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?
00:00:00.000I'm really happy to have one of my old, old friends, David Carpenter.
00:00:05.000David Carpenter is a public health physician who received his MD degree from Harvard Medical School.
00:00:11.000He 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.
00:00:36.000He 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.
00:00:50.000Of laboratories and research at New York State Department of Health.
00:00:55.000And I'm not going to read your other credentials because...
00:01:02.000This guy is really smart and he knows what he's talking about and he's feared by defense attorneys.
00:01:09.000I want to just get your take on a couple of issues.
00:01:12.000We'll just play a game because you've written three papers in the last two months that are amazing.
00:01:17.000We really need to think And explore before we bring these chemicals on the market.
00:01:24.000As you said, I've been very involved in health effects of PCBs.
00:01:28.000You know, they were manufactured from the late 1920s.
00:01:32.000Nobody thought they did anything harmful till they were banned by the Toxic Substance Control Act in the late 70s.
00:01:41.000Now, 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.
00:01:57.000I 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.
00:02:11.000And if you have a chemical in the air, you breathe it every moment of the day that you're in that building.
00:02:17.000And these children have serious neurobehavioral effects and are going to be at risk for other more chronic diseases as they grow older.
00:02:30.000At 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.
00:02:45.000They 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.
00:03:01.000In some states, up to 30% of the schools have astronomically high levels of PCB in the window caulking.
00:03:12.000And when it gets hot in that schoolroom, the PCBs mobilize out of the window caulking into the air.
00:03:20.000And then they go into the furniture, they go into the rugs, they go into the curtains.
00:03:24.000And every time there's a little warmth in that room, the air is saturated with PCBs.
00:03:31.000and the little kids who are studying in that classroom are inhaling it.
00:03:37.000They're suffering all kinds of neurological problems and behavioral issues and they are all at risk.
00:03:45.000Right now, we're involved in a bunch of lawsuits around the country by school districts against Monsanto.
00:03:53.000To get to Monsanto is absolutely liable for all of the costs.
00:03:58.000A 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.
00:04:09.000And 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.
00:04:22.000Now, the way our system works, that falls in the local taxpayer.
00:04:26.000And the EPA regulation is written such that if you don't know for certain You don't have to do anything.
00:04:32.000And you're absolutely right about the caulking.
00:04:37.000It's any old building, including a lot of homes.
00:04:40.000But there's another problem, and that is old fluorescent light bulb.
00:04:46.000They have ballasts, which are little capacitors that used to be filled with PCBs until literally about 1980.
00:04:54.000Now, those fluorescent light ballasts are supposed to have a lifespan of 10 to 15 years.
00:05:01.000I was involved in the situation in New York City schools where we have, what, 700-some schools.
00:05:07.000600 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.
00:05:22.000We had a situation in one New York City school where PCB oil dripped on the head of a child from a leaking balance.
00:05:30.000So 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.
00:05:44.000And 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.
00:05:54.000But the problem with remediating PCB contamination is it's so expensive.
00:06:02.000And therefore, a lot of people, including our government, has been sticking their head in the sand and not been willing to identify the problem.
00:06:13.000But parents should know this, and they should be concerned because this is critical.
00:06:18.000There is growing evidence that the adverse effects of PCBs on learning and memory are not reversible.
00:06:25.000They can be counterbalanced to some degree by extra education and nurturing and love and affection, but these effects don't go away.
00:08:27.000Now, the big concern there is a pregnant woman who is pregnant with the male fetus.
00:08:34.000Because 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.
00:08:48.000Now, 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.
00:09:07.000And 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.
00:09:19.000A 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.
00:09:33.000It's long been known that you can test for estrogenicity or androgenicity, so male hormones, female hormones, in rodents, animals, rats, and mice.
00:09:46.000And 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.
00:10:03.000The extreme is, for example, in other higher mammals, dogs and cattle and deer, where the male organ is really on the belly.
00:10:11.000But 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.
00:10:21.000And 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.
00:10:37.000Now, 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.
00:10:50.000And what they found is the baby boys born to mothers that had high phthalate exposures had small penises, and they were more feminized.
00:11:00.000More recently, they have studied college students in relation to their mother's exposure to phthalates during birth.
00:11:09.000So they took these metabolites of phthalates from the mother while she was pregnant, followed the sons until college age, 1822.
00:11:19.000They found, as they had seen earlier in the infants, smaller genitals, small penis, small testicles.
00:11:28.000And when they do sperm counts, they found reduced sperm concentration.
00:11:34.000Now, it's not clear that this really translates to infertility, but it certainly is one of the factors that's responsible for infertility.
00:11:43.000I don't think the mothers that are considering having children In the US, I have any concept of this.
00:11:50.000There 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.
00:12:09.000Now, I've only been talking about what is perhaps the most dramatic effect of phthalates, but phthalates have effect on other organ systems.
00:12:18.000And my laboratory, my group has been involved in study of phthalates and thyroid function.
00:12:25.000Now, thyroid hormones, right here in our neck, it's a hormone.
00:12:29.000It releases thyroid hormone under control from the brain.
00:12:33.000The hypothalamus directs the pineal gland, the pituitary gland, to release thyroid stimulating hormone, which causes the thyroid to manufacture and release thyroxin.
00:12:47.000Now, thyroxin is not active in itself.
00:13:08.000But what we find is that people that are highly exposed to some of the phthalates have reduced thyroid function.
00:13:18.000Now, what's the effect of thyroid function?
00:13:21.000Well, people that are hypothyroidine, We're good to go.
00:13:32.000That's in contrast to the hypothyroid person who can't sleep, who's always active.
00:13:37.000In the extreme case, they get the bulging eyes.
00:13:41.000But the normal thing in our body is that our brain regulates our thyroid hormone, and that regulates our metabolism, our nervous system activity.
00:13:52.000The extreme hypothyroidism is a cretin.
00:13:56.000An infant that's born without an active thyroid, and they become grossly retarded.
00:14:03.000This 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.
00:14:16.000Well, all of us are exposed to phthalates.
00:14:18.000All of us have some effect phthalates on our thyroid gland.
00:14:22.000For most of it's probably not super dangerous because our body probably compensates.
00:14:28.000But this is a messing up with the normal homeostasis of our hormonal system.
00:14:35.000And it It's like the changes in the sex hormones, the estrogens and the androgens.
00:14:42.000Phthalates 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.
00:15:04.000We 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.
00:15:14.000I want to just pursue just one question on these, you know, the other endocrine disruptors, because our children now...
00:15:25.000You 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.
00:15:41.000We 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.
00:15:59.000One example that you and I have talked about in the past is atrazine.
00:16:37.000I 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.
00:16:51.000To interfere with the development of children before they're even born.
00:16:55.000These changes in sexual behavior in children as well as in adults.
00:17:08.000It'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.
00:17:22.000How 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.
00:17:38.000These are all dramatically influenced by these chemicals.
00:17:42.000I don't mean to say that that's the only influence.
00:17:45.000But that's an influence we can do something about.
00:17:47.000And 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.