Toxic Makeup = Deformed Genitals?
Trevor Butterworth, November 14, 2006
Cosmetics are getting the meth treatment from the media. But when it comes to warning about the connection between nail polish and penile problems, the old journalistic adage still applies: show, don’t tell.

Now that the excitement of the mid-term elections has abated, it’s time to return to the gripping issue of abnormal penises. As a recent story in the Seattle Post Intelligencier, subtly titled “Putting on your face could cause ugly health problems,” put it:

“Scientists say that some of the chemicals found in commonly used health and beauty products can, in sufficient quantity, cause cancer, birth defects or disrupt hormone function. Ingredients called dibutyl phthalates -- a chemical used to soften plastics and found in nail polish and countless other consumer items -- have been linked to development problems in the male genitals of humans and rats.”

Actually, one scientific paper, written by a number of researchers, makes this claim, which is rather different from suggesting that a number of discrete scientists are all saying the same thing. But more to the point, if you read the paper that the Seattle PI is too coy to cite by name (an August 2005 article by Dr. Shanna Swan in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP) titled “Decrease in anogenital distance among male infants with prenatal phthalate exposure,” you won’t actually find any “development problems in the male genitals of humans.”

What Swan claimed to have found was a correlation between the anogenital index (AGI) of a baby boy, and the level of residual chemicals from four phthalates in the mother’s urine before his birth, one of which was dibutyl phthalate or DBP for short.

The anogenital index is a measurement of the distance from the anus to the base of the penis, divided by the weight at the time of measurement. The boys in the Swan study had a smaller-than-average anogenital index. Because no-one has established what the normal range for AGI is in baby boys, it is misleading to claim that this finding constitutes abnormal development.

Swan also claimed that there was a statistically significant relationship between a short AGI and delayed testicular descent, which is important because that condition is a risk factor for both infertility and cancer.

But there were methodological problems in the study, as STATS first reported and then analyzed in detail as more data became available. (One of the problems in covering this issue was that Swan refused to release her raw data).

At the same time, an independent expert panel convened by the Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction (CERHR) was unable to validate one of Swan’s key finding, which led to a correction to the original article. Additionally, industry groups, in a letter to EHP, argued that “the relevance of AGD as an end point of interest in humans is entirely speculative, and the correlation reported by Swan et al. (2005) is lacking in biologic plausibility and remains unproven.”

Swan then co-authored a commentary for the June 2006 issue of EHP, which, citing the “subtle developmental effects” in her earlier study, suggested the Environmental Protection Agency reference doses for phthalates were too lax and needed revision.

The EPA agreed, at least in the case of DBP, which is the phthalate in nail polish which the PI told its readers “to avoid;” but instead of recommending a much lower reference dose, the agency’s safety review on June 27 recommended raising the human oral exposure guideline from 100 to 300 micrograms per kilo of bodyweight per day, thus determining that DBP was three times as safe as previously thought.

The Post Intelligencer’s story is just the latest in a brace of near-hysterical reports about cosmetic safety and phthalates over the past month that include stories in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Arizona Republic, and Minneapolis Star Tribune. None noted that the EPA has revised the risk from DBP downwards.

And there was the October issue of Vogue magazine, which featured Judi Shils of the Marin Cancer Project in a feature looking at the hidden risks from make up. In this case, it wasn’t testicular: Marin County, near San Francisco has an unusually high cluster of breast cancer cases – 199 per 100,000, which is concentrated among women aged 40 to 69.

Rather than accept the view among scientists researching the cluster that this was a consequence of Marin’s sociodemographics, especially reproductive factors, such as later age of first birth, better access to health care (more rigorous use of mammograms, thereby catching more early stage tumors) along with drinking significantly more alcohol than the national average – all of which correlate with increased risk for breast cancer – Shils, a former TV producer for ABC, fingered nail polish and DBP.

“I thought, It’s gorgeous; who would get sick here?” she told Vogue. Therefore, the “health epidemic” must be caused by “environmental correlatives,” which included nail polish even though there was no compelling reason to think that Marin women painted their nails significantly more than women elsewhere in the U.S. – or drank nail polish for that matter.

Of course, environmental factors can’t and shouldn't be ruled out when it comes to cancer, but as the San Francisco Chronicle explained in a detailed article in 2003, the unpalatable, counter-intuitive yet overwhelming explanation for Marin’s – and San Francisco's – strange cancer problem was affluence.

Besides not keeping abreast of scientific and regulatory developments, the recent brace of make-up-ophobic stories all note that the European Union has implemented a ban on DBP – without noting that the EU’s own risk assessment says – on page 108 – that there is no risk to consumers from cosmetics. (In other words, the politicians who enacted the ban ignored their own scientific advisors.)

But the key measure of just how badly this story is being reported by the press does not lie in uncovering the flaws in Swan’s study or pointing to regulatory changes that the media fail to explain or even report; it’s something far more basic, a fact that was determined by the National Institutes for Health in 2000: most of our exposure to phthalates in the environment comes not from cosmetics but from food.

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