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Aug. 19th, 2015 12:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckMy sister thinks she's identified the environmental factor that led to our cancer. Apparently the statewide PBB contamination in 1973 has led to a massive increase in breast cancer for women our age. It may very well be the cause of our family's widespread thyroid problems. Our brother wasn't born then, but the effects apparently get passed on for generations. My nephew is eight and already starting puberty which is probably from this, too, and may result in him being a lot shorter than he ought to be. Cordelia hit puberty at eleven which is reasonable for a girl, so she may have less carry over.
At any rate, if you're female and were a child in Michigan in 1973, get a damned mammogram every single year regardless of what the guidelines say and do breast self examinations regularly. The stuff got into all forms of animal derived foods. (People who were vegan at the time may be safe but not necessarily because of how the animals which died were disposed of.)
PBB is a flame retardant. Somehow or another, a large amount of it got mislabeled as a feed additive and given to all sorts of livestock all over the state. A lot of animals died, but it took about nine months for anyone to figure out what had happened, and by that time, pretty much everybody in the state had been eating contaminated food for months. The company responsible went bankrupt a long time ago, so it's not like we can sue them now or anything.
The state has apparently decided that they don't have the money to investigate all of this, so, from what my sister can gather, the current research is all in the hands of a guy at Emory who's operating on a shoestring and mainly collecting anecdotal evidence.
http://michiganradio.org/post/researchers-find-serious-health-effects-toxic-pbb-mix-michigan#stream/0
At any rate, if you're female and were a child in Michigan in 1973, get a damned mammogram every single year regardless of what the guidelines say and do breast self examinations regularly. The stuff got into all forms of animal derived foods. (People who were vegan at the time may be safe but not necessarily because of how the animals which died were disposed of.)
PBB is a flame retardant. Somehow or another, a large amount of it got mislabeled as a feed additive and given to all sorts of livestock all over the state. A lot of animals died, but it took about nine months for anyone to figure out what had happened, and by that time, pretty much everybody in the state had been eating contaminated food for months. The company responsible went bankrupt a long time ago, so it's not like we can sue them now or anything.
The state has apparently decided that they don't have the money to investigate all of this, so, from what my sister can gather, the current research is all in the hands of a guy at Emory who's operating on a shoestring and mainly collecting anecdotal evidence.
http://michiganradio.org/post/researchers-find-serious-health-effects-toxic-pbb-mix-michigan#stream/0
