(NADD)
Hormone-disrupting chemicals pose a threat to public health, so policymakers and scientists should work to improve their understanding of the compounds' connection to health problems, a scientific organization said yesterday.
The Endocrine Society said there is enough scientific evidence to warrant reducing public exposure to endocrine disrupters.
"In the absence of direct information regarding cause and effect, the precautionary principle is critical to enhancing reproductive and endocrine health," the group's report concludes.
The report is the group's first scientific statement on the matter. The group says it will lobby for regulation of the chemicals, which it says have been linked to reproductive disorders, breast cancer, obesity, diabetes and neuro-endocrine disorders.
Definitively connecting the chemicals to health problems is not easy, the group concedes, since people are exposed to many industrial chemicals.
The group is urging researchers to take basic experimental data and connect them with human observations to better understand causal connections between endocrine disrupters and health problems. The focus, it says, should be on pregnant women and developing fetuses.
The report was released at an annual meeting of endocrinologists in Washington, where scientists presented new research on one endocrine disrupter, bisphenol A, or BPA, which is used in many plastics.
In one BPA study, the University of Cincinnati found that exposure to the chemical caused improperly controlled heartbeats in female rodents. Another study using monkeys suggests that people are likely exposed to BPA at much higher levels than is considered safe by regulatory agencies, while a third found that BPA exposure caused a fertility defect in pregnant mice.
The American Chemistry Council, a leading trade group, questioned the scientific validity of the three reports, saying animal testing and cell culture studies have "very limited value" for determining human health effects.
"Bypassing the scientific process in favor of sensational press releases is a scare tactic that will not promote public health," the industry group said.
Because of the intrinsic difficulties in performing human studies, though, animal studies are a critical way to understand exposure pathways and outcomes, the BPA researchers wrote.