers of exposure."

I'm think I'm for it.

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