It's not easy to get blood from an 18-month-old.

Doctors want a good reason before drawing a drop. But scientists need a lot of blood to detect trace environmental contaminants.

That was a chief hurdle confronting InsideBayArea's nine-month investigation of consumer and industrial contaminants in our bodies.

We picked the Hammond Hollands because the family lives at one end of the consumer-chemicals spectrum — they eat organic, avoid common household cleaners and pesticides, don't have wall-to-wall carpets or large new appliances. If anybody has a reduced body burden, odds were good it would be them. Or so we thought.

The family's age and geographic diversity also appealed to scientists studying environmental health. Five-year-old Mikaela is in kindergarten, with different exposure to environmental toxins than Rowan, who still breast feeds. Michele, 36 and a fourth-generation Californian, works at a university lab. Jeremiah, 35 and an East Coast native, teaches high
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school. Both have lived in Berkeley since 1991.

Contaminants tested were a mix of the well-known (PCBs and metals), the relatively new (polybrominated diphenyl ethers and phthalates), and the cutting edge (perfluorinated compounds). We did not test for other common toxins such as pesticides, dioxins and solvents.

Protocol and consent forms
AXYS Results
Bergman Data
Frontier GeoSciences Data


Enter the research ethics board.

Government- or university-funded research using human subjects needs approval from such a board, whose members are charged solely with protecting study participants' rights and well-being.

We did not need such approval but sought it after several scientists said a newspaper-sponsored project should, in fairness, play by the same rules.

Independent Review Consulting Inc., a commercial ethics board in Marin County, conducted the review. "By doing this according to the same standards as a regular physician investigator or toxicology investigator … you're not going to deviate from the standards established by the scientific community," advised Dr. Greg Koski, former head of the federal Office of Human Research Protections and who now handles ethical, legal and political issues regarding human research at Harvard University.

That's where testing a toddler became an issue. Facing a skeptical board, the paper wrote up a 22-page protocol justifying the research and outlining its methodology, including how much blood would be drawn. The Hammond Hollands were given the option to back out at any time prior to publication. The newspaper paid for a follow-up visit to a specialty clinic at University of California, San Francisco's Mount Zion Hospital and continues to make other counselors and advisers available.

AXYS Analytical Services Ltd. in Sydney, British Columbia, analyzed blood and urine samples. Frontier GeoSciences in Seattle analyzed hair for metals. All told, the newspaper spent $17,000 on the project.

The small quantity of blood available from Rowan pushed the limits of detection technologies, said Laurie Phillips of AXYS. Five to 10 years ago, such analyses were beyond scientists' grasp.

Here the story would've ended had the family not tested so high for PBDEs, a fire retardant. Consensus among scientists consulted was unanimous: test the family.

With PBDE data showing unprecedented levels, Swedish researcher Aake Bergman, one of the scientists at Stockholm University's Department of Environmental Chemistry who first alerted the world to growing levels of PBDEs in breast milk, and his colleague, Maria Athanasiadou, agreed to retest the entire family for PBDEs.

Their results confirmed AXYS' numbers, with one exception: a type of PBDE known as "decaBDE" and used mostly — but not always — in plastic appliances. He found lower levels in the family.

DecaBDE, notoriously difficult to detect, is different from other PBDEs, accumulating in fat but purging rapidly from blood. Although contamination cannot be ruled out, Bergman surmised the family received a high dose prior to September, when the paper first tested the family. Much of that was gone by December, when the family was retested.

Regardless, follow-up tests confirmed the children's levels of both decaBDE and total PBDEs were higher than what Bergman finds in Swedish workers exposed daily to the compounds.

"These numbers" he said, "are real."

To read more of A Body's Burden, visit www.insidebayarea.com/bodyburden/.