My nose is clamped and I'm trying not to choke on a tube a scientist at Harvard University has stuffed in my mouth. I am blowing into a clear plastic bag, which is sealed and later studied for what it contains.
Sure, everyone suffers occasionally from a little bad breath. But what they found in mine was enough to keep my wife away for a week.
Besides my breath, researchers at Harvard's School of Public Health examined my blood, hair, urine, toenails and bones. It's all in the name of the emerging science of body burden, a concept referring to the amount of chemicals that accumulate in the human body.
As it turns out, I am polluted. Everyone is to some degree. But as the list of toxic chemicals identified in people continues to grow, scientists are trying to figure out what the implications are for human health.
"It is alarming," Professor John Spengler says. "This is not meant to be settling information. I think if more people wake up to this fact, the better we are going to be . . . and the more demanding we're going to be of our governments and our industries."
An estimated 35,000 chemicals are in commercial use in Canada and more than twice as many in the United States. The national American government registers an average of 2,000 newly synthesized chemicals each year.
Cosmetics have at least 5,000 chemicals; more than 3,200 are added to food. As many as 1,010 chemicals are used in the production of 11,700 consumer products, and about 500 chemicals are used as active ingredients in pesticides, according to Environmental Protection Agency data cited by the Environmental Working Group, based in Washington, D.C.
Many chemicals end up in the environment, even thousands of kilometres from industry.
Despite being banned years ago, PCBs are still found in Arctic wildlife. Biologists are also finding rising levels of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), flame retardants used in foam, textiles and plastics, as well as chlorinated paraffins, chemicals used in paints, sealants and rubber-processing.
Scotchgard, which is part of a family of chemicals used to make clothes, carpets and furniture stain-resistant, has been found in polar bears in Alaska and bald eagles around the Great Lakes.
If chemicals are showing up in wildlife and the environment, it's no surprise that many are being discovered in people.
"Pretty much from the minute you wake up to the moment you go to bed, you're exposed to hundreds and hundreds of chemicals," says Jane Houlihan, vice-president of research for the Environmental Working Group. ". . . In most cases, they're in minuscule quantities. But that fact is it's hundreds [of chemicals] and they're adding up."
What's disturbing, Prof. Spengler says, is how the majority of the chemicals have been approved for use without any research being done on their potential impact on human health, except mainly for those that end up in drugs or food.
What's more, little is known about what our chemical body burden truly is. "So measurements like we're doing on you, and myself, and our research subjects are really part of a new frontier because it's really trying to understand . . . what effects these might have on disruption of human function," Prof. Spengler says.
No extensive study has considered the chemical body burden of Canadians, although separate studies have reported the presence of individual compounds -- for example, research documenting a dramatic rise of PBDEs in breast milk.
More wide-ranging studies have been done in the United States.
