The question comes down to risk: Would you chance death in a fire today or via cancer 30 years hence?

We all have toxic chemicals such as fire retardants in our veins. And while that touches several nerves, much of the raw emotion centers on risk.

Or rather, our perception of risk.

With these chemicals posing unknown but potentially terrifying effects — a grisly death by cancer, sterility in your children or grandchildren — our intuitive response tends to overwhelm more reasoned scientific explanations, said David Ropeik of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis.

"What is it we're afraid of? They don't give us the runs, like food poisoning. They give us cancer," he said. "In most cases, the principal fear of these agents is they kill us in what we perceive to be a very nasty way."

Worse, we have no say over what enters our bodies. Whether or not you use Scotchgard offers little indication how much a key ingredient — perfluorooctane sulfate — contaminates your blood.
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Such lack of control increases fear, Ropeik said, much the way an aggressive driver clutches the dashboard should he become the hapless passenger of an equally truculent road warrior.

Three factors — scant data, no control and potential threat to our kids — make our chemical "body burden" a true headline-grabber, Ropeik suspects.

Not that it's bad, he adds. It's just easy to miss a larger threat.

The worry over possible contamination of, say, perfluorooctanoic acid in cardboard fast food containers pales when considered against health consequences of eating the fried meat inside, scientists say.

Robert Brent, professor of pediatrics, radiology and pathology at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and an expert on the effects of environmental factors such as radiation, drugs and chemicals on the developing embryo and child, finds such misplaced anxiety frustrating to no end.

Death comes to children in many forms, he said — but rarely from a few picograms of a compound in a kidney.

Of the 19,234 deaths reported among young adults age 20 to 24 in 2002, 14 percent came from murder. More than 17,000 people in 2003 died in an alcohol-related vehicle crash — 40 percent of all traffic fatalities.

"And you're worried about TCE (tetrachloroethylene) in a well?'' he asked. "Where is your perspective? A third of all children (who die) in the U.S. die in fires, and they die because the father or mother is downstairs drinking. And it isn't even a bad fire — it's smoke inhalation."

Ron Zumstein heads up health, safety and environment at Albemarle, the Louisiana-based company that's taken considerable flak for rising levels of its flame retardants in household dust, blood banks and wildlife.

He offers three words to those who would call for the ban of such compounds:

Gerry Model 602.

In 1989 the Gerry Co. redesigned its Model 602 baby monitor, moving the power supply — which can overheat — into the monitor while jettisoning the flame-retardant casing for a cheaper non-retardant plastic.

The new casing, a 1996 ABC News investigation found, saved Gerry Co. 12 cents a monitor.

But the flammable plastic also burned rapidly, producing toxic smoke and spreading the fire as it melted, according to ABC News. After receiving 400 complaints, Gerry again redesigned the monitor in 1990. The U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission issued a recall, but more than 1 million Model 602s already sold remained in use.

In 1993 in Davenport, Iowa, one ignited in the bedroom three-year-old Bradley Mercer shared with his 19-month-old brother, Travis, ABC reported. Their dad punched through a wall to get to Travis. Choking smoke kept him from reaching Bradley.

"Finding it in the environment — we don't brush that off as an unimportant issue," Zumstein said.

"But flame retardants do provide a very important purpose."

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