Episode 1 update**_KW

Kathleen and Jacinda introduce their podcast, "Exposing the Toxic Truth," which will discuss the six classes of harmful chemicals identified by the Green Science Policy Institute. They share their personal experiences of discovering the number of chemicals in everyday products and questioning their regulation. They discuss their efforts to choose healthier products and mention the six classes of chemicals: antimicrobials, bisphenol and phthalates, PFAS, flame retardants, solvents, and certain metals. They also provide a brief historical timeline of toxic chemicals, including the creation of DDT and the establishment of the EPA. They emphasize the need to reduce exposure to toxic chemicals and highlight the importance of definitions related to environmental health. Hello listeners, it's Kathleen. And Jacinda. Welcome to our first episode of Exposing the Toxic Truth. This series will be utilizing the Green Science Policy Institute's creation of the six classes of harmful chemicals. Each episode will be dedicated to discussing each chemical class. Before we do that, we thought it would be helpful to explain how we ended up interested in this topic and give you a brief overview of each chemical class. Lastly, we will share a historical timeline of chemicals in the U.S. and environmental health definitions you may hear while listening to each episode. All right, let's jump in. Learning about chemicals and all the various chemicals that we're exposed to in our daily lives has been a pretty mind-blowing experience. I first started learning about chemicals when I took my environmental health class and our professor had us look up on this website the products that we use and from lotions to shampoos to the household cleaning products and to see what chemicals were listed in those products. And I was just amazed at how many chemicals are in my products and also why wasn't this being regulated in the same way that like our medications are regulated or vaccines are regulated? Why are these chemicals being allowed to be in these products that we consume and put on our skin and absorb into our bodies? I used to pick products based off of price and now I'm really considering that option and really looking into more as to how I choose the products that I choose. I had a very similar experience in regards to our course looking into all of our products and what's in it. I definitely shop at Costco. I've got a kiddo at home and Costco is great for price for bulk. The price point is right and kind of shifting my mindset after learning you know there's quats in my hand soap and there's a lot of fragrances and the shampoos that I'm using. And so I guess for me it was a wake-up call and just kind of okay I have this information I'm learning. These chemicals are not good for health. How do I want to start to decrease this exposure? And so I kind of just started looking at like one area. So I mean my bathroom products. Now I'm using what I have and then I've been using the Environmental Working Groups app. They have a lot of recommendations. They'll give you products that are in the green that they approve of that are safe for health. And so I kind of use them as a guidance and we'll start to find products that are healthier. And so like sprouts for instance we just got that market at my hometown. And they have a lot of bigger bulk items that the price is a little bit you know it's a little more than Costco but the price isn't bad for the size and so and it's better for health. So kind of taking it one step at a time with that. Definitely a process for sure. Mm-hmm yeah we definitely we learned a lot in that class and part of that was learning about the Green Science Policy Institute's six classes of harmful chemicals. And this kind of broke down all those different chemicals that we could be exposed to in our products. Do you want to dive into that Kathleen? Yeah so this was a really helpful framework that kind of made sense of how to classify groups of chemicals. You know if you kind of get overwhelmed when you realize how much things are not so great for our health. But we use it every day and they are they can be useful if you have a lot of conflicting viewpoints. But at the end of the day this is a helpful framework that we want to use in this podcast to kind of break down these types of classes of chemicals and where we're exposed to them and how to start to eliminate them. And so that's what we want to bring to our fellow nurses and even our communities that we are in. So I'll start off there's six classes of chemicals. The first one being antimicrobials. These are chemicals that you'll find in a lot of soaps and toothpaste believe it or not. And it'll say antimicrobial soap or toothpaste and while that sounds great you know we want to get especially post COVID want to get rid of these microbes. Is it absolutely necessary to have this in your household in your toothpaste? Do you need it? I mean maybe in the hospital setting but maybe not so much at home. That's one class. The second is bisphenol and phthalates. And those are chemicals that we find a lot in IV tubing in hospitals or even in some of our personal care products like makeup. And so we're going to dive into that. The next one is PFAS and those are forever chemicals that unfortunately is found in our drinking water all over the country. And it was also very much a part of why nonstick pans are so great. And that's a really tough one. But unfortunately it's really bad for health. And so that's the first three and I'll let Jacinda break it down to the last three. The last three chemicals are flame retardants, some solvents, and certain metals. So with flame retardants we find them in our couch cushions and our mattresses and we're inhaling the stuff. Next is some solvents. This is found in nail polish remover, oil-based paints. The solvents can get into our water and our air and contribute to smog. Lastly, certain metals such as arsenic which is found in rice cereal. Another metal is mercury and this is another one that we consume when we eat certain fish. Now that we have gone over the six classes of harmful chemicals, we are going to transition to the historical timeline of how chemicals became so ubiquitous in our daily lives. So how did toxic chemicals all begin? I'm going to lay out just the beginning parts of kind of the historical context of toxic chemicals and then Jacinda is going to finish off the last half from 1980s to current exposure to toxic chemicals. So in the 1940s and 1950s during World War II, chemists created a chemical called DDT which stands for dichlorodiphenyl trichloroethylene that was discovered to kill insects and was sprayed on troops to stop the spread of insect-borne diseases like malaria and typhus. However, this newfound spray was marketed in the U.S. to be used in homes as a healthful pesticide. Sadly, it was later found to cause health issues in wildlife, people, and our environment. DDT was a man-made chemical that never existed in nature before. Unfortunately, it was found to cause vomiting, tremors, and seizures with acute exposures. Despite being banned in the U.S. since the 1970s, DDT is still found in most of our tissues. Which is crazy, right? Yeah, so DDT is one of the forever chemicals that we have mentioned above and it is still being used in other countries, especially those with endemic malaria. Interestingly, through my course in environmental health, we were able to find that there are on YouTube, there are DDT promotional videos that actually show the U.S. government promoting children ride their bikes through the chemical fog. You know, DDT was put into wallpaper and so this should help deter mosquitoes from biting you at night and prevent you from potentially contracting some of these vector-borne diseases. In general, you don't have to be bothered by mosquitoes. However, in 1962, the book Silent Spring came out. Silent Spring was written by Rachel Carson, a scientist who basically came out and was bringing to the public that, you know, what we're doing, the use of these chemicals, has implications on our health. And so she wanted everyday people to become aware of the use of these pesticides and thinking about the long-term effects. Actually, as a result, the public pressure put on the government and this is what led to the creation of the EPA. Pretty cool. So then, in the 1970s, President Nixon established the EPA-OSHA division and also in the 1970s, which was the year the state was adopted. Furthermore, the government also passed the Clean Water Act, which is especially important as we talk about public health topics. You know, this was established to regulate pollution in our waterways. This was kind of the foundation of the government getting involved to kind of set precedent to improve public health standards. And so now we're going to shift into the next part of the decades. Alright, let's move on to the 1980s and 90s. In the 1980s, there was more of a shift towards pollution prevention. Within the EPA, the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics was developed. More change would occur in the 1990s in the area of pollution prevention under the EPA as more data was collected during the 80s and this was released in the 90s. On May 25th, 1993, Carol Browner, who was an administrator for the EPA, released data under the Pollution Prevention Act. She stated, I released new Pollution Prevention Act data on the type and amount of toxic chemicals generated as waste and announced my intention to expand Right to Know to include different chemicals and sources of pollution. And continuing on into the 1990s, Green Chemistry was established, which was a new take on chemical engineering. It was focused on design of products that minimizes or eliminates the use of man-made toxic substances. Today we're now finding that 98% of all organic chemicals are petroleum derived, meaning we are extracting fossil fuels to create chemicals used in our daily lives. On that same note, a current area of research is microplastics, its impact on health and environment. According to the Ocean Conservancy, humans ingest 121,000 microplastic particles per year through the air, food, and beverages that we consume. So there's a lot of work to still be done and that's why we're doing this podcast. It's an interesting topic but very important and there's so much more that we can continue to do to reduce our exposures in the environment and reduce toxic chemicals. Let's get into definitions to know. All right, so now we want to get into some definitions to know as we go through this podcast. We're going to be using some of this language and we just want to make sure we're on the same page. So let's go over exposure pathways. So let's also go all the way back to nursing pharmacology class as we think about exposure pathways. So we want to think about chemicals in the same way that we think about drugs that we provide our patients and what routes they're receiving those drugs. So the idea of pharmacology routes are similar to exposures of chemicals. So toxic chemicals, just like the drugs that we can provide our patients, can either be inhaled, ingested, or absorbed on the skin. And so this can be inhaling things like dust or drinking water, eating contaminated food, or products that have chemicals in them that we put on our skin and that gets absorbed in our skin. And so when we think about what that looks like for some of our patients or populations, like children for example, are inhaling household dust, which could contain many contaminants from microplastics to whatever chemicals that we have in the house on our surfaces, to our pregnant patients who we need to be very thoughtful about the things that they consume like fish and the mercury that's in the fish and what's on the fruits and vegetables that they eat because they could have been sprayed with pesticides and how they are ingesting all that. And then also looking at water contamination from things like PFAS and how that's impacting the health of everyone. And also lead, we've seen how the Flint, Michigan situation where there is that large exposure to lead in the water and how greatly that impacted the population there. Thank you, Jacinda, for kind of giving us a little bit of introduction to routes of exposures and other good definitions to have and some of them are a little bit new I feel like for nurses and some of it not so much. But I'll just go over about like food chain bioaccumulation. Over time when organisms are, you know, in their habitat, chemicals can build up in their system faster than it is excreted. And so the chemical can accumulate in their tissues. Specifically, chemicals want to accumulate in the fatty tissue which is really interesting to me and something I don't feel like I quite knew until taking more courses on environmental health. And what kind of triggers me is I think about breast cancer because breast tissue is fatty tissue and we have high rates of breast cancer in our communities. So when you think about the environmental aspect of health, it's hard to not ignore how chemical exposures could potentially be impacting breast cancer. And so that's an interesting kind of correlation there. And then predators at the top of the food chain can absorb more toxic chemicals when they ingest smaller animals and contain these chemicals. So over time, let's say like a big fish, a big predatory fish like swordfish, it's eating all these tiny little fish. Well those tiny fish have mercury in them. And so over time this fish now has all of that, you know, accumulation. It's called biomagnification. And so that's why, you know, doctors will tell you and specifically pregnant women will tell you to avoid eating large fish and swordfish because we don't want to inadvertently expose pregnant women to high levels of mercury which can cause damage to a developing fetus. That's kind of where that connection is. And then another interesting definition to know is what forever chemicals are. This term we'll be hearing a lot. So these chemicals never break down and they can't be destroyed with incineration. So they're coined forever. They are in our environment and they exist. Kind of a scary thought. So this is the kind of thing we need to think about as healthcare professionals. People come in with health complications and considering all the different factors that could be attributing to that. And forever chemicals is certainly something to be considering when you think about some chronic conditions. And so we just kind of want to give you a little bit of all those definitions so you have to work with as we dive into all of our episodes on types of chemicals we want our nurses and our communities to know about.