RFK Jr. The Defender - Chemical Attack On Children with Dr. 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 has become one of the leading global experts on the impact of endocrine disruptors on the 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 Labs and Research at the New York State Department of Health. David Carpenter has written three papers in the last two months that are amazing, that we really need to think and explore before we bring these chemicals on the market. 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 his take on a couple of issues: 1. The problem in New York City schools where we had a situation in one school where PCB oil dripped on the head of a child from a leaking balance. 2. The last thing you want in a school where you want your children to learn to learn is chemicals that will reduce the cognitive function of those children. And remember, remember, the only thing you should care about is what you learn in school, and remember, is that it s not what you should be learning in school not where you get your information from a government agency that s trying to help you find it. 3. What s going to be the worst thing you can do in school? 4. What are you should you be doing in schools? 5. What you should do in schools 6. What should you do to make sure your kids are getting the most out of school 7. What kind of education you re getting? 8. What is the most important thing you re going to learn from school 9. What do you need to be doing to make the most of your environment 10. How do you know what you re gonna be able to do? 11. Is there a safe place for you to learn the most effective way to get the most information you can access the most effectively 12. 13. Can you be a good teacher 14. 15. How much of your school is a good place to get a good high-quality education 16. What can you learn from a good environment? 17. How can you be an effective teacher?

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:00.000 I'm really happy to have one of my old, old friends, David Carpenter.

00:00:05.000 David Carpenter is a public health physician who received his MD degree from Harvard Medical School.

00:00:11.000 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.

00:00:36.000 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.

00:00:50.000 Of laboratories and research at New York State Department of Health.

00:00:55.000 And I'm not going to read your other credentials because...

00:00:58.000 We're too many pages.

00:01:00.000 That is boring.

00:01:02.000 This guy is really smart and he knows what he's talking about and he's feared by defense attorneys.

00:01:09.000 I want to just get your take on a couple of issues.

00:01:12.000 We'll just play a game because you've written three papers in the last two months that are amazing.

00:01:17.000 We really need to think And explore before we bring these chemicals on the market.

00:01:24.000 As you said, I've been very involved in health effects of PCBs.

00:01:28.000 You know, they were manufactured from the late 1920s.

00:01:32.000 Nobody thought they did anything harmful till they were banned by the Toxic Substance Control Act in the late 70s.

00:01:41.000 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.

00:01:57.000 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.

00:02:11.000 And if you have a chemical in the air, you breathe it every moment of the day that you're in that building.

00:02:17.000 And these children have serious neurobehavioral effects and are going to be at risk for other more chronic diseases as they grow older.

00:02:27.000 And people should know this.

00:02:30.000 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.

00:02:45.000 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. 0.82

00:03:01.000 In some states, up to 30% of the schools have astronomically high levels of PCB in the window caulking.

00:03:12.000 And when it gets hot in that schoolroom, the PCBs mobilize out of the window caulking into the air.

00:03:20.000 And then they go into the furniture, they go into the rugs, they go into the curtains.

00:03:24.000 And every time there's a little warmth in that room, the air is saturated with PCBs.

00:03:31.000 and the little kids who are studying in that classroom are inhaling it.

00:03:35.000 They're suffering IQ loss.

00:03:37.000 They're suffering all kinds of neurological problems and behavioral issues and they are all at risk.

00:03:45.000 Right now, we're involved in a bunch of lawsuits around the country by school districts against Monsanto.

00:03:53.000 To get to Monsanto is absolutely liable for all of the costs.

00:03:58.000 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.

00:04:09.000 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.

00:04:22.000 Now, the way our system works, that falls in the local taxpayer.

00:04:26.000 And the EPA regulation is written such that if you don't know for certain You don't have to do anything.

00:04:32.000 And you're absolutely right about the caulking.

00:04:35.000 That's a major issue.

00:04:36.000 And it's not just in schools.

00:04:37.000 It's any old building, including a lot of homes.

00:04:40.000 But there's another problem, and that is old fluorescent light bulb.

00:04:46.000 They have ballasts, which are little capacitors that used to be filled with PCBs until literally about 1980.

00:04:54.000 Now, those fluorescent light ballasts are supposed to have a lifespan of 10 to 15 years.

00:05:01.000 I was involved in the situation in New York City schools where we have, what, 700-some schools.

00:05:07.000 600 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.

00:05:18.000 They heat.

00:05:19.000 They often burn.

00:05:22.000 We had a situation in one New York City school where PCB oil dripped on the head of a child from a leaking balance.

00:05:30.000 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.

00:05:44.000 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.

00:05:54.000 But the problem with remediating PCB contamination is it's so expensive.

00:06:02.000 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.

00:06:13.000 But parents should know this, and they should be concerned because this is critical.

00:06:18.000 There is growing evidence that the adverse effects of PCBs on learning and memory are not reversible.

00:06:25.000 They can be counterbalanced to some degree by extra education and nurturing and love and affection, but these effects don't go away.

00:06:34.000 And this is absolutely tragic.

00:06:37.000 Let me ask you very quickly about some recent issues that you've written about.

00:06:41.000 One is phthalates, and explain what phthalates are and why they're dangerous to children.

00:06:49.000 Well, phthalates, it's not just one chemical, just like PCBs are not just one chemical.

00:06:54.000 There are some 50 different kinds of phthalates.

00:06:57.000 And they're added, especially into plastics, to make the plastic soft, to make them appropriate for use in different situations.

00:07:07.000 Now, the phthalates don't get actually incorporated into the plastic.

00:07:11.000 They're just added to the plastic to change its properties.

00:07:15.000 Again, they were thought not to be dangerous.

00:07:18.000 Now, we all are exposed to phthalates every day.

00:07:21.000 I should have Phthalates are very common in personal care products.

00:07:28.000 Your hair conditioner is loaded with phthalates.

00:07:32.000 The reason it makes your hair soft and so forth is because it binds to phthalates.

00:07:37.000 But phthalates are fat-soluble substances, and you put it on your hair, it goes through your skin and gets in your body.

00:07:44.000 A lot of lotions, lipsticks, underwarned deodorants.

00:07:49.000 Many of these personal care products have phthalates.

00:07:51.000 They're in your plastic wearer.

00:07:54.000 They're in your personal care products.

00:07:56.000 And almost all of us are exposed to phthalates every day.

00:08:00.000 Now, they have a variety of adverse health effects.

00:08:04.000 In my judgment, the most serious is that phthalates are weak estrogen receptor agonists.

00:08:12.000 They act like estrogen.

00:08:14.000 They're not as effective as estrogen.

00:08:17.000 They don't stay in the human body more than about a day.

00:08:21.000 So you get them in your body, you excrete them fairly quickly.

00:08:25.000 But there are many estrogens.

00:08:27.000 Now, the big concern there is a pregnant woman who is pregnant with the male fetus. 0.91

00:08:34.000 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.

00:08:48.000 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.

00:09:07.000 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.

00:09:19.000 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.

00:09:32.000 Let me back up.

00:09:33.000 It's long been known that you can test for estrogenicity or androgenicity, so male hormones, female hormones, in rodents, animals, rats, and mice.

00:09:46.000 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.

00:10:03.000 The extreme is, for example, in other higher mammals, dogs and cattle and deer, where the male organ is really on the belly.

00:10:11.000 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.

00:10:21.000 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.

00:10:35.000 They'd be more like the females. 0.99

00:10:37.000 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. 0.88

00:10:50.000 And what they found is the baby boys born to mothers that had high phthalate exposures had small penises, and they were more feminized. 0.53

00:11:00.000 More recently, they have studied college students in relation to their mother's exposure to phthalates during birth.

00:11:09.000 So they took these metabolites of phthalates from the mother while she was pregnant, followed the sons until college age, 1822. 0.75

00:11:19.000 They found, as they had seen earlier in the infants, smaller genitals, small penis, small testicles.

00:11:28.000 And when they do sperm counts, they found reduced sperm concentration.

00:11:34.000 Now, it's not clear that this really translates to infertility, but it certainly is one of the factors that's responsible for infertility.

00:11:43.000 I don't think the mothers that are considering having children In the US, I have any concept of this. 0.93

00:11:50.000 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.

00:12:09.000 Now, I've only been talking about what is perhaps the most dramatic effect of phthalates, but phthalates have effect on other organ systems.

00:12:16.000 They reduce thyroid function.

00:12:18.000 And my laboratory, my group has been involved in study of phthalates and thyroid function.

00:12:25.000 Now, thyroid hormones, right here in our neck, it's a hormone.

00:12:29.000 It releases thyroid hormone under control from the brain.

00:12:33.000 The hypothalamus directs the pineal gland, the pituitary gland, to release thyroid stimulating hormone, which causes the thyroid to manufacture and release thyroxin.

00:12:47.000 Now, thyroxin is not active in itself.

00:12:50.000 It's released from the thyroid gland.

00:12:53.000 And in the periphery, there's an enzyme that That changes it to triiodothyronine.

00:13:01.000 Thyroxine has iodines on it.

00:13:03.000 It's actually structurally similar to PCBs.

00:13:05.000 PCBs have chlorines.

00:13:07.000 Thyroxine has iodines.

00:13:08.000 But what we find is that people that are highly exposed to some of the phthalates have reduced thyroid function.

00:13:18.000 Now, what's the effect of thyroid function?

00:13:21.000 Well, people that are hypothyroidine, We're good to go. 0.99

00:13:32.000 That's in contrast to the hypothyroid person who can't sleep, who's always active. 0.94

00:13:37.000 In the extreme case, they get the bulging eyes.

00:13:41.000 But the normal thing in our body is that our brain regulates our thyroid hormone, and that regulates our metabolism, our nervous system activity. 0.96

00:13:52.000 The extreme hypothyroidism is a cretin. 0.96

00:13:56.000 An infant that's born without an active thyroid, and they become grossly retarded. 0.99

00:14:03.000 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.

00:14:16.000 Well, all of us are exposed to phthalates.

00:14:18.000 All of us have some effect phthalates on our thyroid gland.

00:14:22.000 For most of it's probably not super dangerous because our body probably compensates.

00:14:28.000 But this is a messing up with the normal homeostasis of our hormonal system.

00:14:35.000 And it It's like the changes in the sex hormones, the estrogens and the androgens.

00:14:42.000 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.

00:15:04.000 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.

00:15:13.000 Carpenter.

00:15:14.000 I want to just pursue just one question on these, you know, the other endocrine disruptors, because our children now...

00:15:25.000 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.

00:15:41.000 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.

00:15:59.000 One example that you and I have talked about in the past is atrazine.

00:16:05.000 If you expose...

00:16:07.000 Frogs to atrazine, male frogs, it changes their sex and they can actually bear young.

00:16:17.000 They can lay eggs, fertile eggs.

00:16:20.000 And so the capacity for these chemicals that we are just raining down on our children right now.

00:16:28.000 To induce these very profound sexual changes in them is something we need to be thinking about as a society.

00:16:36.000 Absolutely right.

00:16:37.000 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.

00:16:51.000 To interfere with the development of children before they're even born.

00:16:55.000 These changes in sexual behavior in children as well as in adults.

00:17:00.000 Are not just psychological.

00:17:03.000 These are changes in the brain, especially during development.

00:17:07.000 And it's the fault of our government.

00:17:08.000 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.

00:17:22.000 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.

00:17:38.000 These are all dramatically influenced by these chemicals.

00:17:42.000 I don't mean to say that that's the only influence.

00:17:45.000 But that's an influence we can do something about.

00:17:47.000 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.

00:17:57.000 Dr.

RFK Jr. The Defender - June 20, 2022

Chemical Attack On Children with Dr. David Carpenter

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