These studies use breast milk as a convenient, noninvasive means of estimating body burdens of these POPs in the mother, fetus, infant, and child. They illustrate the global interest in children's environmental health, particularly from exposures to POPs, whose stability makes them intrinsically hazardous, and hint at the formidable challenges, both scientific and nonscientific, that await researchers undertaking such studies.
Breast milk is an ideal medium for assessing exposures to POPs.
POPs enter humans largely as contaminants of dietary animal products, where they sequester in adipose tissue, serum, and breast milk and equilibrate at similar levels on a fat weight basis. Breast milk mimics sediments of rivers or lakes as a storage reservoir for POPs, serves as an indicator of past human exposures or environmental conditions, and complements environmental monitoring data in air, water, soil, and food. POPs can be especially hazardous because, once released into the environment, they invariably end up in breast milk and in the infant. Time-trend data from BMMPs indicate the effectiveness of regulatory actions and provide early warning of POP chemicals of emerging concern. There are no BMMPs to determine past or present PBDE levels or time trends in the United States.