The Toxins in Our Bloodstreams

In 2004, the CDC sampled 2,500 people across the country looking for the “body burden,” or amount of chemicals and pollutants each individual was carrying. They found traces of all 116 chemicals and pollutants they looked for, including PCBs, insecticides, dioxin, mercury, cadmium and benzene, all highly toxic in higher doses.  Then, in 2005, researchers found something more alarming: a cocktail of 287 pollutants — pesticides, phthalates, dioxins, flame retardants, and breakdown chemicals of Teflon — in the fetal cord blood of ten newborn infants from around the country, in samples taken by the American Red Cross.  A few months ago, CNN headlined the story of an 18-month-old and five-year-old who were selected and tested at random for industrial chemicals and found to have toxic chemicals coursing through their bloodstreams at levels several times higher than those already known to cause health problems in lab animals.  Meanwhile, levels of a number of chemicals now found in women’s breast milk have been doubling every five years – and are particularly high in American women.