Something in the water?
Male frogs living in Greater Hartford, Connecticut, ponds are exhibiting female sex traits, and a Yale professor wants to know why. David Skelly, professor of ecology, is conducting a study on hermaphrodites, which are proliferating in Connecticut ponds. "Amphibians living in Connecticut neighborhoods show abnormal sexual development at very high frequencies," says Skelly. "Something about these environments is causing these vertebrates to develop an illness that is otherwise uncommon."
Over the past decade Skelly has been making progress in answering the many questions raised by frog deformities. (For a Yale Alumni Magazine report, see "The Frog Mystery.") Now, a two-year, $30,000 grant from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving will help fund the study of suburban and urban neighborhoods in the Hartford area, which will include the physical examination of the common green frog, Rana clamitans, and water testing for pharmaceuticals and pesticides. Area homeowners will also be surveyed about their use of chemicals.
While Skelly has not found a direct link between illness in amphibians and human health, he said, "The fact remains that they are vertebrates like us and share similar physiological and developmental pathways. Such animals can serve as sentinels for human health risks."
The plastics inside you
A new book by an environment school professor exploring the health risks to humans of some chemicals contains a lengthy chapter dealing with the impact plastics have had on our lives. John Wargo ’84PhD, professor of environmental risk analysis and policy, warns of the extraordinary pervasiveness of chemicals in our environment in Green Intelligence: Creating Environments That Protect Human Health (Yale University Press).
Products made from plastic have had considerable benefits, from safer food storage and water delivery to increases in energy efficiency and durability. But Wargo, whose career has been dedicated to investigating the effects of chemicals on women and children—work that helped inspire the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996—provides a thorough review of the extensive research showing that all of us now carry molecules that started off in plastics but wound up, via a number of routes, inside our bodies. And despite the long-standing insistence by the chemical industry and federal watchdogs, such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, that these substances pose no risks to human health, a growing number of scientists, along with several legislators and a wide array of environmental organizations, now insist otherwise. The molecules of concern in the plastics story are known as endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and the two most-studied sources of EDCs are Bisphenol A (BPA), a basic building block of hard, polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins, and phthalates, which are added to plastics to make them more pliable.
To be sure, in a situation reminiscent of the early days of the tobacco and health debate, there's no smoking gun—no accepted cause-and-effect mechanism. "But the absence of that kind of evidence is not the absence of risk," says Wargo.
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