Health
Baby and Me and DDT
Mother’s milk used to be the healthiest food for babies. Then pesticides spoiled everything.
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Ed Gomes checked to see that the tiny bottle of milk was thoroughly thawed. He weighed out seven grams of milk into a centrifuge bottle while I looked for a chair, settled in, and began to nurse my fussy baby as inconspicuously as circumstances would allow. Most of the sample would be examined for chemicals, but a small part would be used to determine the percentage of lipids in my milk. The lipid content is important because the pesticide residues—“if any,” as Ed reiterated—would be measured against the lipids in the milk. He added acetone to the bottle, then put it in a centrifuge to separate out the solids.
After taking the sample out of the centrifuge, he filtered the liquid through a separatory funnel, an elegant piece of glassware shaped like an inverted teardrop. What came out of the funnel was a clear-looking acetone solution. “The pesticides, if there are any, are in the acetone now,” Ed explained. “We’ll repeat the whole process two more times to make sure we’ve got them all.” After that, he added a mixture of hexane and water to the solution, shook it, and let it separate out like vinegar and oil. Somewhere in the watery hexane was my milk and the pesticides.
Several other complicated steps followed, then Ed discarded part of the solution, transferred part into other vessels, and held back part for the lipid test. Despite his patient elucidation, I had the impression I was watching a skillfully played shell game: “Your milk is in this flask, and now…it’s in this beaker. Now, in this test tube over here.” All along I was convinced, wrongly of course, that it had been poured down the drain hours ago.
Finally he put a small portion into a glass column to filter out the first of the pesticides. This first “fraction” would contain any signs of dieldrin. He would filter two more fractions, each of which would carry within it a group of chemicals he was testing for. The purpose of this elaborate procedure was to set up the contents of my milk in known sequences so Ed could run them through a machine called a gas chromatograph.
While we waited, Ed extracted a little glass cup from an oven. An almost invisible film coated the glass; that film was the lipids in my milk. The percentage was lower than ordinary, the average being about 3 to 3.5 per cent. Mine registered only 1.7. After some speculation about how I had reared a 21-pound four-month-old on low-fat milk, we decided Jeff either ate too often or else this sample was the watery “fore” milk from the early half of a feeding; the “hind” milk, which is produced late in a feeding, is fattier.
Vaughn brought a small tube of clear liquid—what remained of my milk—into the room containing the gas chromatographs; these machines measure minute amounts of chemicals, then transcribe the measurements onto graph paper. He injected some of the contents into one gas chromatograph and an equal dose into another machine. He would check the graphs from both against each other to verify the accuracy of each machine, and then compare those to the model patterns made by the chromatography of “Standard 10,” a sample made up of known quantities of the pesticides the lab is investigating.
Vaughn held Jeff while Ed and I hovered over the paper as the first fraction rolled off. Ed measured the ink peaks on the graph paper. Something that looked like a pesticide registered on the first machine, but the other failed to match it. “If it’s not exactly the same on both machines, it doesn’t count,” Ed asserted. No dieldrin.
Vaughn gave the baby back to me and “shot” the second fraction. The needle moved slowly over the steady outpouring of paper. No HCB, no Mirex. But a little series of four bumps caught Ed’s attention. He measured their height and the distance between them. Then he checked the pattern forming on the sister machine. They both indicated PCBs. Polychlorinated biphenyls. “The amount is very, very small,” Ed said. By his calculations, less than 11.7 parts per billion. “Remember what I told you?” he asked. “One part per billion, if you can picture it, is one one-thousandth of a teaspoon of sugar in a boxcar full of sand—twenty tons of sand. One teaspoon is about one part per million.” He tried to impress upon me how small an amount that was. It didn’t help.
All I could think of was how careful I am about what I eat and what chemicals I expose myself to, but I should have suspected that no amount of virtuous living could make me immune to some contamination. The insecticides on Ed’s list and the PCBs are old chemicals, still hanging around in the environment, some after nearly forty years. The DDT derivatives are so pervasive that trying to figure out the source of one’s exposure to them is futile. I had been exposed to Western civilization—that’s about as specific as I could get.
I asked Ed and Vaughn to put these unexpected findings into perspective for me, but the analyses of the Milk Study had just begun. They couldn’t interpret for me. I would have to compare my numbers to those of the 1975-76 study. Even then, no one could tell me if the levels in my milk are going to harm my baby. Suddenly I felt too tired and disheartened to wait for the third fraction to play out on the graph paper. My back ached from holding the baby, I had run out of diapers hours ago, and the ink needle on the chromatograph didn’t seem to be moving perceptibly. Ed offered to finish the test that evening and I gratefully accepted his plan.
That night at the Holiday Inn, I lay in bed in the dark, the baby curled up close to me nursing. When I put my sleeping baby in his crib and went back to bed, the first tiny doubt entered my mind. Should I be nursing this baby? Should I give up this dearest of relationships and run out now and buy a can of Similac?
The next morning I found the irrepressible Mr. Gomes looking tired but working away. In blue jeans and a gimme cap with a chemical brand name appliquéd over the bill, he looked a bit more like a Little League coach (which he has been) than a chemist. He showed me the readout for the last fraction: DDE (a derivative of DDT), a little less than 12 ppb. Ed’s youngest son, Michael, called asking for advice about transplanting pepper plants. It gave Ed and me an excuse to talk about his opinion of pesticides.
“I use them,” he told me. “If you’ve ever tried to grow vegetables, you know you need them.” I confessed to using Sevin dust on my own garden. Michael called again. I said good-bye. Ed needed to get back to his tests; I wanted to get back to Austin.
Bad news followed me home. A few weeks after my trip to San Benito, I talked to Ed Gomes on the phone. He was concerned that the low lipid content of my milk may have given us a false reading on the pesticide content. I sent him another sample, this one taken after a feeding, containing milk we hoped would show a higher fat content. It did. The butterfat rose to 3.64 per cent, more than double the previous count. The pesticides residues rose too: p,p′-DDE (50.4 ppb), p,p′-DDT (0.690 ppb, well below the WHO maximum level), dieldrin (2.63 ppb), beta-BHC (6.74 ppb), HCB (0.670 ppb), oxychlordane (2.08 ppb), trans-nonachlor (3.59 ppb), and PCB (35.0 ppb).
My initial reaction was shock. I spent the rest of that afternoon feeling uncomfortable in my body, like some kind of leper. When I finally realized I couldn’t postpone nursing my baby, I decided the only choice was to come to terms with this new information. I talked with Gomes again and he explained how I could mathematically adjust my whole-milk amounts and compare the fat-adjusted figures to those in the 1975-76 Human Milk Study from the Southwest Region, so I started doing some quick division. PCBs were not investigated in the study so I had nothing to go on there. In the other categories, for whatever solace it provided, I didn’t register at the high end of the ranges. If I had to be contaminated, at least I wasn’t highly contaminated. I just hoped it was good enough.
I told my pediatrician at Jeff’s four-months checkup what I had found out in San Benito. He said, “I’d like to tell you not to worry, but, of course, that’s not very practical. You’ll worry anyway. But I can tell you what the American Academy of Pediatrics has to say about pesticides in milk and I agree with them.” What they say is that when mother and infant are healthy, breastfeeding is the preferred form of infant nutrition in the absence of any evidence that low-level pesticide residues present short-term health hazards. They concede that the long-term effects are not known.
That’s the catch: what constitutes a low level and how long is long-term? “High” levels of PCBs, as demonstrated in the Kyushu, Japan, epidemic in 1968, cause chloracne (cola-colored skin), ocular discharge, enervation, hypotonia, apathy, and other even vaguer symptoms in infants. Dioxin’s minute quantities apparently cause liver disease, depression, irritability, miscarriages, and birth defects. But no one has determined the effects of small amounts of DDE, PCBs, HCB, or any of the other pesticide acronyms, whether in infants or in their mothers. And because the traces of these chemicals are so widespread (DDE and PCBs are now the most common pollutants in the world), and my children will undoubtedly ingest or absorb them without any help from me, and because the amounts in my milk are so small, I will continue to breast-feed my baby, although I’ll never feel quite the same about it.
Whenever Jeff has a grumpy day now for no apparent reason, I worry that he might be feeling the insidious effects of those “low-level” residues. Though I have never been a great meat-eater, I have given up even more in an effort to get off the top of the food chain, where the largest concentration of chemicals accumulates. I read labels and reject foods grown in areas of the country that I know are chemical hot spots. But there’s no escaping some contamination—it is irrevocably part of the world my sons have inherited from me.
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