Informant38

Particularly telling is Steingraber�s description of thalidomide damage in the 1960s. It illustrates graphically that timing can be even more important than dosage, especially since hormone-disrupting chemicals can cause horrible damage at doses well below levels that have been considered safe.
During organogenesis, the fetus develops from the top down and the centre out. What was discovered in 1991 about thalidomide is that when pills were taken between days 35 and 37 of pregnancy, the baby was born with no ears; between days 39 and 41, it had no arms; between days 41 and 43, no uterus; between days 45 and 47, no leg bones; and between 47 and 49, deformed thumbs.
Thalidomide is long gone. But now we have the dirty dozen, the persistent organic pollutants (POPs), the most prominent of which are PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), dioxins and furans. In addition, we have newcomers, such as the flame retardant PBDEs (polybrominated diphenyl ethers).
POPs and, apparently, PBDEs can wreak havoc during organogenesis, and cause cancer anytime in life.
They all lodge in fat and accumulate over time; biomagnify is the technical word. What this means is that each creature in the food chain has a level of these chemicals 10 to 100 times greater than the creatures on the next rung down.
Some POPs have been banned from production but that�s a very qualified consolation because they hang around for generations after release. And new chemicals with similar characteristics, such as PBDEs, keep being identified.
Faced with this continuing saga of mutilated embryos, the most remarkably sane proposal I�ve heard comes from Kjell Larsson, the Swedish minister of the environment. He�s urging the European Union to ban all chemicals that build up in human tissue over time unless they can be proven absolutely safe.
from a review of Sandra Steingraber's book "Living Downstream"