Sludge Watch ==> Plasticizers go from breast milk to baby

[maureen.reilly at sympatico.ca]

Sludgewatch Admin:

Sewage sludge may play a role in putting plasticizers into breast milk and 
cow's milk.
The leachate from landfills tends to be high in plasticizers as the material 
in the landfill
decomposes and leaches. The leachate is sent to sewage treatment plants 
where it
accumulates in the sludge.

The sludge is land applied on pastures where the sludged soil is ingested by 
dairy cattle.
The contaminants are expressed into fat, meat and milk.  Then we eat meat 
and drink milk
and increase our body burden from sludge toxins.

.....................................................................................................



http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag/40/i17/html/090106news3.html

Environmental Health and Technology Journal

Vol. 40, Iss. 17
pp 5166–5167ES&T News
Plasticizers go from breast milk to baby


Infants imbibing breast milk may also be sucking down a high dose of 
phthalates, the ubiquitous toxic plasticizers that are in many consumer 
products, from lipstick to vinyl flooring to food packaging. New research 
published in this issue of ES&T (pp 5276–5281) provides one of the first 
snapshots of phthalate delivery through breast milk. For 6 months, 
scientists tracked phthalate levels in the breast milk of Canadian mothers, 
but the health implications remain unclear and the data show that the amount 
of the toxic ingested by infants can vary from feeding to feeding.


Jupiterimages
Babies may be getting phthalates with their breast milk, but the 
implications remain unknown.The preliminary results of the long-term study 
show significant levels of phthalates in breast milk from >80 women: The 
mean values of di-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP), dibutyl phthalate (DBP), 
and diethyl phthalate (DEP) were 222, 0.87, and 0.31 ppb (ng/g), 
respectively, although DEP appeared in only a few samples. (Three other 
target esters—dimethyl phthalate, butyl benzyl phthalate, and dioctyl 
phthalate—were not found.) The researchers, led by Jiping Zhu of Health 
Canada, translated that load to a phthalate esters dose of 167 µg/d for a 
7-kg baby drinking 750 g of breast milk daily.

The team also reported that the amount of each phthalate varied in a subset 
of 21 women tested. In some women, the levels gradually increased during the 
study period, while other mothers showed declining concentrations or levels 
that increased and then declined. The team could not control for that 
variation, which they hypothesized could be attributable to exposures during 
the women’s daily activities to products containing phthalates. The 
researchers compared their results with those of a previous study of German 
women, finding that the levels of DEHP were much higher and of DBP much 
lower in the Canadian mothers than in the German mothers. The disparity 
between these studies adds a regional twist to the exposure and transmission 
story that remains to be explained.

Overall, the work is “another piece of evidence that phthalates are being 
detected in biological samples of many types,” from urine to blood, says 
Gary Adamkiewicz, a research associate at the Harvard School of Public 
Health. He adds that the results raise more questions than they answer. “The 
fact that you’re seeing it in breast milk highlights the fact that you need 
to understand the effects of a significant dose during that first year of 
life,” he says. “What are the health effects down the road? What are the 
health effects for that child? That is the one big question highlighted.”

Other factors could possibly produce the variability documented within 
individual mothers, Adamkiewicz notes. But if exposure is the key, then more 
controlled studies (although incredibly difficult) could lead to ways of 
limiting phthalates in everyday use and thus minimizing the amount a mother 
carries in her breast milk. “This is not a call to stop breast-feeding,” he 
emphasizes.

Phthalates are quickly metabolized, within a matter of hours on average, and 
kicked out of animals’ systems, says Antonia Calafat, a research chemist 
with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center 
for Environmental Health. Calafat emphasizes that she has not seen the 
research of Zhu and colleagues, but she says that DEHP could partition into 
fat, so its presence in fatty breast milk is not surprising. She also notes 
that earlier studies that used phthalate diesters (generally in blood) as 
markers of exposure were limited to highly exposed populations (e.g., in 
occupational settings) because the analytical methods for measuring these 
diesters are difficult. Typically, detections of phthalates come from 
measurements of monoesters, after the body metabolizes the phthalate 
diesters.

The Health Canada researchers document some of the precautions they took to 
avoid outside contamination, such as using glass and nonplasticized 
containers for collecting the breast-milk samples. The researchers also 
emphasize that the benefits of breastfeeding, both social and physical, 
still outweigh any perceived hazard of phthalate consumption in infants. The 
compounds’ effects on children remain controversial, though previous studies 
in rats as well as humans show that they potentially affect development. 
—NAOMI LUBICK