Your Baby Drinks Rocket Fuel — Courtesy Of The EPA
by Spence Cooper on 08/04/09 at 7:43 pm
A baby having milk from a bottle.
What an outrage. Last year it was the FDA cover-up of toxic melamine in US baby formula, this year it’s rocket fuel, courtesy of the EPA.
Fifteen different brands of baby formula are contaminated with rocket fuel and rocket fuel (Perchlorate) is in the drinking water of at least 35 states. Keith-Thomas Ayoob, a professor of pediatrics said the findings are “disturbing” and “a wake-up call to municipalities to clean up their water supplies.…”
“Infants fed cow’s milk-based powdered formula could be exposed to perchlorate from two sources — tap water and formula,” said Anila Jacob, a senior scientist with the Environmental Working Group. “That suggests that millions of American babies are potentially at risk.”
Despite the EPA stand that levels of perchlorate are safe, Anila Jacob, with the Environmental Working Group urged the EPA to regulate perchlorate in water; but the EPA sees no need for regulations because according to the agency, regulation offers no “meaningful opportunity for health risk reduction.”
“The widespread penetrance of these products, and the potential for utilization of water for reconstitution that has even minimal concentrations of perchlorate,” the [CDC] researchers write, “suggest that a significant number of infants consuming bovine milk-based [powdered infant formula] with lactose, will have perchlorate doses in excess of the [recommended limit].”
Even if we were to take naive solace in the mainstream medical community’s downplay of the health risks, and their pronounced “safe levels” of rocket fuel, the gamble of exposing an infant to the chemical’s cumulative exposure in both water and baby formula is totally unacceptable.
“Considered in isolation, these perchlorate concentrations in formula are not concerning for child health,” Sathyanarayana wrote in an e-mail to ABC News. “The reason that some may be concerned about health effects to children is that there are several sources of perchlorate in our environment … and, therefore, the cumulative dose of perchlorate to an infant may be much higher than that found in the formula.”
Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control claim they tested infant formula for perchlorate content because of concerns that the chemical can damage thyroid function. Their findings were published last month in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology. If the CDC is concerned that the rocket fuel your baby is drinking may cause damage to thyroid function, why is all this baby formula still on the market? ABC reports the two brands with the highest levels — more than double that of the other milk-based products — command 87 percent of the market share for infant formula, yet the report does not specify the brand names of any formula tested. The public has a right to know all brand names! Where is the outrage?
The highest levels of perchlorate were found in formulas derived from cow’s milk, the researchers found. Here’s a question — how does rocket fuel end up in cow’s milk and our nation’s water supply in the first place?
