A California safety standard intended to prevent furniture from catching fire may be having the unintended consequence of exposing children to large amounts of harmful flame retardant chemicals.
That assessment comes from a study of seven-year-old, first-generation Mexican American children from California’s Salinas Valley. The study, led by researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, found that the seven-year-olds had levels of flame retardants in their blood seven times higher than children in Mexico and three times higher than their own mothers.
In fact, as Environmental Health News reports, the Salinas Valley children had more of the chemicals — known as PBDEs, or polybrominated diphenyl ethers –in their blood than almost all other adults and children ever tested worldwide.
“Only Nicaraguan children who lived and worked on hazardous waste sites had higher reported levels of PBDEs in their bodies than the California children,” study leader Brenda Eskenazi of UC Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Research and Children’s Health, said in a news release.
Large amounts of PBDEs have been used in the United States, particularly in California, to meet a state standard for furniture adopted in the 1970s. Furniture foam sold in California must withstand 12 seconds of flame without catching fire.
The new study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, compared PBDE levels in 264 first-generation Mexican American children from the Salinas Valley with 283 youngsters in Mexico. To narrow differences between the groups of youngsters evaluated, the researchers focused on children whose mothers came from the same regions of Mexico as the Mexican children in the study.
The major source of the PBDE exposure among the California children is believed to be household dust that was laced with flame retardants released by old, deteriorating furniture.
Part of the problem is that furniture is used for long periods of time, and their flame retardants “are not chemically bound to the materials they’re used with,” said Asa Bradman, one of the study’s co-authors. “As polyurethane foam and other materials containing the flame retardants age and degrade, they can release PBDEs into people’s homes in the form of dust. And scientists know that when you have persistent pollutants in dust, they get into children.”
Researchers believe that prolonged exposure to PBDEs can cause thyroid problems and infertility.
On the other hand, the same study looked at levels of DDT and one of its byproducts in the children and found that the Salinas Valley children had lower levels of the chemicals than their Mexican counterparts. DDT has been outlawed in the U.S. since 1972, but wasn’t phased out in Mexico until 2000.
