Scare de jour?

Proposal would ban trio of toxic chemicals used in everyday products covers a proposed ban on fire retardants known as polydibromodiphenyl ethers (PBDE's) that have a nasty habit of showing up in the environment and people. Do they pose a real harm? Reading the internet, no studies have indicated that they do any harm, but the words "growing concern" ae mentioned. I suppose "concern" means that "we can't find any evidence to back up our claims, but we have this evil chemical we want you to get excited about."

What do the data show? The CDC has a very lengthy very technical report on both PBDE and PBB (remember the Michigan exposure 30 years ago?). As a layman, I don't propose to be an expert on the toxicity of the chemical. However, the CDC does not appear to any studies showing human health effects and seems to find only very limited effects in rats. It appears that any effects that may be observed in rats decline with increasing bromine content and industry is manufacturing the decabromo product and not the penta- or octa- congeners.

An interesting note in the CDC report is that the effects on cows attributed to the 1977 Michigan problem couldn't be replicated when cows were fed 100 x the exposure believed to have happened in Michigan. In case you don't remember, a PBB (polybrominated biphenyl) called FireMaster was accidentally mixed with cow food. Over a period of almost a year, problems were reported with the cows and farmers. The problems were traced back to the accidental feed preparation problem. The problems disappeared after the cows were destroyed and the contaminated cattle food was removed.

We keep hearing about "problems" from low concentrations of chemicals. We rarely get any hard data that they cause problems. Humans have been exposed to PBDE's for decades. If there were problems, one supposes that they would have manifested themselves by now. Is this another example of chemophobia or real. No evidence that we have a real problem.

I really wonder why some folks are more willing to work hard to chase possible phantoms than attack real problems. At best, we should fund more studies, but I doubt they would find anything.