Worst pollution risks increasingly indoors

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Tucson Region

TOXIns FILL our homeS: A STAR INVESTIGATION

Worst pollution risks increasingly indoors

Not so sweet home: Toxins lurk in air, dust, even cleaning supplies

By Tony

Arizona Daily Star*

Tucson, Arizona | Published: 11.30.2007

http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/214061

We clean with them. We build them into our walls and cabinets. We

spray them on bugs, weeds and gardens.

We drag them into the house on our shoes and we stir them up when we

walk on our carpets.

They're in our toys, our shower curtains, our clothes, the water

bottles we use for hiking and the baby bottles we use for breast

milk and formula. They're in the televisions we watch and some of

the computers that entertain us.

More and more chemicals and unhealthful substances are embedded in

our daily lives. And they swirl together inside our tightly built

personal spaces to create new, and very personal, toxic hot spots:

our homes.

Before even stepping outside in the morning, we are exposed to more

severe pollution than we get from landfills, hazardous waste sites

or smokestacks, say many scientists, including retired Environmental

Protection Agency officials.

The health risks from these indoor pollutants are also much greater

than the risks outdoors ¡ª perhaps 100 to 1,000 times greater,

scientists concluded. That's especially troubling because people

tend to spend 90 percent of their time indoors, 65 percent of it at

home.

An Arizona Daily Star investigation finds that:

¡ñ Household chemicals are linked to various diseases, including

cancer, in a growing number of studies of laboratory animals, but

experts disagree on their safety.

¡ñ Arid Arizona is considered one of the riskiest states in the

country for toxic mold inside the home, even though mold is caused

by water.

¡ñ The United States has regulated chemicals fairly lightly, far less

strictly than Europe. In this country, for instance, companies don't

have to label the toxic ingredients they put in consumer products.

¡ñ Consumers are left in the dark about the safety of conventional

chemical cleaners and other popular products, including a

controversial chemical commonly used in hard plastic water bottles

and baby bottles.

¡ñ People can try to minimize their own exposure at home, but

industrial solutions are elusive. For example, it's been hard for

authorities to find and put in place a safe, viable alternative to a

cancer-causing solvent used by 85 percent of dry cleaners.

The health risks are a concern for many Tucsonans ¡ª ranging from a

mother who switched to a different type of bottle for her infant

daughter, to a woman who wonders if chemical exposures have kept her

from getting pregnant, to a mom who slashed her use of chlorine

bleach because she feared it was making her kids sick.

" We have a number of chemicals in our indoor air that weren't there

50 years ago, " said Weschler, an expert in environmental and

occupational medicine at Wood Medical School in New

Jersey.

" We know why we are using them ¡ª to make our plastics perform

better, to reduce the risk of fire, to kill cockroaches, to help our

paint last longer, to make our cleaning products smell good.

" But we often don't know their long-term health consequences. "

Endocrine disruptors a concern

As the number of studies about chemical risks reaches into the

thousands, the toll of diseases they are suspected of causing is

also mounting.

Asthma, attention deficit disorder, autism, increasing infertility

in women and declining testosterone levels and sperm counts in men

all may be caused or aggravated by household toxic exposure.

What bothers many scientists is that the federal government hasn't

put nearly as much energy into combating indoor air pollution as it

has put into cleaning outdoor air.

" We've spent a tremendous amount of societal resources on studying

and cleaning our water and working on outdoor air pollution, " said

Glenn on, an engineering professor at the University of

Missouri-Rolla. " ly, the real known hazard from exposure to air

indoor pollution is so much higher that a lot of the time and effort

has been misdirected.''

For many years, scientists' biggest indoor air quality concerns lay

in conventional poisons such as tobacco smoke, asbestos, volatile

organic chemicals, carbon monoxide, lead, pesticides, formaldehyde

and radon. Indoor air levels of many of those have declined since

the 1970s.

But today, those toxins are joined by a class of common but not

totally understood chemicals called endocrine disruptors or

environmental estrogens.

They're found in plastic bottles, metal food cans, detergents, flame

retardants, food, toys, cosmetics and pesticides. They're in circuit

boards in computers, game stations and home audio systems,

environmental professor Weschler said.

Many have been used for decades. But unlike lead and tobacco, whose

health effects are well-established, numerous problems associated

with these compounds have come to light only in the past decade.

As their name implies, endocrine disruptors can adversely affect

hormone balance or disrupt organ function and cause developmental,

reproductive, neurological and immune effects in humans and

wildlife.

Jill ez, a Northeast Side mother of four, has a house full of

plastic toys ¡ª Legos, Star Wars light sabers, a microscope and a

piano, to name just a few.

Plasticizers in toys and other products generally aren't labeled, so

consumers don't know which ones have the controversial chemicals.

ez hadn't heard about health controversies involving plastics,

but said if the chemicals turned out to be unsafe, " I would

definitely be inclined to slow down on buying them. I would only buy

them if I thought they would be educational somehow. "

Similarly, Tucsonan Esquer, 52, has amassed many perks of the

modern good life: two big-screen TVs, an Apple TV, PlayStation 3,

four computers and more. " I got all the toys, I guess you could

say, " said Esquer, who manages an automotive warehouse.

" There's been a lot of talk that there are lead items made in China,

but I wasn't aware of fire retardants " in household electronics, he

said. " I'm not real concerned about it, but maybe we should be. "

If they were proven to be unsafe, " You bet I'd would want to replace

the TVs, " Esquer said. " I'd be willing to pay half again as much to

make sure they were safe. "

Risk relationships chronicled

In the case of many chemicals and compounds, the risks for humans

are inconclusive, and disagreements are heated.

One reason: The vast majority of research comes from animal studies.

It's considered unethical to deliberately feed or inject people with

chemicals, although many studies have compared people known to have

been exposed to certain chemicals with those who haven't been

exposed. Not all scientists and government officials accept the idea

that chemicals have the same effect on humans as on animals.

Beyond that, chemical industry officials say the safety of their

products has been affirmed over and over by federal agencies and, in

some cases, other countries. They say the studies raising questions

about the products aren't valid, had weak results at best, and

didn't prove cause and effect.

They also say advocates for regulation have distorted the

significance of their results to push a political agenda.

Federal officials, for their part, say they lack authority to

regulate indoor air safety but are making some strides.

But concerns about our household chemical stews keep mounting.

In the past year, scientists from Massachusetts to Denmark to

Australia have released studies saying:

¡ñ Laser printers release ultra-fine particles that can cause heart

and lung disease.

¡ñ Three organic hazardous chemicals released into indoor air present

a cancer risk to the general population about 100 times greater than

the EPA considers acceptable: formaldehyde, found in some building

materials; chloroform, related to chlorinated water in many cities;

and naphthalene in mothballs.

¡ñ As household dust gets heavier, the risk that residents will get

asthma doubles.

¡ñ PFOSes and PFOAs ¡ª ubiquitous man-made chemicals used to coat non-

stick pans, textiles and carpets and to manufacture insecticides ¡ª

have a statistical association with decreased birth weight and head

size in newborns.

¡ñ Flame retardants called PBDEs commonly used in television sets

increase the risk of undescended testicles in newborn boys and of

feline hyperthyroidism, a leading cause of death in cats.

Together, various kinds of environmental exposures could be one

reason that the percentage of children and adolescents in the United

States with chronic illnesses lasting more than three months has

risen from 1.8 percent in 1960 to 7 percent in 2004, the Journal of

the American Medical Association says.

Other factors playing a role could be very low birth weights, diet,

obesity, lack of exercise and increased television and other media

viewing, the journal recently reported.

Tucson alternatives growing

The costs of indoor pollution are skyrocketing, several studies

show.

It costs about $15.9 billion and perhaps up to $20 billion annually

nationwide to prevent and clean up indoor air pollution, says a 2005

EPA study.

In California alone, crummy indoor air costs the state's economy $45

billion annually due to premature deaths, medical costs, lost worker

productivity and other impacts, says the state's Air Resources

Board.

Nationwide, just taking care of childhood asthma caused by indoor

pollution costs about $2.3 billion a year.

If society could come up with ways to improve indoor air quality,

the savings would reach $125 billion annually, said the federally

financed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

" We need to pay attention to pollution sources that are right under

our nose, " said Nazaroff, a professor of civil and

environmental engineering at UC-Berkeley.

Some states have banned some of the most controversial compounds in

consumer products. Various federal agencies, prodded by public

concern, are looking at them more closely.

For consumers in Tucson and elsewhere, choices are growing.

" Green " commercial home cleaners are becoming a big business,

although sorting through their claims and hype isn't easy.

Some Southern Arizonans are finding ways to build less-chemicalized

homes. They're painting those homes with non-toxic paints, and

cleaning them with natural concoctions.

But one public health professor says she has learned to live with

the uncertainty of the risks even though she's studied the products

in her work and takes the health warnings seriously.

" I use pesticides, eat non-organic food and buy all the cleaning

products on the cleaning products aisle, " said the University of

Arizona's Kay O'Rourke. " I follow the directions, make sure the

house is well-vented. "

Like many, she does what she can, a little here and there in her

busy life, and hopes it's enough.

INSIDE TODAY

Mold is rampant

Dry climate is no deterrent. Page A6

Asthma strategies

Managing dust helps. Page A7

Rating the dangers

Scientists rank the most dangerous pollutants. Page A7

Visit go.azstarnet.com/toxic for a video previewing the toxic home

series as well as photos and links to all the stories in the series.