https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/spiegelspecial/index-1995-2.htmlhttps://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/spiegelspecial/d-9157717.htmlThey are among the most powerful and versatile control substances in every human and animal organism: they give the first signal that determines the development of sexual characteristics, with all the consequences for body type and nature; they affect physical health and well-being for life, generate or dampen lust, prevent or trigger diseases such as cancer.
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UNWANTED FEMALE
But now the hormones - once synonymous with reproduction - are suspected of being counterproductive in their very own domain and "threatening the reproductive ability of humans", as the US science magazine Science wrote.
"Falling sperm counts? Atrophied penises? It's not feminists' fault, chemical pollutants in water and food could be the cause," the US magazine Newsweek summed up the scientific knowledge about an environmental problem, the importance of which is only beginning to emerge.
Over the past few years, biologists have discovered a progressive feminization of the male in numerous wild animals, but sometimes the opposite - a progressive masculinization in female fish, for example.
The cause of these profound changes is partly hormones from pharmaceutical products such as birth control pills that get into the wastewater. In addition, there are apparently a large number of industrially produced chemical substances and their degradation substances, whose molecular structure is similar to that of hormones. They are absorbed by human and animal organisms and have the same effect there as, for example, estrogens.
In Germany alone, the resident doctors prescribe 20 million packs of birth control pills and four million packs of the estrogen-containing remedies for the symptoms of menopause every year. Whether the medication is swallowed or thrown away in the garbage - it ultimately ends up in nature's cycle again, be it through the sewer or with the rain that sweeps it out of the dump.
Johannes Huber, hormone specialist at the Vienna University Clinic, analyzed the wastewater from the central sewage treatment plant in Vienna-Meidling last year. Huber was "horrified", the news magazine Profil reported when the numbers from the analyzer ticked. "In Vienna's wastewater there is an estrogenic activity like in the blood of a fertile woman," said Huber.
The scientist measured values in the wastewater broth that corresponded to 90 picograms of the female hormone estrogen per milliliter. Huber: "A hormonal time bomb may be ticking here." If such estrogen concentrations entered the body via the food chain, fertility could be impaired, at least in men.
British scientists discovered trout and carp men who had become transsexuals near sewage treatment plants whose drainage pipes flowed into rivers or streams. Tiny traces of the highly effective pill hormone ethinylestradiol had turned the male animals into pseudo-females unable to produce.
There is still no clear evidence that so-called environmental hormones - insecticides, herbicides, plastics, bleaches or degradation products from cleaning agents - also affect human health and reproductive capacity. But there are numerous indications for this.
At the international conference "Estrogens in the Environment", which was held in Washington last year, the Danish endocrinologist Niels Skakkebaek and his Scottish colleague Richard Sharpe led the most serious:
- The incidence of testicular cancer has risen sharply in numerous industrialized countries. In Denmark, for example, where a national cancer registry has been kept since 1943, the disease has tripled in the past 50 years. A similar increase has been observed in other Scandinavian countries, but also in Scotland and the USA.
- An international study involving nearly 15,000 men showed that the average number of sperm per milliliter of ejaculate has dropped from 113 million in 1940 to 66 million in 1990. The amount of semen produced during ejaculation decreased by about 30 percent over the same period.
Cases of undescended testicles and hypospadias (split urethra) in male newborns have almost doubled in the past four decades. The doctors also registered all these symptoms in the male offspring of women who were treated with the - now banned - synthetic estrogen DES in the 1950s and 1960s.
On the other hand, animal experiments at a US institute, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina, have shown that a number of environmental pollutants affect male offspring
ARE SO SMALL KIDNEYS
By Christiane Kohl
02/01/1995
The blockers came with gas masks and white protective suits. On January 16, 1994, early in the morning at 7.45 a.m., they occupied an important traffic junction in downtown Stuttgart. Your slogan: "Caution, benzene!"
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ARE SO SMALL KIDNEYS
Nothing went anymore in the Swabian capital, the cars jammed in all directions. However, instead of complaints or statements of protest, the demonstrators only received approval from the responsible state authorities.
The environment minister announced that the anti-car action was "a right step". The transport minister said he had asked the Bonn government to finally take action against the high benzene pollution caused by car traffic.
Benzene is a horror word for environmentalists and health politicians. The aromatic-smelling chemical, an extremely poisonous combination of hydrocarbons, has recently become particularly widespread, especially in cities, as a result of the auto-invasion. Around 92 percent of the benzene emissions, a total of 52,000 tons per year, come from the exhaust pipes.
Benzene is known to be a clearly carcinogenic substance. According to medical doctrine, even the smallest concentrations can cause blood cancer in sensitive people.
Young children are particularly at risk, their noses just reaching over the hoods of the cars. According to measurements by Greenpeace, the exhaust gases are concentrated there about three times as much as at those altitudes (three to five meters) at which government officials usually track down the pollutants.
The benzene exhaust is by no means the only pollutant that disproportionately affects children. For years, there has been increasing evidence that dangerous environmental toxins in the air, in food, and even in clothing are so difficult for young people to develop that immune deficiencies, rashes and allergies, neurological disorders and cancer can be consequential damages:
- Pediatricians in metropolitan areas observe a significant increase in asthma even in very small patients - almost one in ten fourth graders, according to series tests by doctors at Hauner's Children's Hospital in Munich, suffers from the (in extreme cases, life-threatening) allergy. Another 11 percent of the 6500 children examined had to struggle with hay fever at this age.
- Parents are close to despair because even babies scratch their skin and can hardly sleep from itching - according to the Munich study and surveys by the Hamburg health authority, between 11 (Munich) and 20 percent (Hamburg) of school beginners are now suffering, probably 1 nationwide. 5 million children with chronic skin irritation (neurodermatitis).
- Teachers are increasingly observing behavioral problems in their students; many children are nervous and hyperactive, can hardly concentrate and have learning difficulties - symptoms that experts also associate with stress and noise-related stress factors.
The pressure on those responsible is growing: The Academy for Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, an association of all pediatric associations in Germany, already asked the German government in 1992 to finally establish an all-German research program "Children and the Environment". Analogous to waste laws and waste water regulations, general guidelines for the protection of children against environmental damage should be issued.
"We leave mortgages for future generations," says Heidelberg environmental scientist Dieter Eis: "Ultimately, it's an experiment with people."
The worst air pollutants are considered to be cars: in the Old Federal Republic alone, the number of cars has tripled in the past 20 years. What they blow out of the exhaust pipes, nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide, dioxins, lead and benzene, could be the cause of the rapid increase in asthma and hay fever.
When it comes to pollution, there is an imaginary border through reunified Germany. On the river Elbe, along the former death strip, the health researchers can still recognize the old demarcation line from their findings:
- In the West, allergies are in the foreground - when the pediatricians at Hauner's Hospital in Munich tested their subjects with irritants for allergic reactions, almost every second child reacted. The researchers' conclusion: 42 percent of the test children are classified as latent allergy sufferers.
- In the east, on the other hand, respiratory diseases are the main problem - of a few thousand offspring, which were examined by various research groups in Halle, Leipzig and Magdeburg, about a third, twice as many children as in western Germany, suffered from bronchitis and other chronic respiratory infections; only every 30th child had hay fever.
Like fingerprints, the environmental toxins have left special traces in human organisms in both East and West. Breast milk samples, for example, reports the head of environmental hygiene at the Lower Saxony Ministry of Social Affairs, Michael Csicsaky, had the testers label them almost blindly according to the finding: "West milk contains more dioxins, east milk more DDT."
Breast milk analysis characterizes the different levels of economic development in the two parts of Germany: The pesticide DDT, an ancient model from the early days of chlorine chemistry, has been banned in western Germany since 1972. In the GDR, however, it was still widely sprayed on the fields in 1986.
The high-tech chemicals from the chlorinated hydrocarbon family, which are now being developed in the West, have long been added to all sorts of everyday products. They can be found in carpets and household cleaners, inflatable baby paddling pools and even in some types of petrol - in car engines and in household waste incineration plants, these compounds exude dioxins, and stuff is blown across the country from chimneys and exhaust pipes.
In the case of another chemical, on the other hand, findings point to similar pollution in East and West Germans: the so-called polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB), compounds that are found in transformers and fluorescent tubes, coolants and mineral oils and are classified as similarly dangerous as dioxins, were found in East Germany. and western children in almost the same dose. The much-discussed harmonization of living conditions - it seems to work for pollutant transfer.
What children take in poisons is hardly manageable. According to the "Maximum Pollutant Quantity Ordinance" for food, breast milk should already be banned due to the exposure to chlorinated hydrocarbons. And then it goes on: nitrate in children's tea, pesticides in break fruit, the new sweater that emits chemicals, the toy that contains plasticizers, toxic dyes or other additives. Nobody currently knows what the different substances do in combination with one another, and it is controversial whether the officially stipulated pollutant limits also fit for children. The threshold values mostly come from the occupational health and safety area and are based on a fictitious, 70 kg average man.
The fact that children are much more susceptible to environmental toxins than adults can be explained by the size difference. In relation to the surface of the skin, they weigh a lot less body weight than an adult: The outer skin of an infant is about nine times smaller than that of its father, but the volume of the baby is just a 27th of the body volume of an adult.
Because of the different geometry alone, the child's metabolism must be three times as active as that of his father - it is therefore three times as sensitive.
And because, for example, the blood-brain barrier, a chemical entrance check in front of the brain, has not yet been properly developed, toxins that would be rejected in adults reach the brain in children via the bloodstream. In addition, the substances in the small organ can do more damage.
Also in the liver, the body's central metabolic factory, various branches of production only exist in the shell. The detoxification department is still suffering from start-up problems, and the enzymes lack certain tools to rework the incoming substances for further transport in the bloodstream.
In sensitive babies, the liver has copper problems. Chlorine compounds such as PCB, DDT and dioxins can stimulate enzyme formation - one of the reasons why the scientists classify such chemicals as possibly carcinogenic.
With the kidneys, the body's drainage system, it is hardly any different during the first half of life, they are also not yet fully developed. Therefore certain substances are not excreted correctly. In addition to the lungs, the kidneys are the main target organ of the highly toxic heavy metal cadmium; at extremely high loads, even functional disorders of the detoxification organ are possible.
The child's gut, recycling yard and garbage disposal in one, sorts substances into the production cycle that do not belong there. This way, the children take in more lead and other heavy metals than adults as well.
In addition, nitrate, which bubbles with the drinking water in many households, is converted into nitrite in the intestine and stomach. In the blood, this nitrogen compound reacts with the hemoglobin and thus interferes with the oxygen transport. In extreme cases, infants may experience deadly blue addiction.
The oxygen supply to the cells can also be significantly impeded by carbon monoxide (CO). The poison gas from the car exhaust binds to the ha instead of the oxygen.
1995 study results : 2020 ?