Toxic Pollution Inherited By Daughters
Across Generations:
The Chemical Pollution Mothers & Daughters Share and Inherit
The unique bond between a mother and daughter starts in the womb and lasts a lifetime. Lab tests of mothers and their daughters show that they share another, unwanted bond: a common body burden of industrial chemicals that can be passed down across generations.Tests commissioned by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) of four mothers and their daughters found that each of the test subjects' blood or urine was contaminated with an average of 35 consumer product ingredients, including flame retardants, plasticizers, and stain-proof coatings. These mixtures of compounds, found in furniture, cosmetics, fabrics, and other consumer goods, have never been tested for safety.
Earlier EWG body burden testing, as well as tests by the Centers for Disease Control and other researchers, has found these and many other chemicals are building up in the bodies of all Americans. But these tests produced three eye-opening findings about the pollutants that can pass through a mother's placenta or breast milk into her daughter's body:
* All four daughters tested had more chemicals in common with their mothers than with a group of 16 other women who were tested. This underscores the long-lasting influence of the pollution passed from mother to daughter, and their shared exposures as the child grows up.
* Much of the chemical burden inherited by daughters at birth will last for decades, some for a lifetime. The daughters will likely pass on to their children some of the very chemical molecules they inherited from their mothers. The estimated age by which a daughter will purge 99 percent of the inherited pollution found in this study ranges from one day for phthalate plasticizers, to one year for mercury, to between adolescence and 60 years for common flame retardants and stain-proofing chemicals, to 166 years for lead.
* Chemicals that persist in the body were found at higher levels in mothers than daughters, showing how chemicals can build up in the body over a lifetime. Mothers had an average of 1.5 to 5.2 times more pollution than their daughters for lead, methyl mercury, brominated flame retardants, and the Teflon- and Scotchgard-related perfluorochemicals PFOA and PFOS.
The full report can be accessed at the EWG website at: http://www.ewg.org/reports/generations/execsumm.php