Testing people for pollutants

Health activists in communities with known environmental hazards have long sought to draw attention to the potential risks of living in such areas, says Cynthia Babich, a longtime environmental activist. She once lived near the federally designated Del Amo Toxic Waste Site in Torrance, a Superfund site contaminated with DDT, a cancer-causing chemical that is now banned in the U.S. Her house and others were razed several years ago in order to clean up the contamination.

While biomonitoring may turn up bad news, the information is important to safeguard the community, says Babich, who is helping to coordinate the EPA study in Torrance. The idea that even the very youngest members of the neighborhood -- newborns -- could be affected by environmental contamination might make people sit up and take notice.

"I think it's important for science to understand what our body burdens are," she says. "People act like it doesn't matter that we have DDT in our blood. Maybe breast-milk biomonitoring will be something that will make people pay attention."

Scientists caution that biomonitoring can only contribute preliminary information about cancer and toxic exposure. While biomonitoring almost always yields evidence of some chemical exposure, what that exposure means to human health may require years of study.

"If a chemical accumulates in breast fat and it is a carcinogen, I would want to look at it very closely. But we have to be careful. We can't assume everything in breast milk is related to breast cancer," says Dr. Gina Solomon, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that sponsors a Web site to promote both breast-feeding and biomonitoring.

And, says Patricia Buffler, an epidemiologist at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, the principal investigator of last year's conference: "The theory is that breast milk is better than other bodily fluids in telling the story of environmental exposure because chemicals are stored in fatty tissue. But we don't know if that is true."

The purpose of the proposed state biomonitoring legislation is not to uncover a smoking gun, backers say. Instead, the program, which would include collecting blood and urine samples, would attempt to point out trends in chemical exposures, identify disproportionately affected communities, link exposures to disease, assess the effectiveness of current regulations and set priorities for research and legislation.