products they have a serious impact on health development and environment and they are found everywhere a major issue is how three m and du pont producers of these chemicals failed to reveal the toxicity data for decades the concealment made it very difficult for scientists to evaluate these chemicals to explain all this we have one of the leading investigators in this area of research groucho is a physician and prominent scientists he's a professor and chair of environmental medicine at the university of southern denmark and also adjunct professor at environmental health at the harvard chand school of public health he's also coeditor of the journal environmental health he's also the author of only one chance how environmental pollution impairs brain development and how to protect the brains of the next generation as an international expert on the impact of humor as industrial toxins on brain development and neurodegenerative diseases john and his research colleagues have over the decades urged the medical community and regulatory agencies to address many urgent talks and issues recently dr graham schoen published an editorial in the environmental health news about three m and du pont concealment of data on performer unaided compounds and this article has been widely cited in the media we are most fortunate to have him with us tonight to discuss the issue and give us the facts we're very honored to welcome dr phil the russian welcome i'm happy to be here so dr question could you give us a little background to start with what are these chemicals and what are they found damn well chemically if it's like a chain of carbon atoms set up pound together and then that molecule is wrapped in in fro m so and the it's a very tight bonding and that means that the molecule is essentially  the body for many many years and and for that reason you know as we age we seem to accumulate more yeah and so there's an age where patients ship now what are they found in well they they come from a variety of sources and some of them i do grab for example if you up buying microwave pop yeah then the popcorn is wrapped in a plastic bag and that's what you put your microwave yeah at that plastic back has to have some you know chemical physical properties and you can achieve that by using these p fine textile so and the problem is that these compounds also turn up in house dust because you wear them off they also come from your raincoat yeah that is protected by by these compounds so you don't get know you have to use this form forming and fire extinguishing material and that's what these compounds are used fire and in in the military i've seen pictures of this the the soldiers  firefighters whatever they are i've seen them walking around in fold up to you know that nexus nationally and then where does it go afterward that well it is somewhat water soluble  and that's very unfortunate that means that it seeps through the sorrow into the groundwater and and in america and in many other countries there are numerous cases where we can see that this is been going on for decades nobody thought about it nobody thought where these compounds going after the fire well and then suddenly somebody discovers that the people who  nearby and that get there either their own well so it's community supply and water then they turn out to have enormous concentrations of these compounds in that bodies and and the problem is we can't get it out yeah but the unfortunate thing is that women will also pass on these compounds to the foetus because they pass the placenta they even appear in human milk and we have examined blood samples from infants and and we can see that the bhangra they are breastfed the higher the blood concentration of these compounds so so that a child let's say after six months  of exclusive breastfeeding and the child may have as much as ten times the concentration that the mother has because hers has dropped a little bit and then all of that is being distributed in a much smaller body distribution for and so the concentration gets higher and and that is quite a call in my mind because you know when when we develop all organ functions and the immune health and development do they do these things affect it we have come to understand that these multi organ poisons so they affect a lot of things and we've found out that they are in body she's incapable of breastfeeding for very long and of course that protects the feeders i mean the infant from from getting a high concentration but on the other hand if she wants to breast feed her child it means  really a catch twenty two dollars right it's ironic and and unfortunately it's the feeders it's the infant dad is taken hostage yeah right yes and and and and so make sure before we leave this that there are a list of diseases like possibly parkinson's a whole the slew of things that it affects ill effects development and that's one of your speciality is will come back to  and and it looks like they had if you have more of these compounds in your body you're more likely to develop diabetes what we call type two diabetes which is sort of a demick in this country of course and and and you know we have a diabetes epidemic and what we don't know for sure is you know how large a role to these compounds play a bit but it looks like it it could be very significant and what they did to that it also seems that these compounds interfere with your metabolism so that you have difficulty losing weight i mean if you feel if you're trying to get your weight down a little bit and a study that was p for recently in which i participated we showed that he people who have been through a diet with calorie restriction and managed to lose weight those people who had  that this could be part of the explanation we know we have an obesity epidemic and it's kind of strange because we also know that the because we're been preaching good that you know you need to eat to eat healthy and people exercise we still see that as more of the city and so the concern is that these compounds are actually making the situation was just on that the fact that you see so many children who are obese in that that that's unusual to have that early in life do you think that that might be related also that it's not just what they're eating and well i mean i certainly don't i certainly do i think because of all the and i mean this is a concern that we may not see everything joined the time span i mean if we're lucky we get a research grant for five years but but i'm not sure that yeah maybe we have to follow this up pieces of the jigsaw puzzle and and we think that this fits into a particular picture and we were concerned about it then in my mind if we're talking about lifetime that to secure a healthier life for the next generation and but we're sort of looking at this in the same way as we have been looking at the actual poison his words much easier to get the evidence it's it's an ongoing battle right one more thing as a did i read in that the environmental health news that the editorial or one of your other articles that this affects immunize ations as this is like an intervention that everybody gets and they get the same dose at about the same age and therefore it is very meaningful to measure the end about a concentration so if you get a shot and the immune cells will develop antibodies that are specific for ten and so and we have an ass a to make sure of that yeah and what we could see was sad that with these childhood  response to the fact scene is stalled and and some of the kids don't even make it is so that there is anybody sufficient anybody to protect them and i don't think the tetanus is a big problem for that i mean why do the vaccination use if they know what i mean the idea is of course bad we want all the kids to have lifetime protection and you know to respond optimally to the vaccine and now we're  saying we can see ed not all of the kids do and especially those with high concentrations of preferred it compounds in the body they don't do what we expect them to do which means maybe we have to vaccinate them again  develop asthma or allergies and again we had the beginning of that it seems that there may be some increased risk of developing as mount a certain circumstances but you know as my is it's not a single disease it's like a clinical pact a package of yeah several ways you can develop the asthma so so we don't have this in my mind sufficient evidence to understand fully what what's going on right and sort of you need the immune system to protect yourself against our cancer cells yeah that's what the immune system does and and yeah i mean that there is an increased risk for developing certain kinds of cancer we don't know why reason are developing you know a single cancer cell it's not being picked up by the moon system and then it can generate the disease it it's it's a hypothesis i don't know night but i hope that we will get to understand  let's say it's so complex at this point you need a lot more time and a maybe different ways of approaching because so complicated and meanwhile you're going to have these unhealthy populations because this is a worldwide thing i would like to ask now about this concealment of the information this is not widely known but you bring it you bring this out and now everybody is very interested not the st time such a thing happen could you tell us what happened and the impact on the scientific community which was your big point well you know there's free open research for the academic research and what the agencies apparently had some surprises that i think these go but was were not as safe as they believe them and thought they might be and and so we don't know very much about it because the environmental protection agency realized you know with many years of delay that this information existed and supposedly the companies should have reported this to they had excellent chemical and physical properties and they were very useful for certain purposes so why mess up the marketing strategy with information open the way don't drink there have been some lawsuits and in that regard the courts have released information about some of the documents that that surfaced in and i mean nobody knew about it i mean outside the the private sector and and therefore the research was not done and what happened to make this even worse was that when the e p a and other agencies eight even if it was in the public domain so it was not formally published in a journal or book but the report existed yeah and could have been retrieved from the e p a if you bring up that a court case brought out the evidence but as a very prominent scientist who spent his life working on this kind of stuff not having access to that information really seems like it handicapped you and your colleagues that and set you back what does it take i mean does it takes like a lot of a lawsuit to obtain the information is that it it's ironic i don't have the answer but i could tell you my personal feeling because we thought in two thousand and twelve when we published a paper on immunization in a large number of children that we could see these highly dramatic losses of antibodies we thought that we had made a scary ready and important scientific discovery now what i didn't and in a way i hate when pricked worley hard we followed these kids from the moment they were born we got a lot samples from the in public record and then we follow them up i think these are the day that they were from ages five and team seventy eight and you needed to be working on this that would have been extremely helpful too if there was an indication that you knew about before nine hundred and eighty you would have had at least twenty years to be working on this stuff more than that you know to write to me working on just follow children exactly i mean we were naive in that we we thought that these compounds were stable and not we active and therefore they're probably not that they are now in our fish yet they are in the drinking water everywhere asa nation and not everywhere but that in many many places very high concentration and and we just can't get them out of there so because this was information was not available to was and the agencies didn't didn't push as hard as a perhaps could have done and this information was sort of kept in the background and and you know my colleagues and myself i mean we had no idea right and so so there's one number one there is a sort of loss to science in that we put back precision all i can do is to tell you the bad news i can't tell you i write this prescription it's no way i am doing exactly the it my impression is that the that the these agencies the protective agencies which are under attack here  now with the with the kind of a political mentality that we don't need regulations so that's going to be one handicap but it's my impression from you is that scientists really count on these regulatory agencies so two things is that true it's hard you really count on them getting information for you from industries secondly is this a worldwide problem like in the science and there's now a movement from the e p a that they want to put with strict sions on the kind of science that they were lie on and i mean if those rules had been in place thirty years ago we would still have lagged in gasoline and we couldn't have done all those things so i think that that's i simply don't understand it i mean it's beyond me how can anybody propose something like that that moment i try to appear as an advocate for some policy then i want to centrally be labeled for as somebody who favors a particular policy and then i lose my neutrality i mean i i want to be an impartial scientist because that's the only way i can convince you as a taxpayer i can convince hopefully  your into your question about the international aspects and then i think i believe that the e u is in front of america by now because   the the country or the euro piano union or whatever that has the strictest regulation that they can help inspire that to become more international big because my understanding that they can export this from america when vice versa and i think that we somehow need to insist that science should and but it's just everywhere this is a result of the global promotion and i think that we saw it with d d t yes set this which was a very stable compound we will ice this is fantastic we only need to spray against mosquitoes let's say once a year every nd year or something like that and now these compounds we use them to protect our couch and our wall to wall carpet and it will  severe price that that may not be obvious at yes i am sorry that we are out of time this is really wonderful information and i appreciate so much your coming in and talking to us and i wish