Health & Environment

5&5: News and Science Selections from February 2011

Science

A nerve cell. Image: Wikimedia

PBDE Disruption of Thyroid Hormone–Induced Purkinje Cell Dendrite Arborization. A technical study which looks at how disruption of the thyroid system may hamper brain development, by changing how nerve cells develop. EHP synopsis here.

Mitochondrial dysfunction in autism spectrum disorders. Systematic review finding that, although many studies suffer from limitations, the evidence supports the notion that environmentally-induced mitochondrial dysfunction is associated with autism spectrum disorders. A different study has also found a role for mitochondrial dysfunction in Parkinson’s Disease (synopsis here).

Prenatal Organochlorine Compound Exposure, Rapid Weight Gain, and Overweight in Infancy. Study finding prenatal DDE exposure to be associated with rapid weight gain in the first 6 months and elevated BMI later in infancy, among infants of normal-weight mothers.

Widely Used Pesticides with Previously Unknown Endocrine Activity Revealed as in Vitro Anti-Androgens. Study finding that which finds many agricultural pesticides disrupt male hormones. These include some which had previously not been tested for this yet are commonly found in food. Synopsis by EHN here.

Prenatal environmental exposures, epigenetics, and disease. This review summarizes recent evidence that prenatal exposure to diverse environmental chemicals dysregulates the fetal epigenome, with potential consequences for subsequent developmental disorders and disease manifesting in childhood, over the lifecourse, or even transgenerationally.

News

Toxic Chemicals in Pregnant Women? An uncomplicated Q&A with Dr Sarah Janssen, MD, about the difficult issues presented by research finding that pregnant women have a range of possibly harmful chemicals in their bodies.

Green Cleaning Spruces Up Environment. WebMD asks: what does “going green” actually mean, when it comes to cleaning products? The answer, they say, has to do with the fact that much of the cleaning we do “isn’t cleaning, it’s polluting”.

Home Pesticide Chemical May Hurt Kids’ Cognition. Data analyzed for almost 350 children found that increase in exposure to piperonyl butoxide — a chemical mixed with pyrethroid pesticides to improve its efficacy — was associated with delayed mental development at age 3 years. Original study here.

Clorox comes clean: Company discloses all ingredients in all products. The maker of bleach, Pine-Sol and other popular cleaning products has announced it will disclose the specific preservatives, dyes and fragrances it uses in its cleaning, disinfecting and laundry products sold in the U.S. and Canada.

First Chemicals Banned In European Union. Chemical & Engineering News provide a lucid explanation of what the new chemical phase-outs under REACH actually mean. The phase-outs have in places been mis-described as bans.

Progress in Children’s Environmental Health

An editorial in this month’s EHP describes progress in children’s environmental health issues, charting changes in perception and challenges faced in reintroducing concepts which used to be central to medicine and health.

One particularly interesting point is the observation that health professionals have become isolated from the professionals who implement their recommendations: buildings go up, towns are planned, waste management schemes are introduced, but all too often health is left out of the picture.

• Full article here

Why has it been so difficult to move from knowing to doing? First, many of the decisions affecting children are made not by those in the health sector, but by our professional colleagues in the agriculture, education, energy, housing, mining, and transportation sectors.

Just as “men are from Mars and women are from Venus,” it seems as if professionals in each of these sectors are from different planets. Although we may speak the same language, we rarely have more than a cursory understanding of the forces that shape one another’s decisions and other considerations.

Because the CEH movement has focused on educating the health community, few efforts have been made to establish relationships with other economic sectors. To use a developmental analogy, we are still involved primarily in “parallel play” rather than team sports. Professionals in the health sciences may work alongside professionals in other sectors, but we are absorbed in our own activities and usually have little interaction outside them.

Instead of sitting at the table with urban planners, housing specialists, and energy experts when health professionals are planning an approach to a child health problem such as asthma, we usually move forward to design a study, implement it, analyze the results, and then present it as a fait accompli to our colleagues in other economic sectors, and hope that they will find it useful.

UK criticised over cost of bringing environmental cases

In an interesting legal development, reported in the Ecologist, a UN committee has found that bringing environmental cases to court in the UK entails unreasonable financial risks.

The Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee agrees, saying the UK’s legal system does not ‘remove or reduce financial barriers to access to justice’.

The UK has already been warned by the EU Commission about the unfair cost of challenging decisions that impact on the environment.

Click here for the full story.