Health advocates push for action on chemicals, plastics

Washington — Public health advocates at a forum in Washington said they see "more than enough" evidence that chemicals used in plastics can harm human health and they want stepped up government action.

But facing President Donald Trump and a new administration they see as hostile to environmental regulation, they also are searching for ways to broaden their case.

"Our goal is to sound the alarm — we are in a fight against an EPA that is now cruelly and recklessly advertising a free pass for polluters," said Dominique Browning, director and co-founder of Mom's Clean Air Force, which organized the April 3 summit.

At the event, titled "A Health Crisis in Plain Sight: How plastics are poisoning our air, food and bodies," researchers, doctors and groups from fenceline communities living near plastics plants and chemical recycling operations reviewed the science.

Shanna Swan, a professor of environmental medicine and public health and author of the 2021 book Countdown, said plastic chemicals like phthalates have played a role in cutting sperm count by more than 50 percent in men in Western countries over the last four decades.

In response to a question about how researchers can connect exposure to a particular chemical to fertility problems, she pointed to repeated studies.

"You're asking about, is this causal," Swan said. "That's so difficult for epidemiologists but I think the combination of having multiple animal studies and multiple human studies, is what we can do. That's the information we have."

She noted phthalates and plasticizers are used as ingredients in a wide range of products, including pesticides, cosmetics and plastics, and said she started studying phthalates after U.S. government studies found they "were in pretty much everybody in the United States, including in pregnant women."

She pointed to phthalates and bisphenols as examples of endocrine disrupting chemicals that can mimic hormones like estrogen and testosterone in the body, and she argued that regulatory systems have not caught up to evaluating widespread exposures in daily life.

"The regulatory system is broken in a way that it fails to protect us, and we know that because we're still buying, everyday, incredible numbers of these chemicals and putting them into our daily life," Swan said. "If the system was working, we would not be continually exposed.

"There's huge forces to continue the use of these chemicals, these plastics are very much in demand," she said. "We have, I would say, a plastic addiction."

There's enough research to demonstrate concern and act, she said.

"We have enough evidence, more than enough evidence, to act and we have for a long time," Swan said. "In some ways, it's a political battle as well as a scientific battle."

Other researchers at the event pointed to studies like one in the New England Journal of Medicine, finding that people with higher levels of microplastics in their carotid artery, which brings oxygen to the brain, had a four-fold increase in heart attacks and strokes.

Leo Trasande, a medical doctor and professor of pediatrics at New York University who researches the disease costs of EDCs, noted a study he authored that found $250 billion a year in health costs in the U.S. from four chemicals used in plastics.

"Five to 10 percent of babies born prematurely in the United States are due to phthalates," Trasande said.

Tracey Woodruff, a professor of obstetrics at the University of California at San Francisco, pointed to plastic production doubling since 2008 and growing 15-fold since the 1950s, with more evidence emerging of harms to people from the growing exposure to chemicals.

"There is a lot we don't know, but there is a lot we know," Woodruff said. "We know that people are exposed to multiple of these chemicals and we know that there's been an increase in all these chronic childhood diseases: attention deficit disorder, autism, metabolic disorders like diabetes and weight gain, and childhood cancer."

Estimates that plastic production will triple by 2060 increases the need for government action, she said.

Another speaker, Robin Morris Collin, a former adviser on environmental justice to the Environmental Protection Agency, said one of her focuses during President Joe Biden's administration was to try to shift policy toward evaluating the cumulative impact of exposure to many chemicals, rather than approaching it chemical-by-chemical.

"I think it's important to switch our language to talk about cumulative impacts, cumulative exposures, cumulative effects," Collin said. "Unfortunately, because of the way that we calculate risk, even at the EPA, it tends to be single pathway, as if we are exposed to one thing at one time and never multiple things all the time."

Woodruff said research is beginning to uncover connections between environmental chemical exposure and health problems in communities but said there's political resistance to some of those studies.

"I will also note that this is research that is being de-funded under the current administration," she said. "We have plenty of data to take action. That's not what's stopping us from taking action."

Trasande urged the audience to look for new venues to make their points with government.

He pointed to the "Make America Healthy Again" movement from President Donald Trump's new Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr.

"The Make America Healthy Again movement is really keenly focused on contamination in foods in particular, so that's a real opportunity," he said. "The EPA offramp is closed for business now. The FDA appears to be a vehicle, and HHS in general appears to be open, at least, to the notion of addressing plastics in food."

"It's not the whole story, it's a decent part of the story, and we need to focus on where we can make progress," Trasande said.

Swan, as well, talked about going on unexpected media platforms, like her appearance on an episode of the popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast that looked at how plastics in food impact human hormone levels.

"Some people might not think that was a good idea but anyway, I was on with Joe Rogan and he was listening," Swan said. "He said, 'Do you mean that the toxins we're putting into the environment are endangering the future of the human race?' And I said yes."

"I am very interested in understanding how to get everyone to hear this message," she said. "I'm trying to make this message be heard, not only by you wonderful people who already have heard it, but the millions who are totally uninformed."