Excerpt from Endometriosis Sourcebook

by Mary Lou Ballweg

PCBs

PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) are compounds that were used widely as electrical insulators and were used formerly in carbonless paper, specialty inks, and paints and as additives in plastics manufacturing. Industrial waste water from these manufacturing process and from municipal sewage treatment plants that process these wastes were sources of PCB contamination of water and soil.

The FDA allowed defined levels in dairy products, poultry, eggs, animals feeds, and other food products – 5 ppm (parts per million) were allowed in poultry and the edible portion of fish, for example. Even these standards covered only foods shipped between states, not foods shipped within states unless the state adopted the standard. A Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources paper form 1974 assures readers that "the Food and Drug Administration Standards are established with a wide margin of safety well below the level of toxicity to humans." The very same paper, however, notes that levels of PCB at only 2 ppm in fish in the diet of mink led to reproduction failure. The FDA currently allows 2 ppm of PCBs in fish.

PCBs last a very long time. They are basically a life sentence, as one speaker at the conference "Health Implications of Great Lakes Pollution" stated. Once you have them in your body, they'll essentially be in your body for the rest of your life. Even worse, like other organochlorides that are stored in our body fat, they are passed along to our children when we are pregnant with them and breast-fed. Work by Wayland Swain, Ph. D., Michigan, showed that it may take six generations before PCBs are cleared from our bodies even with no further exposure. This work was calculated on the basis of the first mother in six generation having the average level of PCBs in her breast milk currently found in Michigan mothers who consumed PCB-contaminated fish. The study also assumed that each mother had her baby at age 20 when some PCBs would have passed out of her body but not as much as would have later (again assuming no further exposure).

PCBs have been banned both in United States (since 1979) and Canada (since 1980) but are still widely prevalent in the environment. The load of PCBs in beluga whales in the St. Lawrence leading into the Great Lakes is so great, for example, that their bodies are declared hazardous waste when they die.

The most serious exposure to PCBs for many people for many people generally would be in contaminated fish. In Wisconsin, the Department of Health and Social Services advised pregnant women not to eat Lake Michigan fish (Lake Michigan is heavily contaminated with PCBs) beginning in the mid-1970s, and others were advised not to eat fish from PCB-contaminated lakes more than once a week. Next people were told to avoid certain sizes and species of fish (the larger, older fish at the higher end of the food chain). Today, with greatly increased understanding of the dangers, the Michigan Medical Society has advised that children and anyone who ever plans to have children, male or female, should eat no Great Lakes fish!

Contact your local governmental health units to attempt to learn what contamination levels may occur in your area and what precautions to take. At the "Health Implication of Great Lakes Pollution" conference, speakers suggested low-fat ocean fish were generally safer than freshwater fish and the smaller fish such as cod and halibut were less contaminated that larger specialty fish.

Anyone attempting to limit the PCBs to which they and their families are exposed should take the fish warnings very seriously. At the "Health Implications" conference, it was pointed out that one fish meal of contaminated fish could result in as much PCB in your body as drinking the water from Lake Michigan and breathing the air in the area for 119 years! In addition, remember that the FDA-allowed levels may be too high to avoid the hormonal/immununological effects discussed in this article. The amount of TCDD (dioxin) currently allowed in fish is 500 ppt! Severe endo occurred in the monkey colony at 25 ppt.

In addition to endometriosis, there may be other pressing reasons to eliminate exposure to PCBs as much as possible. A preliminary study has suggested that PCBs and pesticides may be involved in breast cancer, which has increased in prevalence from one woman in 20 in the United States in 1940 to one woman in 9 today. The study found elevated levels of PCBs and pesticide residues in fat samples from women with cancer compared with those who had benign breast disease. [The study, "Pesticides and Polychlorinated Biphenyl Residues in Human Breast Lipids and Their Relation to Breast Cancer, " appeared in Archives of Environmental Health 47, no. 2 (March/April 1992).] Possible this finding, if confirmed, will make sense out of past observations that high-fat diets seem liked to breast cancer and that women who breast-feed have a lower incidence of breast cancer - can we speculate that perhaps this could be because toxic chemicals bioaccumulate in fat tissues such as the breast and because breast-feeding results in dumping some of the toxic chemical load into the infant? In the dioxin monkey colony the monkeys lost up to 20 percent of their body burden of dioxin in pregnancy and breast-feeding, with breast-feeding being the greatest source.

All this information on the environmental pollutants and their health consequences can certainly feel overwhelming. But perhaps we can take heart in knowing that information is the first step toward taking action. And action is what's needed, both individually and socially. There are many steps you can take to reduce your exposure to these toxins. See "Avoiding Dioxin and PCBs - What You Can Do." And remember, together we can make a difference. If indeed toxic pollutants are a part of the endometriosis story, only working together will make it possible for us to overcome this nightmare.