THE MORNING SHOW
with
Patrick Timpone

Shanna H. Swan, Ph.D.

Chemicals and Our Health

Topic: The Disappearing Male:How environmental toxins are affecting testosterone levels, sperm counts, masculinity, penis size, semen quality, etc

Our environment is now largely man-made. There are at least 85,000 chemicals in commerce today. The CDC now measures 148 chemicals in human blood and urine and many of these have the potential to affect our health through subtle pathways. These pollutants are everywhere – in our water, in our air, in our food – usually in tiny amounts. Even those that pass through our bodies rapidly (the “non-persistent” chemicals, like those in plastics) are of concern, because our exposure to them is ongoing. And those that cause changes when a fetus is developing may well be affecting health in childhood and beyond.

Traditional epidemiology measures effects of high exposures to a single agent (e.g. smoking), or with exposure occurring over a short time period (e.g. an industrial accident). We are only now learning how to measure effects of low-exposure/long-term factors, singly and in combination, and starting to identify substantial impacts on health. Cumulatively, the current chemical burden we are experiencing may pose one of the greatest risks to human health that we have faced. Dr. Swan’s work is to understand how to measure the effects of these environmental pollutants, and to document their effects on the health of the developing fetus, the child and the adult.

Dr. Swan has worked for over twenty-five years to understand the threats posed by chemicals to our environment and our health, and, when necessary, to develop new paradigms to assess their risks. Of most concern to her are the chemicals that our bodies can confuse with its own hormones (the “endocrine disrupting” chemicals). At the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Dept of Preventive Medicine, she is working with a wide range of collaborators, including epidemiologists, biostatisticians, toxicologists, geneticists and systems biologists, to conduct studies and develop methods to evaluate the risks from such chemicals — methods that are sensitive enough to tease out the often subtle health effects of complex mixtures.

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shanna swan phd, chemicals linked with fertility and organ formation issues, january 21, 2016