The Crisis in Clean Water: New Solutions 2009 s1

Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions

Providing Safe Foods: Flooding of farmland does not increase levels of potentially harmful flame retardants in milk

Combating disease . . . promoting public health … providing clean water and safe food . . . developing new sources of energy . . . confronting climate change. Hello, from the American Chemical Society — the ACS. Our more than 163,000 members make up the world’s largest scientific society. This is “Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions: New Solutions 2011.” Global Challenges 2011 updates the ACS’ award-winning podcast series. In 2011, we are focusing on the four themes of the International Year of Chemistry: health, energy, environment and materials. Today’s solution provides a reassuring message—although potentially harmful flame retardants build up in flooded rivers, that doesn’t translate to harmful levels in milk from cows that consume the grass in these flood-prone areas.

As millions of acres of farmland in the U.S. Midwest and South recover from Mississippi River flooding, scientists report that river flooding can increase levels of potentially harmful flame retardants in farm soils. But the higher levels apparently do not find their way into the milk produced by cows that graze on these lands, according to a study in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Here’s the study’s lead author Iain Lake, Ph.D., of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom …

“The flame retardants known as ‘PBDEs’ are found in a variety of common household products, including furniture upholstery, clothes, plastics and electrical equipment. These substances are increasingly associated with hormone disruption, neurotoxicity and even possibly with cancer.”

Fatty foods such as milk and meat accumulate PBDEs, making those foods a potentially significant source of the substances for humans.

Working along the River Trent in the U.K., the researchers examined whether PBDE levels in the soils, grass, and milk obtained from grazing cows would differ between flood-prone and non-flooded farms along the river. While flood-prone fields contained significantly higher levels of PBDE from river sediments, this increase did not translate into higher PBDE levels in the grass growing in the soils.

"We found no clear evidence that the grazing of dairy cattle on flood-prone pastures on an urban and industrial river system leads to elevated PBDE levels in milk."

Smart Chemists/Innovative Thinking

Smart chemists. Innovative thinking. That’s the key to solving global challenges of the 21st Century. Please check out more of our full-length podcasts on wide-ranging issues facing chemistry and science, such as promoting public health, developing new fuels and confronting climate change, at www.acs.org/GlobalChallenges.Today’s podcast was written by Katie Cottingham. I’m Adam Dylewski at the American Chemical Society in Washington.