Don’t you just love how the research to show how harmful a product can be is done years after a product has been in use? Polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs have been in use since the 1970s. This chemical is a flame retardant and it is present in your home in your TV, your computer, your toaster and your couch. It was a great idea, in theory, to reduce the flammability of common household equipment and thus reduce house fires and ultimately human fatalities that can result from house fires.

The big problem is PBDEs don't stay where they are originally placed and when ingested they build up; never leaving the body. Each time you sit on your couch you're releasing countless, invisible PBDE particles into the room which end up on your clothes, in your lungs, and if you have an infant, in the baby’s mouth. When you wash your laundry the PBDEs rinse off and wind up in ground water or in fertilizer. They end up in the feed for farm animals so when we eat, particularly meat and dairy products because the chemicals stick to fat we are ingesting them.

“After exposure to the flame retardant, the animals showed changes in motor activity and impaired learning, as well as decreased thyroid hormone levels in their blood. Thyroid function can affect metabolism and organ function throughout the body.”

“Researchers also wonder what happens when increasing doses of PBDEs are combined with other pollutants known to knock normal human development off track, contaminants such as lead, mercury and PCBs -- a banned chemical that's structurally similar to PBDEs.”

‘How long will the PBDEs be around in the environment? "As long as the plastic lives," Ikonomou said. "That's a big question that we have to worry about. ... We have not even begun seeing the start of the PBDE impact."
PBDEs: They are everywhere, they accumulate and they spread

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Chemical flame retardants pose threat to humans, environmentBy LISA STIFFLER
P-I REPORTER
When Andrea Riseden-Perry nurses newborn Genoa, she knows she's providing her daughter vital proteins, nutrients and fats that can come only from a mother's milk.
She also knows she's likely feeding her baby human-made chemical flame retardants.
Riseden-Perry knows this because she volunteered for a breast milk study after her first daughter was born a few years ago. Her toxic levels weren't very high -- about 13 parts per billion -- but she wondered: What are industrial chemicals used to fireproof TVs and sofas doing in her breast milk in the first place?

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