This Plastic Chemical Is Banned From Baby Toys, but Preemies Get a Heavy Dose of It
Dr. Eric Mallow, a neonatologist and researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has long suspected that preterm infants are being overexposed to chemicals in the plastic medical equipment intended to nurse them to health.
Phthalate plasticizers are chemicals added to plastics to make them durable and pliable, and Mallow was concerned about a chemical called DEHP. The only phthalate plasticizer allowed in medical equipment, it helps soften breathing tubes, intravenous (IV) lines, fluid bags, and catheters. Mallow had read studies showing overexposure to DEHP to be associated not only with hormonal disruption (similar to the effect of BPA, another plasticizer) but with nonhormonal effects like liver damage, a problem common in preemies. He had noticed that if a breathing tube was in a patient for a long time, it came out stiffer than when he put it in. DEHP, which doesn’t chemically bind to the plastic of the tube, had leaked out.
In a study published today in Nature’s Journal of Perinatology, Dr. Mallow and Johns Hopkins colleague Dr. Mary Fox present an alarming conclusion: The “daily intake of DEHP for critically ill preterm infants is on the order of 4,000 and 160,000 times higher than desired to avoid reproductive and hepatic [liver-related] toxicities, respectively.” In other words, sick preemies are regularly exposed to levels of DEHP—in breathing tubes, feeding tubes, catheters, IVs, and blood storage bags—that are thousands of times higher than have been deemed safe for infants.
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