Excerpt from Endometriosis Sourcebook

by Mary Lou Ballweg

Since our new of the startling findings of endometriosis in a research monkey colony exposed to dioxin, an environmental pollutant, many women with endometriosis have expressed concern about dioxin exposure. How are we exposed to dioxin? What are the dangers? Can we protect ourselves from it and how? This article is meant to start to answer those questions.

We will also cover the same questions for PCBs since some monkeys in a research colony studied by the Canadian federal government reportedly developed severe endometriosis and impaired fertility following PCB exposure. Also, a German study has found higher levels of PCBs in women with endometriosis and antithyroidal antibodies.

Organochlorines

It is unfortunately entirely possible that other chemicals in addition to dioxin and PCBs could be related to development of endometriosis. Dioxin and PCBs are part of a large group of chemical compounds called organochlorines. Organochlorines are made on purpose or by accident (as a by-product of other processes) by combining with organic substances, usually petrochemicals. Organochlorines began being manufactured and used widely in the 1940s. They were the result of wartimes experiments to create more lethal chemical weapons.

Organochlorides are now found everywhere on earth according to a publication by Greenpeace, the international environmental organization. At least 177 of them have been found in human tissue and fluids in the United States and Canada, including in fat, mother's milk, blood, semen, and breath. They are responsible, researchers believe, for the declining sperm counts of men over the recent decades. They are passed from one generation to the next through the placenta and in breast milk.

Organochlorides are almost completely foreign to nature according to Greenpeace, although some dioxins may be produced in nature in small quantities. Synthetic, human made organochlorides are extremely resistant to breakdown and can take hundreds of years to breakdown completely. Meanwhile, these synthetic organochlorides are taken up and are stored in the fatty tissue of animals and humans. The concentration in fatty tissues increases with time even at low levels of exposure. This process is called bioaccumulation.

To make matters worse, another process, called biomagnification, occurs. As plants and small animals are eaten by larger animals, the amount of toxins consumed by each higher organism increases. For instance, bottom animals and plants in a lake with contaminated sediment are eaten by small fish, which are eaten by bigger fish, which are eaten by seabirds and humans. Humans who eat animal products at the top to the food chain can thus consume significant concentrations of toxins. (Vegetarians consume significantly less, since they're eating at the bottom of the food chain-plants.)

Only a few of the organochlorines have been banned (including PCBs and DDT, but not dioxin)*, but even those that have been banned are still widely prevalent in the environment. This is due partly to the compounds' long life as well as to continued use and dissemination of the compounds illegally or by wind, water and products from countries where the compounds are still legal. The book Whitewash: Exposing the Health and Environmental Danger of Women's Sanitary Products and Disposable Diapers - and What You Can Do About It, by Liz Armstrong and Adrienne Scott (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1992), notes that "hypocritically, we still manufacture DDT in North America for export to other countries."

Greenpeace, which notes that there are 11,000 organochlorines now in commerce, call for a complete ban on organochlorines in its 1991 report "The Product is the Poison: The Case for a Chlorine Phase-Out." The International Joint Commission, a U.S.-Canadian organization established in 1909 to oversee binational concerns related to the Great Lakes, has also stated that "the use of chlorine and its compounds should be avoided in the manufacturing process."

Greenpeace notes that enough is known about the persistence and toxicity of organochlorines as a class to justify a ban but that only a tiny portion of the compound have been subjected to even preliminary hazard assessments. A similar problem was noted at a Medical College of Wisconsin conference, "Health Implications of Great Lakes Pollution." Speakers noted that while more than 70,000 chemicals are in use in industry today, toxicological data exists for only 5,000 to 6,000 of these chemicals, and the data on even these is incomplete.

"Hindsight is always 20/20," the saying goes, but even still it's hard to imagine why so many chemicals were and still are allowed to be produced and disseminated widely in the environment without prior testing to assure safety for humans, animals, and plant life. This widespread dissemination means that every person and animal in the industrialized world (and many in the third world also, since water, wind , and products have spread the contaminants worldwide) has what scientists call a "background" of contaminants they carry in their bodies, from the embryo stage on. Because of this background load, the only way to know what any particular chemical does is to study it under controlled laboratory conditions without exposure to other chemicals. In addition, because the chemicals have bodywide impact and scientists do not yet understand what these impacts are, especially in the incredibly complex immune, reproductive, and nervous systems, they must study the chemicals in animal models.