WASHINGTON — Home decor like fixtures and flooring might not be notorious polluters like gas-guzzlers, however those indoor consumer merchandise can also be giant resources of probably risky chemical compounds.
Kids who live in homes with all vinyl floors or living room couches that contain flame retardants have plenty better concentrations of chemicals known as semivolatile natural compounds in their blood and urine than different youngsters. Researchers reported the ones outcomes February 17 on the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Manufacturers typically use semivolatile organic compounds, along with plasticizers and flame retardants, to make electronics, furniture and other household trappings (SN: eleven/14/15, p. 10). “Many of those chemical substances have been implicated in detrimental fitness outcomes in kids — things like ADHD, autism … even most cancers,” environmental fitness researcher Heather Stapleton of Duke University stated in a information conference. “It’s crucial that we understand the primary assets of those chemical compounds within the domestic.”
Stapleton and her colleagues investigated the in home exposure to semivolatile organic compounds of 203 youngsters a while three to 6. The team accumulated dust and air samples, together with small pieces of gadgets like sofa cushions, from the children’ houses. The researchers also accumulated urine and blood samples from the kids.
Children dwelling in houses with all vinyl flooring had concentrations of a derivative of the plasticizer benzyl butyl phthalate in their urine of about 240 nanograms according to milliliter on common. Meanwhile, kids dwelling in houses with no vinyl flooring had handiest about 12 nanograms according to milliliter on average. Children with the highest exposure showed 20 to 40 percentage of the “reference dose” for benzyl butyl phthalate — that is, the best each day dose that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers safe to ingest with out negative results over someone’s lifetime.
The benzyl butyl phthalate exposures that Stapleton’s team located have been lower than the EPA’s protection threshold. But it’s unclear how the tiers of this chemical in children’s bodies would alternate over the route of several greater years, Stapleton says. Contact with benzyl butyl phthalate has been linked to respiratory and reproductive disorders.
Children from homes with dwelling room sofas that contain flame-retardant polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, had concentrations of those compounds of their blood serum of about 108 elements according to billion on common — about seven times better than other kids. Stapleton’s crew still wishes to assess how those concentrations examine with the EPA’s reference dose. Exposure to PBDEs has been linked to several cognitive troubles, such as decrease IQ and hyperactivity, as well as cancer and other sicknesses.
Glenn Morrison, an environmental engineer on the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill no longer concerned inside the work, says that during retrospect, it makes experience that Stapleton’s group determined evidence of semivolatile organic compounds in youngsters’s our bodies. But for a long time, there was a “tacit assumption” amongst researchers that home fixtures don’t release these compounds fast sufficient for them to noticeably gather in citizens’ our bodies, he says. The new findings undercut that assumption.
Showering and washing garb extra often may curb people’s susceptibility to picking up those chemical substances, Morrison says, but “there’s a restriction to how nicely the ones matters paintings.” Ideally, indoor consumer products must be freed from dangerous chemical ingredients, he says. A higher information of how semivolatile natural compounds increase within the frame can also inform regulations on which chemicals may be used to make household products, or help customers make higher selections approximately healthy, secure alternatives.
