Home health and your pets

Here is an article from NPR.org. This is just the beginning of finding out the effects of chemicals that are brought into the home.

Pets Carry Wide Range of Chemical Pollutants : NPR 4/18/08 10:16 AM
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89726772&ps=bb2 Page 1 of 2
April 18, 2008
DLILLC
Cats and dogs harbor higher rates of
certain chemicals than their people do.
Corbis
Research News
Pets Carry Wide Range of Chemical Pollutants
by Jon Hamilton

All Things Considered, April 17, 2008 · Your cat probably has more mercury in
its system than you do, and your dog has twice as much of the chemicals found
in stain-resistant carpets and couches. That's the conclusion of an
environmental group that tested pets for a wide range of industrial chemicals.
If you walk on a stain-resistant carpet, you may kick up and inhale a tiny dose
of perfluorochemicals, or PFCs. But what if you stretched out on it for a while
and then licked your fur? That's what Richard Wiles and his colleagues at the
Environmental Working Group wanted to know.
"It occurred to us that no one had actually tested pets, [which] live in the same
environment as we do, for the toxic contaminants that we know are in people,"
Wiles says.
The group — a nonprofit research organization based in Washington, D.C. —
took samples from several dozen healthy dogs and cats at a clinic in
Mechanicsville, Va. Though it was a small sample size, Wiles says lab tests
revealed a number of chemicals, including Teflon compounds for stain
resistance, flame retardants found on furniture and mercury, which might come from cat food.
Levels of some chemicals, such as phthalates (found in plastics) and lead, were lower in pets than in people. But
dogs had more than twice the levels of stain-fighting PFCs as people. In cats, mercury levels were five times those
usually found in people. And levels of flame-retardant polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, were 23 times
higher.
Implications for Humans?
Wiles says the findings suggest that pets could serve as a warning system for people.
"It's the canary in the coal mine, if you will," he says. "They're picking up the same chemicals that we're exposed to,
they have shorter life spans and they develop diseases more quickly, and so they may be providing some insight into
human health problems from these same contaminants in our homes."