Biomonitoring of industrial pollutants: health and policy implications of the chemical body burden

Biomonitoring of industrial chemicals in human tissues and fluids has shown that all people, not just those working in or living near major pollution sources, carry a "body burden" of synthetic chemicals in their blood, fat, mother's milk, semen, urine, and breath.In March of 2001, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) presented its National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, the first of a planned series of annual studies of the types and amounts of industrial chemicals that Americans have in their blood and urine. 1 An immense chemical industry that grew rapidly after World War II provides materials now used in virtually every sector of commerce and in every home in the United States.More than 70,000 individual industrial chemicals are registered with the Environmental Protection Agency for commercial use; of these, some 15,000 are nonpolymeric chemicals produced in quantities greater than 10,000 pounds per year, and 3,000 to 4,000 have production volumes over one million pounds annually. 2Only a very small fraction of these substances has been characterized for biological activity or human toxicity. 3Meanwhile, an average of 2,300 new chemicals are introduced onto the market each year. 4everal classes of chemicals, including the organochlorines and heavy metals, are the object of considerable public health and regulatory concern because of their tendency to persist in the environment, bioaccumulate and bioconcentrate in food webs, and disrupt biological processes at low doses.Residues of industrial chemicals can now be found in air, soil, water, and food webs in the most remote reaches of the planet. 5,6All humans are now exposed to synthetic pollutants in drinking water, air, and the food supply, 7,8 as well as in consumer products and home pesticides. 9,10Some of these chemicals resist metabolism and excretion and therefore accumulate in body tissues.The quantity of an exogenous substance or its metabolites that accumulates in an individual or population is defined as a "body burden."The toxicology of individual industrial chemicals is covered in textbooks 11,12 and in government