Connecticut’s Biomonitoring Stunt
Trevor Butterworth, January 16, 2007
A coalition of activists plan to abuse scientific testing to further policy goals.

Biomonitoring, the practice of testing human blood, tissue and urine for trace amounts of chemicals, has proved enormously useful in determining that the public’s exposures to lead and mercury are dangerous, which lead to action by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to mandate the reduction of lead in gasoline and to revise exposure guidelines to on mercury.

In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control conducts periodic national biomonitoring studies, and the EPA and National Institutes of Health are also engaged in this kind of research. However, because biomonitoring is a cutting edge tool that has outpaced the ability of scientists to interpret what many of the results mean, the National Research Council established a Committee on Human Biomonitoring for Environmental Toxicants “to review current practices and recommend ways to improve the interpretation and uses of human biomonitoring data on environmental chemicals.”

The result was a book “Human Biomonitoring For Environmental Chemicals,” which was published last year, and whose 26-page executive summary is available free online. As the Committee notes, the

“Rapidly developing technological capabilities to measure chemicals in the human body have increased the availability of biomonitoring information. However, the complete potential of this tool has yet to be realized, inasmuch as the science (epidemiology, toxicology, pharmaco-kinetic modeling, and exposure assessment) needed to understand the implications of biomonitoring data for human health is still in its nascent stages. For some chemicals (such as mercury and lead), the health risks and effects are well known; but for most of the chemicals currently measured, the risks cannot be interpreted…

“…The committee concludes that it is critical for biomarker researchers to adhere to appropriate statistical principles when sampling popu-lations representative of the sampled population. In addition, biomarker studies should collect detailed information on cofactors (for example, socioeconomic status and lifestyle factors) to facilitate interpreting the data—an inconsistent practice at present.”

Such caution is not stopping health activists in Connecticut, who under the name of the Coalition for a Safe and Healthy Connecticut are launching a biomonitoring plan “to prevent harm to our health from toxic hazards.”

There is one rather glaring problem with this plan: it’s limited to testing six people, which is in no shape or form a representative sample of anything. Worse, the Coalition has established,

“Criteria to identify and select representative individuals for parti-cipation in the project [which] may include: recognized leadership or celebrity in participant's field; reputation for being credible; articulate, thoughtful, objective, and at ease as a public speaker; comfort with and willingness to participate in media events and in public discussions and interest in environmental health and justice.”

Though the coalition acknowledges that biomonitoring cannot “make definite linkages between exposures and health problems,” plans to test the Connecticut six for three chemicals, which it has deemed to be toxic anyway: phthalates, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), which are used as flame retardants, and an as yet undecided-upon “toxic” chemical.

The point of this exercise is to educate “the public, policy makers and opinion-leaders about increasing levels of toxic chemicals in our bodies,” and aide “in statewide advocacy efforts to replace toxic chemicals with their safer alternatives.”

As the Committee on Human Biomonitoring for Environmental Toxicants notes,

“Considerable controversy often surrounds the interpretation of bio-monitoring data. Researchers are generating biomonitoring data whose relevance to human health is unclear in many cases. For example, news-media reports present stories of people who have had their blood tested and are alarmed to learn that it contains hundreds of chemicals. For a number of those chemicals, scientific data could enable interpretation of individual measurements in comparison with validated reference values, but usually the interpretation stops with the mere observation that the chemical is present.”

The problem with the chemicals thus far chosen by the Coalition for a Safe and Healthy Connecticut, is that the levels of phthalates found through biomonitoring by the Centers for Disease Control (in a statistically valid national sample) are well below the levels where they might prove toxic according to Environmental Protection Agency exposure guidelines.

Indeed, in a review of the latest safety data, the EPA recommended raising the reference dose on DBP, a phthalate used in some cosmetics, to three times its previous level because of reduced concerns about its risk. Based on CDC data, average adult human exposure levels are 300 times lower than the maximum daily intake recommended by the EPA.

As for polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), in 2005, the European Union decided to exempt deca-BDE – the most widely used flame-retardant in consumer products – from their Directive on Hazardous Substances after a 10-year risk assessment evaluated 588 studies and found it posed no health risk. However, recent studies show that deca-BDE breaks down into octa and penta BDE, which have been banned in the EU and are already being phased out in the U.S. due to demonstrable aquatoxicity and bioaccumulation.

The EPA, Food and Drug Administration, National Toxicology Program are all currently evaluating deca-BDE and other BDE’s for a revised risk assessment. One problem with eliminating deca-BDE is that there is currently no safer alternative that is as effective in fire retardation.

Showing that six people have trace levels of these chemicals in their bodies will do nothing other than induce “chemiphobia” in Connecticut. It’s a PR stunt with no real scientific value. Finding traces of chemicals that can be shown to be toxic to rodents at very high levels has nothing to do with determining the actual risk or toxicity to humans.

Tips for Journalists
Just because a group of people claim to be acting in the public’s interest on a health issue doesn’t mean that they should be given a soapbox. Too often, such groups and coalitions pay scant attention to getting the science right and putting it into a meaningful context. They are more interested in crafting a straightforward alarming message that will get into print.

Biomonitoring data from activist groups should be balanced by comment from expert sources on biomonitoring. The levels of the chemicals found should be contrasted with the reference doses stipulated by the EPA so that readers should not be left with the impression that they are being poisoned. The statistical validity of the sample should be queried.

Industry sources are best avoided: they are often easier to get and more quotable than research scientists, but they tend to be less believable than the watchdogging activists because they are always on the defensive. An eight-graf story reporting a health scare on a chemical which is rebutted by an industry source in the penultimate graf is neither balanced nor fair.

Reporters in Connecticut and New York should note that two members of the Committee on Human Biomonitoring for Environmental Toxicants are at local universities, namely:

Mark R. Cullen, M.D.
Director, Yale Occupational and Environmental Medicine, New Haven, CT

Robin M. Whyatt, Dr.P.H.,
Associate Professor of Clinical Environmental Health Sciences, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health

The free executive summary for “Human Biomonitoring For Environmental Chemicals,” lists all the Committee members.