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DANGERS OF TOXIC FIRE RETARDANTS House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree grew up on the island of North
Haven. Imagine her surprise when she had her blood tested last year
and found 19 flame retardant chemicals
in her system. Pingree began telling her story Monday [May 19] night
in a two-part series on the "CBS Evening News.
"If I were going to have a child in a couple
of years, the child would be impacted by the chemicals in my body."
Pingree told CBS News reporter Wyatt Andrews as they walked
along a beach on the island. "If I have it, you have it, we all have
it," she said.
A CBS News crew spent a day with Pingree on North Haven to produce
the story about her work to replace toxic
flame retardants in consumer products with safer options. The
story focused on brominated flame retardants
and the negative effects they have on people, especially children.
"Hundreds of millions of pounds of flame
retardant chemicals have been embedded in furniture [mattresses]
and consumer products in an effort to slow down fires and reduce
deaths and injures." Andrews says in the story.
Scientists are raising red flags about the widely used
flame retardant polybrominated
diphenylether, or PBDE.
The report shows Linda Bernbaum, a senior toxicologist with the
federal Environmental Protection Agency, who is concerned because
PBDEs have cause the kinds of health effects in young animals that
are warning signs for infant humans. "The PBDEs can affect the
developing brain and they can affect the developing reproductive
system," Bernbaum said in the the CBS report. "There is limited
evidence whether they can cause cancer," she says.
Maine State Toxicologist Dr. Deborah Rich once studied PCBs,
toxic chemicals banned in the 1970s.
She now compares them to the chemical deca, one type of PBDE still
produced in America. "I concluded that deca was toxic, Rice said.
she came away from the studies convinced that they cause brain
damage.
Unlike other industrial chemicals, brominated
flame retardants build up inside the human body. These
chemicals are now in our furniture [mattresses],
cars, electronics, children's products, even our food, Andrews said.
MORE ABOUT DANGEROUS CHEMICALS. |
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