Two important releases on flame retardants

Below are excerpts from two interesting articles from yesterday:
1. A news article about chlorinated tris flame retardants in Ikea furniture from Slate
2. A press release from a UC Berkeley study showing that pentaBDE, used in furniture and baby product foam, may alter human thyroid function which, in pregnant women, may impact birth outcomes.

Arlene

My Ikea Couch Reeks of Chemicals:
Why are flame retardants required in furniture, anyway?
By Florence Williams
http://www.slate.com/id/2255573/pagenum/all/#p2

Here are a couple excerpts form the Slate article:
Why do we need flame retardants in the first place, you might ask? ..... manufacturers make gobs of money selling flame retardants, and they've successfully lobbied for laws that mandate them......
The flame retardants that meet California's standard can delay the ignition of a fire by a few seconds. But when the furniture does burn, stand back. "Treated furniture takes several seconds longer to burn but can generate much more carbon monoxide, toxic gases, soot, and smoke. That's what kills people, so it's possibly more dangerous with the flame retardant chemical than without," says Arlene Blum, a chemist and executive director of the Green Policy Science Institute in Berkeley. ......

A better solution one would be to change California's outdated flammability standards.... The best ways to save lives from fire are to install working fire alarms and to quit smoking, and enough Americans have done those to reduce fire fatalities by half in recent decades. In addition, most states in the United States now require cigarettes to self-extinguish. Reforming California's standard won't be easy, says Blum, who first published her findings on the health hazards of brominated tris as the lead article in Science more than 30 years ago. She has led the first American expedition to climb Annapurna and walked 2,000 miles across the Himalayas; she says both were easier than fighting the chemical industry over flammability laws.

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Flame retardant chemicals may alter thyroid function < http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2010/06/21/common-chemicals-may-alter... >

Flame retardant chemicals found in a wide variety of products may affect the function of the thyroid gland, according to a study published Monday by Jonathan Chevrier, Brenda Eskenazi and others at UC Berkeley.

Researchers examined 270 pregnant women, checking the level of PBDEs in their bloodstream, and the level of TSH, a hormone linked to thyroid function. On average, higher levels of PBDEs were linked to lower TSH levels – which means that women with a high PBDE exposure tended to have overly active thyroid glands. (The lower the TSH level, the more active the thyroid gland).

Results suggest that exposure to PBDEs is associated with lower TSH during pregnancy. Findings may have implications for maternal health and fetal development.

The study < http://ehponline.org/article/info:doi/10.1289/ehp.1001905> is published in the journal “Environmental Health Perspectives.”

The final sentence of the paper:
"Although maternal clinical hyperthyroidism has been associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes such as preeclampsia, premature births and low birth weight, few data are available on the direct effects of maternal subclinical hyperthyroidism on fetal and child development. In future analyses, we thus intend to examine whether subclinical hyperthyroidism and maternal exposure to PBDEs are associated with these outcomes."