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"The central point of the Our Stolen Future is that some man-made chemicals interfere with the body's own hormones. These compounds find their way into our bodies through a variety of pathways. They build up over time, often over years.

When a woman becomes pregnant, some fraction of her contaminant burden is transferred to the fetus. When this happens they interfere with the hormonal signals directing development and thus disrupt fetal growth. Sometimes the effects are conspicuous, sometimes they are not.

Some of these chemicals alter sexual development. Some undermine intelligence and behavior. Others make our bodies less resistant to disease. Sometimes the effects don't appear until a child reaches puberty or afterward, even though the exposure took place in the womb.

These chemicals pose the greatest hazard in the earliest phases of life because hormones orchestrate development and because fetal development is exquisitely sensitive to tiny variations in hormone signals. For a fetus to grow up according to its genetic blueprint, the right hormone message has to arrive at the right place in the right amount at the right time.

The emerging science we present in Our Stolen Future is about what happens when something interferes with the delivery of that message. A signal doesn't arrive because it is blocked. One that was small becomes large. One that shouldn't have been there at all shows up nonetheless.

The first nine chapters of the book examine a chain of evidence that extends from wildlife populations to laboratory experiments to the epidemiology of exposed groups of people. There's not a lot in these sections that is controversial.

We are working from a data base of over 4,000 scientific publications. Over 100 scientists have participated directly in deliberations that have produced a series of consensus statements about the nature of the problem. Many scientists reviewed their sections of the book word-by-word to ensure that we did not misrepresent their findings. This is not fringe science.

After we examine in Our Stolen Future the basic science from wildlife, lab animals and relevant human studies we then ask a larger set of questions.

Given these findings,

* given the the uncontested observations that endocrine contaminants are ubiquitous

* and given that at least in some places in the world those background levels of contamination are within the ranges in which effects are seen in the laboratory and in people.

* given all that, what signals should we look for in human populations?

We could have stopped before this. We knew that going on would be controversial. But as we thought about the implications of these basic findings and their potential ramifications, we concluded that the only responsible course was to go on and find out what science was able, and not able to say, given the current evidence.

If you have read this section, you will find it replete with all sorts of cautionary statements, with many comments to the effect that data on one issue or another are as yet inadequate to reach a judgment. In sum, however, the weight of the evidence says we have a problem. Human impacts beyond isolated cases are already demonstrable. They involve impairments to reproduction, alterations in behavior, diminishment of intellectual capacity, and erosion in the ability to resist disease. The simple truth is that the way we allow chemicals to be used in society today means we are performing a vast experiment, not in the lab, but in the real world, not just on wildlife but on people."



"Nine Key Points from the Book:

1. There are demonstrable effects outside of the laboratory in wild animal populations and in groups of people exposed by accident or through medicine.

2. Work at low exposure levels, very low exposures, show that the classic high dose experiments can completely miss important low dose effects. Moreover, these results are reproducible in the lab. This science does not rest on extrapolating high dose curves down to the low end of exposure.

3. It's not just estrogens. While the first two decades of this work focused largely on man-made chemicals capable of mimicking estrogen, within the last five years we've seen that expand to include estrogen blockers, androgen blockers, progesterone blockers and compounds that interfere with thyroid. This last one is especially important because thyroid hormone is key to proper brain development.

4. It's not just the disruption of the endocrine system. Natural chemical signals are important at all levels of organization of life--within cells, among cells, between organs, even between organisms, including from one species to another. Any of these chemical signals, in principle, are vulnerable to disruption. Scientists, for example, have just begun to look at the chemical signals that mediate communication between symbiotic organisms, such as nitrogen-fixing bacteria and the roots of the plants in which they live, and are examining how synthetic chemicals might interfere with these signals. Disrupting these 'signals of life' could have important ecosystem impacts.

5. The developing fetus is exquisitely sensitive to both the natural hormone signals used to guide its development, and the unexpected chemical signals that reach it from the environment. Both the natural signals and the chemicals that disrupt them act as "morphogens." They guide the fetus through forks in its developmental path and also help set its sensitivity to subsequent hormonal signals. This involvement of setting sensitivity can have life-long consequences. New science, for example, on the developing prostate, shows that natural and synthetic estrogens experienced in the womb can lead to enlarged and hypersensitive prostate in adulthood.

6. Work with the best known of the endocrine disrupters, particularly diethylstilbestrol, or DES, led to great scientific confidence about the predictive value of lab animal studies for anticipating human endocrine impacts.

7. The contamination is very widespread and it comes from many sources, some quite conspicuous and others completely unexpected.

8. Some of the synthetic chemical compounds are notorious because they accumulate in our fatty tissue. These chemicals can then bioaccumulate up the food chain, and can be passed on in the womb and through breast milk. Because, they are not flushed through our bodies chemical accumulation in the fat tissue and breast milk can reach very high concentrations over time, concentrations millions of times higher or more than plant estrogens.

9. Plant estrogens are widespread in our diets and when eaten in large volume they can cause serious problems. In fact they have been used as antifertility agents by many cultures for a long time. But normal diets usually don't create risks because our gut chemistry quickly flushes them through and because there are special proteins in our blood that are effective at ensuring many (but not all) of these natural compounds don't reach the fetus at levels sufficient to have an effect. For example, while the most common plant estrogen in soy has a half life in our body of about 6-8 hours, DDT's half life is 10-12 years."

Source: Our Stolen Future; Website: http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/Basics/keypoints.htm


"Recommendations


What we recommend:

1. A significant commitment of federal research dollars to resolve scientific questions and determine which of these potential risks are real and which ones are not. Industry should be encouraged to support research on these issues, but the funds should be placed in a trust fund overseen by a governing body including appropriate representation of all major stakeholders to insulate researchers from the pressures of special interests.

2. Improvement of existing protections. Regulations should protect the most vulnerable members of our community, especially children, the unborn and the elderly. They should explicitly recognize that compounds interact unpredictably in the real world and they come from many sources. Enough information is already available to warrant dramatic strengthening of the constraints on use and distribution of a number of persistent organic pollutants, known as POPs, by implementing international protocols. Far more stringent testing should be required before allowing new compounds to enter into widespread commercial use. New products should be designed with the goal of reducing exposure. And there should be an accelerated research program to test compounds now in use that have escaped scrutiny.

3. Fulfill the public's right to know. People want to make informed decisions for themselves about these issues and right now a variety of laws and practices prevent access to crucial information.

4. Build the capacity in the United States to monitor contamination levels, health impacts, and the links between them. The National Center for Environmental Health at the US Centers for Disease Control is an extraordinary national resource and needs public support to ensure it can do its job.

5. Support implementation of the precautionary principle. Current regulatory practices give chemical manufacturers the benefit of the doubt. Substances can be removed from the market only if their health impacts can be demonstrated with scientific certainty. This burden of proof needs to be shifted. If plausible doubt can be justified about the safety of chemical compounds, their use should be allowed only if the manufacturer can prove they represent no inappropriate threat to human or ecosystem health.This is especially important for endocrine disrupting chemicals because increasingly it appears that aspects of their modes of action make it very difficult for epidemiological science to demonstrate causality with certainty. On the contrary, epidemiological studies of endocrine disruption in humans are biased toward finding false negatives."

Source: Our Stolen Future; Website: http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/Basics/corerecs.htm

For more information, please reference "Scientific and Medical Sources on Endocrine Disruption" in the HEALTH AWARENESS & ADVOCACY PORTAL section above.