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June 20, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender

17:57

Chemical Attack On Children with Dr. David Carpenter

Dr. David Carpenter, discusses how endocrine disruptors, such as phthalates, PCBs, and pesticides, harm children during developmental stages in this episode.

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	Hey, everybody.
	I'm really happy to have one of my old, old friends, David Carpenter.
	David Carpenter is a public health physician who received his MD degree from Harvard Medical School.
	He has focused primarily on neurobiology and electric physiological techniques, and he has become one of the leading global experts on the The impact of endocrine disruptors on sexual development of neurotoxicological chemicals on IQ and behavior in children and adults.
	He had a research position at the National Institute of Mental Health and the Armed Forces Radiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland before he was recruited as the director of the Wadsworth Center.
	Of laboratories and research at New York State Department of Health.
	And I'm not going to read your other credentials because...
	We're too many pages.
	That is boring.
	This guy is really smart and he knows what he's talking about and he's feared by defense attorneys.
	I want to just get your take on a couple of issues.
	We'll just play a game because you've written three papers in the last two months that are amazing.
	We really need to think And explore before we bring these chemicals on the market.
	As you said, I've been very involved in health effects of PCBs.
	You know, they were manufactured from the late 1920s.
	Nobody thought they did anything harmful till they were banned by the Toxic Substance Control Act in the late 70s.
	Now, what we find is our knowledge of how dangerous they are is growing much more rapidly Then these chemicals, which are persistent, are being reduced in our environment and also in our bodies.
	I was just on another case yesterday of the harm that children in a school near Seattle, Washington, have suffered because of the PCBs in the air in their school.
	And if you have a chemical in the air, you breathe it every moment of the day that you're in that building.
	And these children have serious neurobehavioral effects and are going to be at risk for other more chronic diseases as they grow older.
	And people should know this.
	At the time when Monsanto, no, Monsanto was the manufacturer of PCPs at the time, in the early 70s, Monsanto knew that PCBs were about to be banned.
	They figured out a way to get rid of their stocks, which was to mix it up in window caulking and sell the window caulking to all of these new schools that were being built to accommodate the baby boomers.
	In some states, up to 30% of the schools have astronomically high levels of PCB in the window caulking.
	And when it gets hot in that schoolroom, the PCBs mobilize out of the window caulking into the air.
	And then they go into the furniture, they go into the rugs, they go into the curtains.
	And every time there's a little warmth in that room, the air is saturated with PCBs.
	and the little kids who are studying in that classroom are inhaling it.
	They're suffering IQ loss.
	They're suffering all kinds of neurological problems and behavioral issues and they are all at risk.
	Right now, we're involved in a bunch of lawsuits around the country by school districts against Monsanto.
	To get to Monsanto is absolutely liable for all of the costs.
	A lot of the school districts don't want to bring that because they don't want to admit to the parents that there is a serious health problem in their schools.
	And it's a very serious issue because usually if EPA has regulations, so if you identify high levels of PCBs in the copy, more than 50 parts per million, you must remove it.
	Now, the way our system works, that falls in the local taxpayer.
	And the EPA regulation is written such that if you don't know for certain You don't have to do anything.
	And you're absolutely right about the caulking.
	That's a major issue.
	And it's not just in schools.
	It's any old building, including a lot of homes.
	But there's another problem, and that is old fluorescent light bulb.
	They have ballasts, which are little capacitors that used to be filled with PCBs until literally about 1980.
	Now, those fluorescent light ballasts are supposed to have a lifespan of 10 to 15 years.
	I was involved in the situation in New York City schools where we have, what, 700-some schools.
	600 of them had caulk in the windows, had fluorescent light ballasts that had never been replaced because the school didn't have enough money to update them.
	They heat.
	They often burn.
	We had a situation in one New York City school where PCB oil dripped on the head of a child from a leaking balance.
	So the last thing you want in a school where children go to learn and remember is exposure to chemicals that will reduce the cognitive function of those children.
	And PCBs are as bad as lead in causing reductions in IQ. We've had a lot of knowledge about lead, a lot of remediation of lead.
	But the problem with remediating PCB contamination is it's so expensive.
	And therefore, a lot of people, including our government, has been sticking their head in the sand and not been willing to identify the problem.
	But parents should know this, and they should be concerned because this is critical.
	There is growing evidence that the adverse effects of PCBs on learning and memory are not reversible.
	They can be counterbalanced to some degree by extra education and nurturing and love and affection, but these effects don't go away.
	And this is absolutely tragic.
	Let me ask you very quickly about some recent issues that you've written about.
	One is phthalates, and explain what phthalates are and why they're dangerous to children.
	Well, phthalates, it's not just one chemical, just like PCBs are not just one chemical.
	There are some 50 different kinds of phthalates.
	And they're added, especially into plastics, to make the plastic soft, to make them appropriate for use in different situations.
	Now, the phthalates don't get actually incorporated into the plastic.
	They're just added to the plastic to change its properties.
	Again, they were thought not to be dangerous.
	Now, we all are exposed to phthalates every day.
	I should have Phthalates are very common in personal care products.
	Your hair conditioner is loaded with phthalates.
	The reason it makes your hair soft and so forth is because it binds to phthalates.
	But phthalates are fat-soluble substances, and you put it on your hair, it goes through your skin and gets in your body.
	A lot of lotions, lipsticks, underwarned deodorants.
	Many of these personal care products have phthalates.
	They're in your plastic wearer.
	They're in your personal care products.
	And almost all of us are exposed to phthalates every day.
	Now, they have a variety of adverse health effects.
	In my judgment, the most serious is that phthalates are weak estrogen receptor agonists.
	They act like estrogen.
	They're not as effective as estrogen.
	They don't stay in the human body more than about a day.
	So you get them in your body, you excrete them fairly quickly.
	But there are many estrogens.
	Now, the big concern there is a pregnant woman who is pregnant with the male fetus.
	Because the whole development of what's the difference between males and females is the balance between the estrogens and the androgens, the female hormones and the male hormones.
	Now, increasing evidence that a woman that is exposed to a lot of phthalates, difficult to determine, because as I said, they don't stay in her body very long, but we can monitor someone's exposure to phthalates by looking at the breakdown products of the phthalates in human urine.
	And so if you take multiple urine samples from a pregnant woman over the course of her pregnancy, you can get a pretty good indication of her overall exposure to phthalates.
	A number of studies that have been done, Shawna Swan, who's now, I guess, at NYU or Mount Sinai, but used to be at the University of Rochester, has been just a world's leader in this project.
	Let me back up.
	It's long been known that you can test for estrogenicity or androgenicity, so male hormones, female hormones, in rodents, animals, rats, and mice.
	And people get very interested when you talk about sexual differences, but in the rodents, the distance between the The female genitals and the anus is quite short, whereas for the males, it's much longer.
	The extreme is, for example, in other higher mammals, dogs and cattle and deer, where the male organ is really on the belly.
	But in the rodents, there is this difference between the distance between the anus and the genitals in females, which is much shorter than in males.
	And a long time ago, it was demonstrated if you give a pregnant rat phthalates, some of the phthalates, not everyone, that the male pups would have a shorter anal genital distance.
	They'd be more like the females.
	Now, recently, what Shauna has done, and a number of other people have done, is look at phthalates, metabolites in the urine of pregnant women, and then examine baby boys.
	And what they found is the baby boys born to mothers that had high phthalate exposures had small penises, and they were more feminized.
	More recently, they have studied college students in relation to their mother's exposure to phthalates during birth.
	So they took these metabolites of phthalates from the mother while she was pregnant, followed the sons until college age, 1822.
	They found, as they had seen earlier in the infants, smaller genitals, small penis, small testicles.
	And when they do sperm counts, they found reduced sperm concentration.
	Now, it's not clear that this really translates to infertility, but it certainly is one of the factors that's responsible for infertility.
	I don't think the mothers that are considering having children In the US, I have any concept of this.
	There may be other factors that this balance between males and females alter, but to have physical differences, distance between the anus and the genitals that last for life, and reduce sperm count from exposure to phthalates, this is very dangerous.
	Now, I've only been talking about what is perhaps the most dramatic effect of phthalates, but phthalates have effect on other organ systems.
	They reduce thyroid function.
	And my laboratory, my group has been involved in study of phthalates and thyroid function.
	Now, thyroid hormones, right here in our neck, it's a hormone.
	It releases thyroid hormone under control from the brain.
	The hypothalamus directs the pineal gland, the pituitary gland, to release thyroid stimulating hormone, which causes the thyroid to manufacture and release thyroxin.
	Now, thyroxin is not active in itself.
	It's released from the thyroid gland.
	And in the periphery, there's an enzyme that That changes it to triiodothyronine.
	Thyroxine has iodines on it.
	It's actually structurally similar to PCBs.
	PCBs have chlorines.
	Thyroxine has iodines.
	But what we find is that people that are highly exposed to some of the phthalates have reduced thyroid function.
	Now, what's the effect of thyroid function?
	Well, people that are hypothyroidine, We're good to go.
	That's in contrast to the hypothyroid person who can't sleep, who's always active.
	In the extreme case, they get the bulging eyes.
	But the normal thing in our body is that our brain regulates our thyroid hormone, and that regulates our metabolism, our nervous system activity.
	The extreme hypothyroidism is a cretin.
	An infant that's born without an active thyroid, and they become grossly retarded.
	This is why in most states now, at birth, a child has a blood sample taken from their heel to test whether or not their thyroid functions normally.
	Well, all of us are exposed to phthalates.
	All of us have some effect phthalates on our thyroid gland.
	For most of it's probably not super dangerous because our body probably compensates.
	But this is a messing up with the normal homeostasis of our hormonal system.
	And it It's like the changes in the sex hormones, the estrogens and the androgens.
	Phthalates are endocrine disruptor chemicals, and they have no beneficial effect, just as PCBs and neonicotendinites have no beneficial effect on humans, but every effect they have is one to screw up the balance of our body.
	We need to close out now, but I just wanted you to comment, and I got a lot of other stuff to talk to you about, and I really want to get you back, Dr.
	Carpenter.
	I want to just pursue just one question on these, you know, the other endocrine disruptors, because our children now...
	You know, we're seeing these impacts that people suspect are very different than in ages past about sexual identification among children and sexual confusion, gender confusion, and these kind of issues that are very, very controversial today.
	We know that we are Subjecting our children to exposure, not just phthalates, but many, many other kinds of endocrine disruptors and chemicals that will disrupt normal sexual development and neurological development.
	One example that you and I have talked about in the past is atrazine.
	If you expose...
	Frogs to atrazine, male frogs, it changes their sex and they can actually bear young.
	They can lay eggs, fertile eggs.
	And so the capacity for these chemicals that we are just raining down on our children right now.
	To induce these very profound sexual changes in them is something we need to be thinking about as a society.
	Absolutely right.
	I think with all the controversy about gay children, about transgender children, it's the fault of those of us that are adults that have allowed these chemicals to get on the market.
	To interfere with the development of children before they're even born.
	These changes in sexual behavior in children as well as in adults.
	Are not just psychological.
	These are changes in the brain, especially during development.
	And it's the fault of our government.
	It's the fault of people that like the benefit of not having bugs on your windshield, that don't think about what they're doing to our children, not just our children, to our own bodies.
	How they change the hormonal balance that regulates our everyday life and especially alters the function of children, whether it be their cognitive function, their reproductive function, their hormonal function.
	These are all dramatically influenced by these chemicals.
	I don't mean to say that that's the only influence.
	But that's an influence we can do something about.
	And I see no indication in our society that we're even recognizing that this is because of the chemicals we've allowed to be used in our environment.
	Dr.

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