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Albany, NY – In today's Academic Minute, Dr. Carl Cranor of the University of California Riverside reveals how easily the unborn are exposed to environmental toxins and describes the medical consequences such exposure brings as children grow into adults.
Carl Cranor is a professor of philosophy and member of the Environmental Toxicology Graduate Program faculty at the University of California Riverside. His broad research interests include legal and moral philosophy, with a recent focus on the philosophic issues concerning risks, science and the law. He has also turned his attention to the regulation of carcinogens and developmental toxicants. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California Los Angeles.
Dr. Carl Cranor - Toxic Exposure
Diseases and dysfunctions can be triggered by toxicants or diet, or even infections in utero or post-natally. The womb might once have been thought to be a protected environment in which children could develop safely before they began facing some of the risks and hazards of the external world into which they would shortly be born. Major social catastrophes resulting from injuries triggered in utero by Methylmercury, Thalidomide and diethylstilbestrol (DES) shattered this view in the 1970s. Subsequent research revealed less dramatic, but nonetheless harmful outcomes from early life exposures.
Other research at the Centers for Disease Control revealed that we are all contaminated and are quite permeable to industrial compounds, including developing children and pregnant women. Babies are born with up to 200 chemical contaminants, some toxic.
For a philosopher interested in moral and legal approaches to preventing injuries to people, this contamination, combined with research showing that pollutants could predispose harm before children were born or out of childhood, posed challenges to the law that should protect us. Existing laws simply cannot protect our children because the vast percentage of industrial chemicals enters commerce without any toxicity data. Thus, it appears they become haphazard experimental subjects because our legally system simply cannot protect them.
Cancers can be and have been caused by in utero or childhood exposures to toxicants, e.g., diethylstilbestrol, DDT, radiation, water disinfection by-products and other carcinogens. Childhood leukemias can be traced to chromosomal damage that occurs in the womb from pesticides, solvents, plastics, petroleum products, and lead. Other toxicants weaken the immune system and facilitate cancer and other diseases.
Neurological problems, including autism, learning dysfunctions, behavioral problems, and Parkinson's disease can be triggered by life exposures.
Pesticides, phthalates, and some other substances can inhibit or damage male reproductive tracts and their sperm. Male babies exhibit reproductive tract disturbance and a degree of "feminization." Estrogen mimicking compounds cause female reproductive diseases and dysfunctions.
How could the law better address such problems? Only a small percentage or chemical creations under existing laws are reviewed for their toxicity before we ingest, inhale or absorb them through our skin: pesticides and pharmaceuticals. Thus, I concluded that the remaining 80-90% of chemical creations should be similarly reviewed if we wish to protect our children in the future from such hazards.