Chemical Stew? What’s a Body to Do?

One day, entirely out of the blue, I got a phone call from someone asking if I cared to find out how badly my body is polluted.

I figured it was someone who’d seen me in action at the Red Lion Tavern in Silver Lake, or perhaps Jax in Glendale. But the caller wasn’t talking about alcohol pollution.

I was being asked to participate in a biomonitoring study, along with more than a dozen other Californians, to determine how much chemical contamination I carry around with me.

A bill by state Sen. Debra Ortiz (D-Sacramento) calls for voluntary testing as a first step in determining links between disease and the chemicals we’re exposed to every day. I said sure to the testing, figuring there had to be at least a couple of columns in it, if not the possibility of having my body designated as a Superfund site.

I’ve always been curious, too, about the long-term health effect of growing up in the industrial Bay Area town of Pittsburg. Pittsburg was home to Dow Chemical, DuPont, Allied Chemical, U.S. Steel, Johns Manville and PG&E;, among other smokestack companies.

They were the lifeblood of the town, putting food on tables for tens of thousands of people. But cancer and respiratory diseases always seemed to keep the mortuary busy.

For my biomonitoring, a Northern California health and environmental research outfit named Commonweal directed me to a lab in Torrance. A nurse there told me she needed 18 vials of blood, a urine specimen and a long clump of hair.

Eighteen vials of blood?

I gave her durable power of attorney and instructed her to yank my feeding tube if I slipped into a coma.

More important, I feared she might be blind, because there is nothing on my head resembling a long clump of hair.

Dizzy with blood loss, I watched in terror as she attacked with a pair of scissors.

“That doesn’t look too bad,” she proclaimed.

Easy for her to say.

I’m supposed to get the results in May, so if I suddenly disappear from this space, look for me in the Pittsburg mortuary.

Commonweal and the Breast Cancer Fund, which sponsored the bill, already know my body is a 6-foot-2 chemical cocktail, or they wouldn’t have asked me to participate.

For starters, they’ll find mercury in me, said Commonweal’s Davis Baltz. Ditto for DDT and other pesticides, chemicals used as softeners in plastics, and flame retardant chemicals found in carpets, upholstery, ceiling tiles, mattresses and countless other household items.

“We have an ongoing exposure to a multitude of chemicals we don’t know much about,” said Baltz, who added that Europe is much further along than the United States in making sure new chemicals are tested before they’re on the market. “It’s not science fiction to say we’re embarking on an uncontrolled chemical experiment.”

Nonsense, says a U.C. Riverside professor who insists my biomonitoring numbers will be practically useless. Of course they’ll find a lot of chemicals in me, says Bob Krieger, a toxicologist. We’ve all got a lot of chemicals in us. So what?

“We live in a chemical world,” said Krieger, who has joined chemical industry representatives and the California Chamber of Commerce in blasting the Ortiz bill as alarmist propaganda based on bad science. “Everything you’re touching, breathing and dealing with is a chemical at some level.”

There is no solid science that tells us what levels of what chemical are unsafe, Krieger says. (Yeah, tell that to Erin Brockovich.)

To biomonitoring advocates, those are good reasons to start gathering more data.

“If it wasn’t for the monitoring of lead in the blood, we’d have no idea what a serious poison lead is for kids,” said Gina Solomon, a physician, UC San Francisco professor and senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Evidence is mounting, Solomon said, that autism, asthma and Parkinson’s disease have environmental causes. Ortiz’s bill could advance work already done by the federal Centers for Disease Control, and customize it to California’s needs, focusing on specific populations, toxins and diseases, she said.

“We don’t want to have more DDT problems creeping up on us, or the PCBs of the future turning up as a surprise in breast milk,” Solomon said. “The fetus is more susceptible to many of the environmental toxins, because the system is still developing and actively growing, and it’s more easily disrupted by environmental exposures.”

Sen. Ortiz said this is the third time she’s introduced this bill. Each time she had to scale it back, eliminating, for instance, a provision requiring chemical companies to pony up a share of the cost of biomonitoring.

But that leaves the bill with no funding in the middle of a big-time budget crunch, and no specific plan for choosing biomonitoring subjects.

Ortiz, whose mother survived thyroid cancer but died of ovarian cancer, says that can all be worked out by the advisory panel called for in SB 600, which cleared one committee last week and is headed for another one next week.

“There’s something more at work” than genetics, Ortiz said. “Let’s at least take the first step, and collect the science.”