How are persistent pesticides hazardous to humans?
Persistent pesticides are like the boomerang toxicants that we talked about earlier, in that they do bioaccumulate in the fish or the meat products that we eat, and they do bioaccumulate in us, and they act like environmental hormones, they can disrupt the way estrogens and androgens work in our bodies. So they can affect our success in terms of fertility, they're carcinogens, so if they build up in our bodies that can be a cancer risk, and, since they accumulate in our bodies; we give them to the next generation. So it's important for young girls, especially, to eat lower on the food chain, to have less PCBs -- these chemicals are related to dioxin PCBs -- and it's important early in life to cut down on exposure to these things because we know that the older you get, the higher the levels of these things are in your body. It's important to start early in life, with children's diets, to make sure that they get off to a good start and don't have these accumulative toxicants building up into them, and we don't want them to pass that on to the next generation of children -- your grandchildren. So, again, it's lower on the food chain, and eating the right fish.
