Interacting Risks – endocrine effects of a compound used in many antibacterial bar soaps

Related articles

• Relative Risk, One Result at a Time -Evidence mounts for endocrine effects of a compound used in many antibacterial bar soaps by Anna Lena Phillips at American ScientistWhy are endocrine-disrupting antibacterials still on the shelves?(sfgate.com)
• Phthalates and BPA: Of Mice and Men (sciencebasedmedicine.org)
• TOXMAP: Learn about toxic chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing (jflahiff.wordpress.com)
• New Way to Assess Risk from Chemicals (InnovationToronto.com)
• Environmental Toxins (education.com)

Related Resources

As the article notes, there are studies of the effects and hazards of single chemicals, but not many on chemical interactions

Here are a few free reputable resources on chemical hazards
— All (and more!) available at Toxnet (US National Library of Medicine)

• Household Products – This database links over 8,000 consumer brands to health effects from Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) provided by the manufacturers and allows scientists and consumers to research products based on chemical ingredients.
• Toxline – Extensive array of references to literature on biochemical, pharmacological, physiological, and toxicological effects of drugs and other chemicals.
• LactMed – A peer-reviewed and fully referenced database of drugs to which breastfeeding mothers may be exposed. Among the data included are maternal and infant levels of drugs, possible effects on breastfed infants and on lactation, and alternate drugs to consider.
• TOXMAP – Environmental Health e-Maps. Geographic representation of TRI data with links to other TOXNET resources.

Upstream

From American Scientist:

When research suggests that a single chemical may cause harm, public concern rises, as it has for the plastic additive bisphenol A (BPA) in recent years. But many more of the 83,000 or so humanmade chemicals used in the United States receive little attention. The possible effects of chemicals in combination get still less scrutiny, even though the potential that some chemicals will interact is high, given their numbers.

This may be due in part to the staggering amount of work required to discern those effects. It would be a very difficult task to keep up with research on all of these substances, much less evaluate their relative risk as new results appear. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has put considerable effort into this under the Toxic Substances Control Act, but the Act has not been updated since its passage in 1976 and excludes many substances…

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UCSF team finds new source of immune cells during pregnancy

Joseph M. McCune, MD, Ph.D. is a researcher at University of California – San Francisco.

From a December 16, 2010 Eureka news alert

UCSF researchers have shown for the first time that the human fetal immune system arises from an entirely different source than the adult immune system, and is more likely to tolerate than fight foreign substances in its environment.

The finding could lead to a better understanding of how newborns respond to both infections and vaccines, and may explain such conundrums as why many infants of HIV-positive mothers are not infected with the disease before birth, the researchers said.

It also could help scientists better understand how childhood allergies develop, as well as how to manage adult organ transplants, the researchers said. The findings are described in the Dec. 17 issue of Science and at www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6011/1695.full.html.

(Accompanying scientific commentary: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6011/1635.full.html)

Until now, the fetal and infant immune system had been thought to be simply an immature form of the adult system, one that responds differently because of a lack of exposure to immune threats from the environment. The new research has unveiled an entirely different immune system in the fetus at mid-term that is derived from a completely different set of stem cells than the adult system.

“In the fetus, we found that there is an immune system whose job it is to teach the fetus to be tolerant of everything it sees, including its mother and its own organs,” said Joseph M. McCune, MD, PhD, a professor in the UCSF Division of Experimental Medicine who is a co-senior author on the paper. “After birth, a new immune system arises from a different stem cell that instead has the job of fighting everything foreign.”

The team previously had discovered that fetal immune systems are highly tolerant of cells foreign to their own bodies and hypothesized that this prevented fetuses from rejecting their mothers’ cells during pregnancy and from rejecting their own organs as they develop….