It’s a Real Dust-up: Household Dust Holds Harmful Chemicals
From Seventh Generation – The Non-Toxic Times

If you were to stop reading this newsletter for a moment (which, of course, we would never, ever recommend) and look closely at your computer monitor and all the other hardware hanging around your real-world desktop, you’d probably see a lot of dust. That’s not a slight on your housekeeping skills. It’s just to point out that statically charged computer gear gets real dusty, real fast. And according to new research, the dust accumulated there and elsewhere is laden with toxic chemical flame-retardants.

In her 1920 poem “Dust,” Dorothy Anderson asked:

What is dust?
Ashes of love, charred letters, faded heliotrope,
Rose petals fallen from a dead hand,
Spiders, bats, deserted houses, crumbling citadels,
And wheel ruts where vanished armies have passed.

While scientists have yet to verify the presence of ashes of love in household dust, they have found that it contains more stuff than we might imagine. The inescapable dust that surrounds us is made of many things. Minute particles of human skin, hair, pollen, mold, fungi, lichen, wood, paint, fabric fibers, plant and vegetable matter, insect parts, paper fibers, and more are typically found in the average sample.

To this extensive list researchers have now added a new component: flame-retardant chemicals called polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). According to two new analyses of household dust, the dust found near computers and throughout the typical house is laced with these substances.

There are 209 different kinds of PBDEs being used in consumer products today. Commercial flame-retardants consist of mixtures of several of these types together. The three primary kinds of these flame-retardant combinations are called as Deca-, Penta-, and Octapolybrominated diphenyl ethers.

PBDEs suppress fire because they break down when exposed to high temperatures, such as those found in open flames. As this breakdown occurs, bromine atoms are released from the PBDE molecules. Bromine slows and often even stops fires by interfering with the basic chemistry that creates it. Like a built-in sprinkler system, PBDEs begin working to prevent a fire from spreading as soon as they’re exposed to it.

PBDEs were introduced in the late 1970s after a related class of brominated fire retardants called polybrominated biphenyls were banned. In the decades since, their use has increased each year. Today, roughly 50,000 metric tons of these materials are manufactured around the world annually, and 40% of this global total ends up in North America.

PBDEs are largely used in foams and plastics. As the polymers used to create these products are being combined, manufacturers add PBDEs to the formula. Unfortunately, these PBDEs do not chemically adhere to the compounds they’re used in. Instead, like noodles in soup, they remain unattached to or absorbed by the materials they’re added to. As a result, these “loose” PBDEs are able to easily leach out of anything that contain them and make their way to the environment where they collect in household dust.

PBDEs are found in so many consumer products that it can be difficult to put together a list of all the categories of goods that contain them, yet alone list the individual products themselves. However, we can say with some confidence that the kinds of household products very likely to include the lion’s share of a home’s PDBEs include computers and peripherals, circuit boards, televisions and other home electronics, coffee makers and other consumer appliances, household wiring, smoke detectors, carpets, car seating, polyurethane foams like those found in furniture and mattresses, and imitation wood products.

The ever-growing prevalence of PBDEs in the home is of great concern because PBDEs are chemically related to dioxin and PCBs. Although they are not yet officially classified as persistent organic pollutants, they nonetheless bear all the hallmarks of these chemically-related poisons: They are highly resistant to biodegradation; they are able to persist in the environment for extended periods of time; they are also highly efficient travelers in the air, water and soil; and they accumulate in bodily tissues in ever higher amounts as they move up the food chain.

Recent studies have verified the increasing presence of these flame-retardants in the bodily tissues of human beings and animals throughout the world. Since Swedish scientists discovered in 1999 that a 60-fold increase in the presence of these chemicals in breast milk had occurred between 1972 and 1997, researchers have been scrutinizing PBDEs. Studies have found that the breast milk and blood of American women hold the highest levels of PBDEs found so far. These levels are 10 to 100 times higher than those found in European women. More frightening still, the amounts appear to be doubling every two to five years.

The most worrisome aspect of this pollution is the ability of minute amounts of PBDEs to depress levels of key thyroidal hormones. This hormonal imbalance can have serious health consequences for adults that include fatigue, depression, anxiety, unexplained weight gain, hair loss and low libido. Children born to women experiencing such reduced hormonal levels are more likely to have low IQs. And studies have also linked PBDEs to permanent learning and memory impairment, behavioral changes, hearing deficits, delayed puberty onset, decreased sperm count, and developmental disorders.

For some time, scientists have suspected that PBDEs are becoming increasingly commonplace in the environment, and the new studies confirm this belief.

The first study was sponsored by the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, the Computer TakeBack Campaign, and Clean Production Action. It tested 16 dust samples wiped off a variety of computers in eight states, including university computer labs, government offices, and a children’s museum. The computers tested included equipment from different makers, and both old and new models.

An analysis of these samples showed that every single one was contaminated by PBDEs. Researchers conducted three tests on each sample, one for each of three different varieties of PBDE and found that all three types of flame-retardant were present in each location. Contamination levels across this spectrum ranged from 0.38 picograms per square centimeter (pg/cm2) to 104 pg/cm2. This means that for every square centimeter of surface examined, between 38/100 and 104/100 of a trillionth of a gram of PBDEs were found, an amount that may not seem like much until we remember that only miniscule quantities of these materials need to be ingested to cause adverse health effects.

In the second study, the Environmental Working Group tested household dust samples from 10 typical homes around the country and found high levels of PBDEs in every household. Researchers had the ten study participants answer a questionnaire and then vacuum their homes normally and send in the dust collected for analysis.

The average level of PBDEs in the samples from nine of the homes was 4,629 parts per billion (this means that in a sample of 1 billion dust particles, 4,629 of these particles will consist of PBDEs), a level researchers described as “unexpectedly high.” In the tenth home, levels were a staggering 41,203 parts per billion. The sample from this last home was reported separately from the others because of the extraordinarily high levels of PBDEs found. The study participant in this case reported using her vacuum cleaner to clean up residue and debris left behind when carpet padding, two mattress pads, and an uncovered foam cushion were removed from her home.

The good news is that safer substitutes for these toxic materials exist and many manufacturers have responded early to a variety of state, federal and European Union PBDE phase out initiatives. As a result of all this regulatory activity, the penta and octa varieties will be removed from the market by the end of this year. The deca type of PBDE will remain in use, but environmentalists are strongly urging that this type be banned as well. In lieu of federal action, states are seizing the initiative. Maine recently banned deca-PBDEs, and similar bills are being developed in New York, Massachusetts and Wisconsin. The state of Washington has issued an Executive Order to develop a phase-out plan for all PBDEs.

The vast majority of PBDEs are used in computer and electronic products and household foams. Until these substances are removed from the market, consumers will have to take matters into their own hands and take their own precautions. Here are some tips you can use to keep PBDEs out of your home and body.

Around the Computer:

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A Doctor Puts the Drug Industry Under a Microscope

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A Doctor Puts the Drug Industry Under a Microscope
New York Times

WASHINGTON - In many ways, Dr. Marcia Angell is an unlikely muckraker. A pathologist by training, she is the former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. She is also a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School.

But just days short of her 65th birthday and her first Social Security check, Dr. Angell is taking on the American pharmaceutical industry with a new book, "The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It" (Random House)…

Q. Why produce an investigative book on the pharmaceutical industry?

A. Because everyone knows that prescription drug prices are sky-high. Americans pay far more for our drugs than people in other countries. The drug companies say, "We need high prices to cover our staggering research and development costs, and if you do anything to squeeze our prices, it will stifle innovation." The book was written to examine that argument.

Q. The pharmaceutical companies say their prices are steep because they spend somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars per drug bringing them to market. Did your research support this assertion?

A. A group of economists - mainly funded by the drug companies - came up with the widely quoted figure on this. They said that it cost $802 million to bring a drug out. They, however, were looking at the most expensive drugs to develop: new chemical compounds developed entirely in house. Most new drugs aren't that at all. Most are what people call "me too" drugs, which are slight variations of older drugs already being sold.

According to these economists, the real cost of bringing out those rare original drugs is actually around $403 million. But they doubled it by factoring in how much money the companies might have earned if they'd invested that $403 million. Moreover, the economists did not figure into their total the many generous tax breaks these companies receive for doing research and development. This is a highly inflated figure.

The fact is that for the last two decades the drug companies have been hugely profitable. Last year there was a little wiggle downward, but in 2002, the 10 biggest American drug companies had a median profit of 17 percent of sales compared to a median of 3 percent for the other Fortune 500 companies. In the 1990's, profits ran between 19 and 25 percent. Prices are high to keep profits high.

Q. Exactly what are these "me too" drugs you argue against?

A. They are minor variations of old drugs already on the market. Sometimes a company creates a "me too" drug as a way of extending a patent on an older one. For example, AstraZeneca created Nexium to replace the virtually identical Prilosec when its patent was about to expire. By putting out these me-too's, the companies can get new exclusive marketing rights on what are essentially the same old drugs.

Other companies come in with their own me-too's because markets are expandable. It's been shown that when you advertise one me-too drug, you increase the sales of all of them.

Q. Why do you have a problem with this?

A. The prevalence of the me-too's really says an awful lot about the lack of innovation within the pharmaceutical industry. If you look at the new drugs marketed over the last six years, 78 percent weren't even new chemical compounds. They were just new combinations or different formulations of old drugs. And 68 percent were classified by the F.D.A. as unlikely to be improvements over drugs already on pharmacy shelves.

At the same time, there are shortages of some important drugs that the pharmaceutical companies aren't much interested in making because they are not as profitable as the me-too's. But the companies don't have to turn out needed drugs, if they are not lucrative. And they don't.

Q. How much of the high cost of drugs is the result of marketing and sales expenditures?

A. The companies spend over 30 percent of their revenues on marketing and administration. Their marketing budgets are so enormous because they have to persuade doctors and patients to prescribe one me-too drug over another. If you had a truly innovative drug - a cure for cancer, for instance - you wouldn't have to market it much. The world would beat a path to your door.

Q. Was there anything in your life that pushed you to write this book?

A. As a journal editor, I witnessed a disturbing trend in pharmaceutical research. Twenty years ago, most drug trials were conducted at academic medical centers and the pharmaceutical companies tended to stand back during the testing period. However, in recent years, the companies have succeeded in attaching strings to research contracts, often designing the studies themselves, keeping the data in-house and deciding whether or not to publish the results. They also began to contract with private research companies for testing. Moreover, the medical schools and even individual researchers began to enter into entrepreneurial arrangements with the drug companies.

While all this was occurring, I began to see bias creep into medical research. And I saw a lot of it. The most obvious example were studies comparing a new drug to a placebo. That may be enough to get a drug F.D.A. approval, but it should not be enough for The New England Journal of Medicine. Doctors don't want to know whether a drug is better than nothing. They want to know if it's better than what they are already using.

Q. You've written that "because most medical journals are dependent on drug ads for their survival, it probably also influences what they publish." Were you speaking of The New England Journal of Medicine there?

A. No. That's because the Journal was virtually unique. We had a real wall between the advertising people and the editorial offices. But many other medical journals - and there are thousands of them - are little more than vehicles for advertisements. Still others, while they are not quite that, will put out occasional sponsored supplements, which I wouldn't have any confidence in whatsoever.

Q. You left the editor's chair at The New England Journal of Medicine in 2000. Have there been any big changes there since your departure?

A. There's only one I know of - we had a policy that review articles and editorials could not be written by anyone with any financial connection to a company whose product was featured in that article. We said that disclosing the connection was not enough.

When we printed papers on original research and there were often conflicts of interests, we published those articles with disclosures. It's my understanding that the policy on reviews and editorials is no longer in place. I'm sorry they made that change. But they say it's too hard to find a prominent author who doesn't have a conflict of interest.

Q. The first phase - the discount card phase - of the new Medicare drug benefit is about to go into effect. Do you, as a newly minted senior, believe it will make prescription drugs more affordable?

A. It's not going to have a major effect. These discounts are very small, maybe 10 to 15 percent. At the rate of inflation of drug prices, they'll be overtaken in a very short time.

Now, the main Medicare drug benefit that goes into effect in 2006 is designed to funnel billions of dollars to the pharmaceutical industry. It's an absolute bonanza for it. The pharmaceutical industry's lobbyists made certain that the legislation contained a provision barring Medicare from negotiating drug prices.

Interestingly, the federal government negotiates drug prices for the Veterans Affairs system and gets very low prices because it is a bulk purchaser. And Medicare would have been the biggest bulk purchaser of all - so it could have negotiated very low prices. That provision allows the drug companies to continue raising their prices faster than the inflation rate, and the drug benefit will soon become unaffordable.

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Editor-In-Chief: Dr. Edward F Group III, DC, PH.D, ND, DACBN
Executive / Managing Editor: Dr. Loretta Lanphier, ND, CN, HHP


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“It is best to put our total trust in God, knowing that every event in our life happens for a reason. Often we become so concerned about the agendas of others and the belief in our own perceptions that happiness and peace become nonexistent leading to a suspicious attitude which often permeates the mind like a poison. Trust and be strong so that nothing disturbs your peace of mind. Take time to focus on your health every day.”
--Dr. Edward F. Group, III