The best Father’s Day gift money can’t buy: reform of our outdated chemical laws

by Julia Varshavsky

If your father is anything like mine then you are well aware of the annual struggle to find the perfect Father’s Day gift. This year I had considered the standard—a tie or some cologne. I contemplated a new electronic gadget, though I know my father would never use it. Instead, I thought of something much more special and better for his health: reform of the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

TSCA is the main law in the United States that is aimed at regulating chemicals used in every day products. However, as we hear more about cases like McDonald’s toy Shrek glasses that contain cadmium and fragrances laced with an array of toxic chemicals, it is becoming increasingly clear that TSCA is woefully inadequate in terms of protecting public health. And with more than 80,000 chemicals registered for use in commerce over the last 70 years, an overwhelming majority for which we have no testing data on basic toxicity, we need a regulatory system that works.

But what does TSCA reform have to do with my father’s health? As the coordinator for the Collaborative on Health and the Environment’s Fertility and Reproductive Health Working Group (CHE-Fertility), I have learned a good deal about environmental impacts to male reproductive health and I can tell you - it all begins during fetal development. We all learn in science class that a person’s biological sex starts with genes. The woman’s egg carries an X chromosome. If the man’s sperm carries a Y chromosome, the resulting embryo will be a boy. If the sperm carries an X, it will be a girl. Together, male and female sex chromosomes form an embryo, either XY (boy) or XX (girl).

But gender is more complicated than genes. After sperm and egg become acquainted, the embryo’s reproductive tissues begin to develop. For about five weeks this process is identical in both males and females. Then, if the embryo is male, certain cells begin to grow and release testosterone, initiating development of the entire male reproductive system – including the prostate gland, penis, urethra and scrotum. At this time the brain is wired to set the stage for further maturation during puberty, and in the last two months of fetal development, testosterone signals the testes to descend into the scrotum.

Testosterone-induced development continues in boys throughout the first few years of life. Then things get quiet for a while until puberty, when the hormone raging begins again. It’s hard to imagine how just a handful of hormones—testosterone, estrogen, thyroid and a few other natural chemicals produced inside the body—through a complex and delicate balance of hormone signaling, orchestrate the growth and development of all tissues and organs, including the reproductive system. It is even harder to grasp how significant changes in development and health can come from absolutely infinitesimal amounts of these natural chemicals.

When tiny amounts of hormonally active synthetic chemicals get into our bodies from our food, air, water, and everyday products, they too can cause major health impacts, even at very low doses. They can disrupt the sensitive hormone balance by blocking natural messages or sending their own misleading signals that fool the body into doing the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Thousands of peer-reviewed, published studies (mostly animal studies) suggest that certain human reproductive health problems are tied to synthetic or industrial chemical exposures. In males, these problems include two common birth defects: cryptochordism (undescended testicles) and hypospadias (a deformity of the penis), both of which have also been linked to low sperm counts and testicular cancer later in life. All four of these conditions, collectively called the testicular dysgenesis syndrome (TDS), are thought to arise from the same origin – disrupted hormone signaling during critical stages of male fetal reproductive system development.

Animal studies have demonstrated time and time again that prenatal exposures to chemicals - including vinclozolin and atrazine (a widely used fungicide and insecticide), phthalates (found in a wide range of flexible plastic products like shower curtains and personal care products like that cologne I was considering purchasing for my father), bisphenol A (found in polycarbonate bottles and the linings of canned foods and beverages), and the banned but still present industrial chemicals DDT and PCBs - can cause TDS. Emerging human studies have also demonstrated a relationship between chemicals such as phthalates, flame retardants, and a wide range of agricultural and industrial chemicals with a higher risk of TDS conditions.

Statistical analysis shows that TDS conditions are on the rise in men, particularly the incidence of low sperm counts in most highly developed countries. Leading scientists have reported that as many as one in five healthy young men between the ages of 18 and 25 produce abnormal sperm counts. In several industrial regions, sperm counts have dropped fifty percent over the last 50 years, and several more recent studies suggest that testosterone levels have declined 1 percent per year for the past 40-50 years. In the United States alone, testicular cancer has dramatically increased since the 1970s, with a reported 60 percent increase among white men alone. Men with TDS conditions also appear to be at higher risk for fertility problems, which are thought to be significant in at least 40 percent of couples who are experiencing problems conceiving. Furthermore, infertility has recently been linked to an increased risk of developing aggressive prostate cancer later in life. Rates of prostate cancer in men have increased dramatically over the last 30 years, by approximately 80 percent overall, but even more so among African Americans.

So what can men and their families do, to protect their ability to become fathers, and increase their chances of living a long and healthy life? The answer is anything that contributes to reducing exposure to environmental contaminants, particularly during fetal development and early life. Green purchasing helps. Buying products that are free of phthalates, pesticides, bisphenol A and other chemicals gives us a way to protect ourselves and contributes to the broader effort to shift markets and move the economy in a healthy direction. Many resources exist that can help guide families, communities, and institutions to greener products.

But as the saying goes, we cannot shop our way out of this problem. The good news is there are many public interest organizations and several highly respected professional societies calling on the federal and state legislatures to push forward chemical policies that truly protect public health by putting research dollars into green solutions and requiring companies to prove that chemicals are safe before they are put into products and released on the market. To that end, many CHE-Fertility colleagues have contributed their expertise on environmental health science in the form of advising elected officials and providing oral and written testimony. Chemical and product manufacturers continue to argue that animal studies should not be used to determine human health policies, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), tasked with protecting public health by regulating food and drugs, routinely relies on animal studies to decide which chemicals are too dangerous to be used as pharmaceuticals. Why shouldn’t they do the same for the wide variety of other chemicals that impact our health?

Most importantly, we need to give our fathers, our sons and ourselves a greener future. That can happen once we come to collectively understand how our families’ health is connected to the health of everything and everyone else. Anything we can do to reduce harm and prevent unnecessary chemical exposures will protect the health of all men and future generations to come. What better gift could a father ask for?

Julia Varshavsky is the program associate for the Collaborative on Health and the Environment (CHE) and the national coordinator of the CHE Fertility and Reproductive Health Working Group. CHE is a diverse network of over 4000 individual and organizational partners in 45 countries and 48 states working to strengthen the science dialogue on environmental factors impacting human health and facilitate collaborative efforts to address environmental health concerns. Before coming to CHE, Julia worked as a research specialist in an ecotoxicology laboratory in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she assisted in the development of a microarray to improve biomarkers for toxicant exposure. She received her bachelors of science degree in molecular environmental biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Learn More!

·        Check out the Collaborative on Health and the Environment website at: http://www.healthandenvironment.org.

·        A great report, “Shaping Our Legacy: Reproductive health and the Environment,” that comprehensively outlines the science behind environmental influences to reproductive health and points the reader to many available resources for what you can do, is available for download at http://prhe.ucsf.edu/prhe/pubs/shapingourlegacy.html.

·        To learn more about TSCA reform, you can visit CHE’s Chemical Policy Reform page at: http://www.healthandenvironment.org/articles/homepage/7542.