A surprise discovery of chemical contamination is described in a
press release from the
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public
Health:
A toxic chemical used in hand soaps, cleaners and other personal care products to kill germs is deposited and remains in the environment long after the products are used, according to researchers…
“It’s somewhat unsettling that we’ve been using this persistent disinfectant for almost half a century at rates approaching 1 million pounds per year and still have essentially no idea of what exactly happens to the compound after we flush it down the drain,”
says
Rolf U. Halden,
assistant
professor
at
the
school,
in the press release. The chemical, called triclocarban (TCC), is a pesticide that has been widely used for decades as an antibacterial, Halden says.
“Our study shows that environmental contamination with triclocarban is widespread but greatly underreported because conventional monitoring techniques cannot detect it… We had to specifically develop a new method, termed liquid chromatography electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (LC/ESI/MS), to detect triclocarban in water. Using this new method, we found the disinfectant in all Maryland streams we examined. Now the big question is what are the ecological and human health consequences of triclocarban in the environment?”
The study connected with this press release is published in the Aug. 18 online edition of Environmental Science & Technology
to see the article.
I was able to read the initial article, visit the Johns Hopkins site and get to the second article without a login.
and I still can’t figure out how to see it. If you’ve gotten to it through the Hopkins site, by all means post a link.
is here.
It wouldn’t even let me look at the abstract without a login.
I don’t know of a way to get that study without login – I only supplied that additional citation and link to the journal so that people could see what the original source of the info was. Sorry to say I don’t myself have access to it, beyond the press release.