DDT’s toxic heritage can harm the granddaughter of exposed women

Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” First DDT and Its Catastrophic effects on birds and fish, Our understanding of how this pesticide affected humans was just beginning. For decades, scientists have sought to explain why DDT still plagues us today, as chemicals can take years to uncover their insidious powers. I have matched it.

Initially Breast cancer in women Those who were exposed to this hormonal disruptive chemical in the 1950s and 1960s. Then their daughtersWas exposed to the womb. For years, researchers have associated DDT exposure with obesity, birth defects, decreased childbirth, and testicular cancer in their sons.

Currently, a team of toxicologists, molecular biologists, and epidemiologists at the University of California, Davis and the Auckland Institute of Public Health Confirmed for the first time The granddaughter of a woman who was exposed to DDT during pregnancy also suffers from a serious health threat. Obesity rates and menstrual periods that begin before the age of 11 are high.

According to scientists, both factors can increase the risk of these young women for breast cancer, as well as high blood pressure, diabetes and other illnesses.

“This is further evidence that pregnant women and their babies are not only vulnerable to the chemicals she is exposed to, but so are her future grandchildren,” multigenerational. Barbara Cohn, director of child health development research at the Institute of Public Health, said. A California research project that has tracked more than 15,000 pregnant women and their families since 1959.

“This is something people always thought was possible, but there has never been any human research to support the existence of that link,” she said.

The findings come at a time of new public interest in DDT, a problem that was largely pushed into the declining chapters of history.The Times was published in the country last fall The largest manufacturer of once abandoned DDT As much as 500,000 barrels of waste are flowing into the deep sea.

Currently banned pesticides are so stable that they continue to pollute the environment and climb the food chain.A significant amount of DDT-related compounds still remain Accumulated in Southern California dolphins, And recent studies have shown the presence of these persistent chemicals. Invasive cancer With sea lions.

For humans, “there is a clear line to track what’s happening,” said Linda Birnbaum, former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program. I have been doing these multi-generational studies With great interest.

“Many people want to think that the DDT problem is gone because Congress banned DDT in 1972. Well, they don’t,” said a scholar now living at Duke University. Birnbaum said. “By the time the daughters became pregnant with their granddaughters, long after DDT was banned, they were still carrying the seeds of these problems into them.”

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More than 60 years ago, during the heyday of DDT, a team of scientists had the foresight to begin collecting blood samples from more than 15,000 pregnant women at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Auckland. In all semesters and shortly after birth, each woman provided a studyed and carefully archived sample.

Researchers tested blood for DDT and related contaminants and continued to follow up on health assessments. They were in contact with the female daughters and granddaughters who were exposed to DDT in the womb.

In 1948, an airplane dusted a flock of sheep in Medford, Oregon with DDT powder. DDT was once considered a mysterious pesticide.

(The Associated Press)

They are the result of years of research A woman who was badly exposed to DDT as a child 5 times more likely Developing breast cancer and exposure of mothers to DDT during pregnancy or shortly after childbirth are associated with an increased risk of breast cancer in their daughters.Their daughter is also likely to experience Delayed pregnancy..

with this Latest researchPublished Wednesday to the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, Research Team We now find that granddaughters in their 20s and 30s are at 2-3 times higher risk of obesity than women who had little DDT in their grandmother’s blood during pregnancy. These granddaughters were also twice as likely to have a much earlier menstrual period. This is another indicator of increased health risk in later years.

This persistent intergenerational exposure According to Korn, it is related to the reproductive system. Women are born with all their eggs, so if the mother is exposed in utero, the granddaughter is also technically exposed to DDT.

“Despite banning such things over 40 years ago, the granddaughters of those who are now walking on Earth, the pregnant people, have been exposed,” Korn said. She suspects that the rate of increase in childhood cancer, diabetes and other health problems affecting young people today may also be somehow related to these chemicals in the past. “This is the complete meaning of what an’eternal chemical’is — in a sense, potentially’forever’all chemicals if there is a possibility of doing this. “

Bruce Blumberg, a professor of developmental and cell biology at the University of California, Irvine, still remembers the track that was spraying large amounts of DDT on farms and nearby. At the supermarket where he worked as a kid, fog was brought in at the end of every day.

“The entire market will be filled with DDT fog,” said Blumberg, who also teaches pharmaceutical science. “The industry wants you to believe that chemicals are ineffective because the doses are too low to be effective and they are all crazy vigilancers.”

Blumberg currently specializes in studying how chemicals in the environment affect our genes. People’s predisposition For obesity Affect About 42% of Americans today. He conducts laboratory experiments in mice to answer many questions that scientists could not test in humans.

That’s why he said that multi-generational Bay Area studies, to which he doesn’t belong, are so important. It provides coveted human observational data that is incredibly difficult to obtain, and perhaps even more difficult to maintain.

“If you’re lucky, that cohort [of Bay Area women] “It will last for four, five or six generations,” he said. “And we will really learn something about the future impact of what happened in the past.”

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Akilah Shahid said he was shocked but fascinated to find out that he was in the third generation of major research on how chemicals in the environment affect women.

Shahid, a biology major at Mills College, said it was all clicked for her when she delved into the study. Her family was no stranger to health problems. Her grandmother alone has fought cancer three times.

“For a while, it feels like the cancer has come out of nowhere,” she said. “I don’t know who gets it, but now there’s a reason.”

Akilah Shahid is a third-generation participant in the Public Health Institute’s Child Health and Development Studies research program.

(Provided by Liv Schultheis)

Shahid, now 30 years old, exercises a lot. She tries to eat well. It allows her to know that her weight is not entirely her fault, and that it is not so much within her control.

DDT is no longer allowed, but she has bisphenol A (BPA), perfluoroalkyl substances, and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)and Other manufactured compounds It doesn’t seem to go away. She avoids plastic bottles and is aware that current choices and actions can expose future grandchildren to unknown illnesses.

“We, climate change and, how many times did you talk about that more often there is a need to for the sake of children and grandchildren? This is, Hello, is that you are us today that affect the people More proof, “she said.

“We are talking about protecting the environment again today for our future generations, so I hope this is a call for the awakening of many.”