Exposure
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This message comes from Fred Hutch Cancer Center, whose discovery of bone marrow transplants has saved over a million lives worldwide. Learn how this and other breakthroughs impact the world at fredhutch.org slash look beyond. This is The Poll, stories about the people and places at the heart of health and science. I'm Maiken Scott.

On the night of February 3rd, 2023, Shuzha Jenis and her nine-year-old son were up late making crafts in their apartment in East Palestine, Ohio, right by the Pennsylvania border. Around nine, they noticed there was a fire down the road. So they stepped outside into the frigid night to check things out. And then we saw like these huge flames, like hundreds of feet tall. And I was like, what?

This is bad. They hurried back inside and watched from the window as sirens blared through the night. It was really crazy. And my son, he's nine. He loves fire engines, police cars, all that stuff. So he was like reenacting it with his toys and was like running back and forth to the window, you know, counting up all like the undercover cop cars and all this crazy stuff. And he's like, this is exciting, but it's scary at the same time. Thankfully, her son finally fell asleep.

But Jujia stayed up, texting with neighbors, trying to figure out what was going on. Everyone's like, did you just hear that explosion? Because it was constantly exploding. There were these flames, and they would go up and they would get it down, and then it would restart, and these explosions, these booms, and everyone's just freaking out, like, what do we do? Like, what's going on?

And nobody had any information. Then, around 3 in the morning, she heard a strange, loud noise coming from her son's room. She got up, rushed into his room, and a powerful smell hit her right away.

It smelled like bleach. And he, my son, is up in his bed coughing, vomiting, like projectile vomiting, shaking. He's gasping for air, begging for water. Xuze was terrified. And whatever this smell was, she was starting to react to it as well. You immediately get this film on your mouth and your tongue just breathing in there. Like, you know there's something in there and your body's telling you. It was like a huge warning sign and he's obviously sick.

She grabbed a bag and they hopped in the car and drove 20 miles east to a hotel in Chippewa, Pennsylvania, near her son's grandmother. And we get there like five in the morning. He finally like gets to sleep and he throws up like one more time and then he just passes out.

By that morning, the incident was all over the news. A Norfolk Southern freight train had derailed near Zsuzsa's house, leaving a smoldering tangle of 38 cars along the tracks. And the explosions they heard, the smell, the sickness and vomiting, that was just the beginning for Zsuzsa and many of her neighbors, who would soon find out that they had been exposed to hazardous chemicals.

Our bodies come in contact with all kinds of potentially harmful things that we can't always see or smell. On this episode, exposures. Everything from chemicals to sunlight and black plastic.

To get started, let's hear more about what happened to the community around East Palestine. In the days after the derailment, officials made a decision that was supposed to protect residents from further explosions. But this decision backfired and exposed them to even more hazardous chemicals.

Hundreds of people living in and around East Palestine have since reported symptoms like headaches, coughs and rashes. And the long-term effects could be even more severe. Reporter Julie Grant has been following this story since the derailment happened two years ago, and she picks it up from here.

When Jujia Jenis' son woke up the morning after the derailment in the hotel room 20 miles away from their home, he seemed fine, back to his normal self. But he started developing these rashes on his arms, which was weird because he hadn't been in contact with anything like that. Over the weekend, they spent time with his grandmother, Jujia anxiously keeping an eye out for new information on the disaster that had struck their community.

On Monday, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and other public officials held a live-streamed press conference where he explained what was about to happen. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro are ordering an immediate evacuation in a one-mile by two-mile area surrounding East Palestine, which includes both Ohio and Pennsylvania.

That afternoon, they planned to vent more than a million pounds of vinyl chloride from five of the rail cars and purposely burn it. Otherwise, they worried it could explode. Vinyl chloride is usually shipped as a liquid under high pressure. Governor DeWine pointed to a map, a red circle around the area closest to the derailment site. That's where Zsuzsa's East Palestine apartment was. Those in the red area, those in the red area,

Zsuzsa was still 20 miles away. Shortly after the chemical burn in East Palestine had been executed, she was leaving her son's grandmother's house to head back to her hotel room. I stepped outside and it was literally like a black wall, like in the middle of her street. It looked like fog, but very, very dark. It was black. But it wasn't like hovering up high or anything. It was like a whole wall.

And I turned around and went back in, and she's immune compromised, has health issues too. And I said, we have to go. Like, we all have to go. And she went outside, and her face just turned white, and we left. We all left.

As they drove further away, Zsuzsa thought government officials would expand the evacuation zone to where she and her family had been staying. But they didn't. So I'm like, how is this safe? They rushed to get further away, and they never really returned, at least not to Liv.

I caught up with Zsuzsa later that year, the fall after the derailment. She told me that since those initial exposures, she'd been having menstrual issues and her son had unexplained rashes. It was like two or three months later, he started getting these splotches on his face, like only on his face. And they would show up and last for like maybe anywhere from...

20 minutes to an hour and then they would go away and none of his specialists can, you know, tell us what it is or what's causing it. It's all been a lot for Zsuzsa herself to understand. So it's been really hard to figure out how to talk with her son about it.

to help him make sense of what's happened, why he had to leave his home and school. How is this shaping a child's viewpoint of what the world is and what it means to be good or what it means to find justice or, you know, safety even? Who can he trust? That's a tough question and a fair one. The disastrous incident and especially the controlled release of vinyl chloride in the aftermath came under intense scrutiny in the weeks and months after.

The National Transportation Safety Board, an independent governmental agency, held a series of investigative hearings. Jennifer Homendy, the agency's chair, was asked about their findings during a Senate committee hearing. And her testimony was kind of a bombshell. The National Transportation Safety Board had found that the vent and burn of vinyl chloride from those rail cars was not necessary.

Norfolk Southern, the rail company, was pushing for the vent and burn. It claimed that temperatures in the cars were increasing and that the tankers could undergo a chemical reaction called polymerization and explode. But Vice President J.D. Vance, at the time Senator for Ohio, confirmed with Jennifer Homendy that OxyVinyls, the company that owned the vinyl chloride, found that the temperatures had actually decreased.

is it true that the chemical shipper oxy vinyls concluded that the reported and stabilized tank car temperatures were too low for a runaway chemical reaction meaning the sort of thing that would lead to an uncontrolled explosion that's correct they had testified that polymerization was not occurring in order for polymerization to occur which was the norfolk southern and their contractors justification for the vent and burn you would have to have rapidly increasing temperatures

and some sort of infusion of oxygen, neither of which occurred. She then testified that Norfolk Southern did not share this information with decision makers. Instead, it gave them 13 minutes to decide whether to approve the vent and burn operation or face a possible uncontrolled explosion. So OxyVinyl was on scene providing information to Norfolk Southern's contractor who was in the room when advice was given to the governor of

Ohio to the incident commander. They were not given full information because no one was told, "Oxivinyl

was on scene. They were left out of the room. The incident commander didn't even know they existed. Neither did the governor. So they were provided incomplete information to make a decision. She testified that Norfolk Southern could have waited and allowed the rail cars to continue to cool down instead of pushing to vent and burn the vinyl chloride, which released over a million pounds of it into the surrounding area.

When the evacuation order was lifted a couple of days after the vent and burn, residents returned to find ash and soot around their homes and yards, on their cars and on playground equipment, and many showed up at their doctor's offices.

Gretchen Nickel, chief medical officer at East Liverpool City Hospital, about 20 miles south of East Palestine, started seeing patients with physical ailments that could be from chemical exposures. So when I have patients that say, I've got a skin rash, I've got dermatitis, I'm having a hard time breathing, I'm diagnosing them with a pneumonitis.

eyes, ears, throat irritation. This is her speaking at a workshop held by the National Academies of Sciences in late 2023. She says she wasn't sure what to tell patients. And knowing that we had VOCs and vinyl chloride, what, if any kind of testing, should we be doing? Many health providers were asking that same question, whether they should do urine and blood testing for residents exposed to chemicals in the derailment.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health offered a webinar for medical providers a few weeks after the Venton burn.

Mike Lynch, medical director for the Pittsburgh Poison Center, told area doctors that tests checking for chemicals in patients' blood were not reliable, not clinically useful, and not recommended. So yes, with confidence you can tell them that there is not a chemical test that they should be seeking either from you or elsewhere at this time that can help prove or disprove exposure or would help with diagnosis, treatment, or prognosis from any of these potential exposures.

The Centers for Disease Control agreed with this advice for local health care providers. Treat the patient's symptoms, don't pursue testing for chemical exposures. The CDC's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry did do an assessment of chemical exposures. That's called an ACE survey of residents' symptoms after the incident. While they walked around the community knocking on doors, their own agents got sick and had to leave the area.

Months later, residents filled the pews of a church in East Palestine to hear what the survey of 700 Ohio and Pennsylvania residents had found. Jill Shugart, a CDC director, explained the results. They had headaches, coughing, difficulty breathing, stuffy nose or sinus congestion, and burning nose or throat.

One mother in the pews said her daughter was still vomiting daily since the derailment. She and other concerned residents had results of urine testing that showed markers for vinyl chloride in their bodies, and they had questions. CDC toxicologist Arthur Chang told them those tests are often incorrect. Instead of blood or urine sampling, he advised them to carefully track their health with a medical provider in case they develop cancer.

Vinyl chloride is a known human carcinogen that can increase the risk of developing certain liver cancers. So that's the reason why we're saying go to your doctor so that you can get examined. We know how to treat endosarcoma.

We may not know how to get rid of vinyl chloride from the body, but we know how to treat those cancers. Zsuzsa Jenis was there for the meeting, and she couldn't believe what the CDC toxicologist was saying. My jaw dropped. She had already moved away from East Palestine, but brought the results of her 9-year-old son's urine test to this meeting. It showed the markers for vinyl chloride. I looked around the room. I was like, did I just hear that right?

And like literally, like they came in and said these ACE surveys showed that you guys are sick. And yeah, the symptoms match chemical exposure. And then we're just not doing anything about it. The CDC apologized to residents for what they were experiencing and said there was no treatment to remove chemicals from people's bodies and nothing they could do.

Since then, researchers have stepped in with a variety of studies. For example, looking at the movement of chemicals that contaminated local streams to see if they're making their way through the soil into people's drinking water wells. Julianne Byer is one of at least 10 researchers really digging into the exposures from the derailment and its aftermath.

She's been interested in the connection between chemicals and the environment and health for a long time. It started when she was growing up in rural Germany on a street with 20 or so homes. Fifteen or so of the people that lived there developed gastric tumors, some pancreatic tumors, some liver tumors, and some stomach cancer. ♪

And I always thought that must be something in the water. It was just so weird that there was this cluster of gastric cancers. And so, I don't know. I've been always thinking about it. And later, as a medical researcher at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, she learned about a case in the 1970s. A cluster of workers at a nearby chemical plant had developed liver abnormalities.

Some workers had been sent into reactors where vinyl chloride was being made into polyvinyl chloride, or PVC. So they were exposed to these really, really high concentrations. They actually passed out within those tanks. Federal safety standards for vinyl chloride were quickly created, and it was considered a seminal event in occupational toxicology.

Decades later, in 2010, Julianne joined researchers working on biosamples collected at rubber plants in Kentucky. They detected a specific form of liver disease in those samples linked to vinyl chloride exposure. More recently, Julianne's team has been looking not at those very high occupational exposures to vinyl chloride, but at the impact of lower-level environmental exposures to it and the connection with liver disease.

For example, her team tested mice by dosing them with vinyl chloride in amounts currently considered safe in the U.S., and all of those mice developed tumors. Eighty percent of those cases were hepatocellular carcinoma, HCC. That's the major malignant liver cancer.

Safety limits for vinyl chloride have not been updated since they were first created. Even though its use is growing, it's estimated that 36 million pounds of vinyl chloride is being transported on U.S. railways at any given moment, moving along on tracks that pass through densely populated residential areas and small towns like East Palestine.

Now Julianne's team is collecting blood and urine samples from about 300 people in East Palestine and testing their liver function. They're also sampling the air and water, both indoors and outdoors, to see if residents are still being exposed to vinyl chloride. So if there are homes with higher concentrations of chemicals in the air or water, we predict that these residents will also have

or may progress faster in their liver disease. Of course, they hope people don't develop liver cancer. But she wants more attention on the health impacts of chemicals like vinyl chloride and updated safety standards. I've been fighting for this to be recognized for years, actually, in the liver field, because this is not what medical students learn. They don't learn this in medicine.

you know, in medical school. And most of the physicians that I speak to, they have no idea what to do. You know, if somebody that thinks that their liver disease comes from environmental exposures, they don't know what to look for. And I think we need to figure this out. In December, the U.S. EPA designated vinyl chloride as a high-priority chemical for risk evaluation, which could lead to tougher safety standards.

After the derailment in East Palestine, members of Congress were quick to condemn Norfolk Southern and the rail industry and introduced a rail safety bill, but that stalled and did not get approved. Many people in the community joined a class action lawsuit against Norfolk Southern, and a settlement was approved by the court last fall. Zsuzsa Jenis could get up to $70,000, but she expects much of that money will be used to pay off months of hotel bills after the derailment.

Zsuzsa has rented a house in another town and her son is settled in a new school, but they still have health issues like his unexplained rashes. She worries about what their exposures will mean for their health in the future. Because like I don't want to spend the rest of my life wondering what if or like next, you know, I show up with a rash all over my back, you know, what is this from? Is this from the dramatic? Like we all have to ask ourselves that the rest of our lives every single day.

That story was reported by Julie Grant. She's a reporter with the Allegheny Front, a public radio program and podcast covering the environment in western Pennsylvania. East Palestine and Norfolk Southern have just announced a $22 million settlement to resolve all claims related to the derailment. Since the accident, the railroad company has already invested over $13 million into infrastructure and other improvements in East Palestine.

We're talking about exposures, coming up, sun exposure, and how to protect yourself from different aspects of it. The UVA is much less likely to give you a sunburn. So if you're getting tons of UVA exposure, you won't know it. That's still to come on The Pulse.

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This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about exposures and what happens when we come in contact with potentially hazardous things.

Sleep researcher Olivia Walsh is a bit like a neighborhood watchdog, always looking out for one thing. When I walk outside in my neighborhood at night and I look through people's homes and I see sort of harsh overhead lights on late at night, it's like seeing an exposed wire in their front yard. That's because, Olivia says, getting too much light at the wrong time disrupts our sleep schedules in ways we're unaware of.

Out of all the things that impact our circadian rhythm, light is the most important one. Which is kind of ironic because it has no mass. It is literally immaterial. So people tend to think of it as, eh, it's not doing that much. Eh, it's just not that important. But you can look at how things like pills. So you can take melatonin in a pill and look at how it affects your circadian clock and

And it has way less of an effect than light does. But people feel like the pill does more than light does because it's tangible and physical. Olivia's new book is called Sleep Groove. Why your body's clock is so messed up and what to do about it.

She says light is like a drug or medication. It literally binds to receptors in your eye. Photons come in. They hit these opsins in your eyes that trigger a biochemical response. So it's a photic signal that gets turned into a chemical signal. And then these cells called radioactives

retinal ganglion cells send that signal onto your brain electrically. This is the stuff of drugs, like having this biochemical effect on your body. The only difference is that it's triggered by a photon instead of being triggered by you taking a pill and putting it in your mouth. So light is absolutely a drug, but it's not an intuitive drug to recognize. You don't usually think of yourself as dosing with light.

We are around artificial lighting all the time. We get up in the mornings, we have lights on in our homes, we have lights on in the office, we have lights on at night. So we can't quite escape the light ever. How does that impact us?

Yeah. So my favorite analogy for how the same thing can do different things to your body at different times is being on a swing. And I just mean classic, you are on a swing and somebody is pushing you from behind. Light exposure is like them pushing you in the going out direction, which is what you want if you are also going forward. But if you imagine you're swinging backwards and you're just...

getting to the halfway point of your swing and they push you again, that's not a good swing. That's not what you want. You want to get all the way through your backswing and then get pushed again on the

forward swing. And so having a good swing is about both having somebody push you on the way out and then having them clear out of the way when you're swinging backwards. But we don't get that with our light exposure these days. So in modern life, we get kind of weak pushes forward because we don't usually get that much light during the day. And then when we're on the way back, we

It's not this clear path because we don't really get dark, dark much anymore. We get darkish dark. So even in my house, which is blackout curtain, no electronic little blue lights, they've all been taped over. I still get light from the street lamp outside through the cracks. And that is brighter than what I'd get if I was in the middle of the woods or in a basement somewhere and...

And as a result, even in my pretty darn dark home, I still have something in my way on the backswing. I still have that little push forward that I don't want. And what getting that push forward is going to do is it's going to disrupt your rhythm.

How can you avoid getting that push at the wrong time? Olivia and I discussed that and a lot more on a podcast extra where you can listen to that whole conversation. She told me how she has optimized her own sleep schedule and why she thinks hours spent in darkness and sleep regularity are the most important things. Give it a listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Olivia Walsh is a researcher at the University of Michigan and the author of the new book, Sleep Groove, Why Your Body's Clock is So Messed Up and What to Do About It. We're talking about exposures.

I still remember the worst sunburn I've ever gotten. I was at a lake in Arizona, swimming and kayaking, and by the afternoon I was so red and completely burned to a crisp, especially my back. It took at least a week for my skin to heal. It was a painful lesson, and it made me way more diligent about using sunscreen.

Lately, though, sunscreen has come under attack. A bunch of influencers are saying the chemicals in sunscreen are actually bad for us and could cause skin cancer. Experts say these claims are totally false. But confusion around sunscreen is not new. What kind works best? How strong should it be? And how much protection are you actually getting?

Nicole Curry looked into what's what. Annie Tomlin got her lesson on sunscreen very early in life. My mother has a skin condition called vitiligo, which basically takes away pigment from your skin. So she had always used sunscreen because it was a necessity for her. So Annie did too, even though sun-kissed skin was a huge trend at the time.

But her mother knew best.

Annie's skin doesn't tan. It burns, going from pale to crimson red quickly. So putting on sunscreen grew into a habit. And by the time she was an adult, sunscreen was just one step in her routine.

If it were a sunny day, Annie would wear a large brim hat. On the beach, she would wear long-sleeved rash guards. She even reapplied her sunscreen every 90 minutes with the correct amount. To cover your entire body, the sunscreen should fill up a shot glass, just to give you an idea.

It was sometimes a pain. Reapplying sunscreen is not fun. It's kind of like you go to the beach, it should be laid back, it should be carefree, and instead you're like repositioning the beach umbrella and wearing long sleeves and reapplying the sunscreen before and after you go into the water. Like, it kind of doesn't feel as much fun.

So at the age of 37, Annie was shocked to be diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma, skin cancer. It was found on her hairline disguised as a rough patch. I was very confused because I had been wearing sunscreen and being diligent about wearing sunscreen my entire life. Thankfully, the type of skin cancer Annie had spread slowly and it will rarely metastasize and

She had the cancer removed and underwent a very painful procedure to reconstruct the skin in the area. She's now cancer-free. But still, Annie didn't understand how this could have happened to her with all of the precautions. She put that question to her dermatologist. And she said, did you wear hats as a kid?

Because most of our sun damage happens when we're children. And I had not worn hats. I was not a hat wearer. And so to me, that actually makes a lot of sense. Who's putting sunscreen into their hair?

Skin cancer can be sneaky. Here's how it works. Too much ultraviolet radiation from the sun can damage the DNA in our skin cells. Over time, that damage can cause mutations, increasing the risk of skin cancer. The whole process can take decades. Therefore, protecting your skin from the sun later in life doesn't automatically cancel out the previous damage, says Daryl Regal. He

He's a professor of dermatology at New York University. And that's also why it's a little bit tricky when you're trying to go after teenagers who just want to be tanned to look good or people in their young 20s, whatever. Then by the time they hit 35 or 40 and they get skin cancer, they say, I wish I knew then what I know now, but that it's too late.

So there's that delay which can cause confusion. And then there is a lot of confusion around sunscreens. And it's been that way for decades. It's gonna tan you like nothing can tan you. Come rain or come shine.

Back in the 1960s, when tanning had already become a sign of leisure and wealth, tanning lotions were being promoted as a safe way to get a bronze tan. Do you have a sun-sensitive skin? Do you have to spend your days in the sun like this? Do you have to be a beach mummy or suffer the consequences?

This summer, face the sun unafraid, protected by new greaseless bronze tan made by Schulte. To deliver on the promise of a tan without the burn, they contained sun protection factor, also known as SPF.

It's a measurement of how well a product protects you from sunburn. But Darrell says these products didn't have a whole lot of it. Those things, Seedski and Coppertone, had about an SPF of about two. So it really wasn't protecting very well at all. I mean, it was better than nothing, right?

But as more studies came out connecting prolonged sun exposure to skin cancer, dermatologists started sounding the alarm bells and manufacturers began to catch up with the research. In the late 70s was the first real sun squeeze, let's call them, that had the SPFs of probably 8 to 12 or so. And SPF 15 really came out in the middle of the 80s.

SPF 30 came out probably in the 90s. But what do those numbers actually mean? So sunscreens utilize a metric which we call the SPF. If you go into the drugstore, you can see, you know, SPF 30 or 15 or 50 or 100 or whatever. That's David E. Fisher. He's chief of the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

SPF is the measurement of how well products block the burning portion of the ultraviolet spectrum, UVB rays. And I should add very clearly that we highly recommend people use high SPF sunscreens to help protect themselves from skin cancer, but...

we know that there's another big portion of the UV spectrum, which is the UVA portion of the spectrum. So there are three types of UV radiation, UVA, UVB, and UVC.

The third doesn't quite make it through our atmosphere, so not much to worry about there. But UVA rays are just as important as UVB rays. We don't actually feel UVA rays because they don't burn our skin. These are often used in tanning beds, but they can still damage our skin and increase our risk of developing skin cancer. And the metric for UVA at the moment is somewhat in disarray.

In 2011, the Food and Drug Administration mandated that sunscreens that pass the FDA test for UVA and UVB be labeled under the umbrella term "broad spectrum." But how much UVA? Is it UVA with an SPF equivalent of 1, 10, 100, 1000? And this is particularly important for several reasons.

One is that well over 90% of the UV radiation from our sun is UVA. Only a small percent, single digits, are UVB. Number two, the UVA is much less likely to give you a sunburn. So if you're getting tons of UVA exposure, you won't know it.

Because sunburn is what usually alerts people to get out of the sun. The absence of it could translate to feeling safe, protected. In fact, there has been a concern that if you have a high SPF UVB protection from existing sunscreens and minimal UVA protection, you actually have the paradox that you're not going to burn

You're sitting on the beach and you're baking away getting tons of UVA, perhaps even more UVA exposure than you would have had if you had had a burn. Some researchers have attempted to put a microscope on the broad spectrum claims in sunscreen.

In 2021, a study by the Environmental Working Group set out to measure UVA protection in 51 sunscreens in the U.S. So we purchased the products you would see at Target, Walmart, Amazon. That's chemist David Andrews. He's the lead author of the study and the acting chief science officer for the organization.

The study examined mineral and chemical sunscreens. Mineral sunscreen works by acting as a barrier and reflecting light away from the skin. They usually contain at least the active and naturally occurring ingredient zinc oxide, while chemical sunscreen absorbs UV rays and uses ingredients like oxybenzone.

And the products on the U.S. market on average were providing about one quarter the UVA protection as they were to the UVB or SPF protection. David notes that the mineral sunscreens did better in the study compared to the chemical sunscreens. But he says people don't usually use them, often because they leave a noticeably white cast on the skin.

The study also tested the SPF claims in these same sunscreens. And we found on average products were only providing half of the reduction of UV light that you'd expect for the SPF value on the label. And there's a couple reasons I think for this.

The biggest reason is that there's an incredible market incentive to have the highest SPF value. That's what consumers look for. And a number of studies of consumer preference have shown that's the top thing they're looking for in purchasing a sunscreen product.

But those products aren't providing the protection they advertise. And that's also leading to really this false sense of security that these higher SPF values bring. Altogether, David says this false sense of security is a huge concern. But he also says this could be fixed if the right actions are put into play.

He says there are newer ingredients that better filter out UVA and UVB rays. For example, in countries like France, South Korea, and Japan. But in the U.S., Those ingredients can't find their way to market because of the required safety testing from FDA. In 1978, the FDA began regulating sunscreen as a drug and not a cosmetic, sort of like your over-the-counter Tylenol.

But the ingredients we see in sunscreens today were grandfathered in. It was only new ingredients that would have to be tested and approved as safe.

But David says there is no incentive for manufacturers to use and test different ingredients. In part because the market's still available to them. They can continue to sell their products and no one's forcing them to do the safety testing at this point. And so we're really just stuck in kind of the status quo. The testing process can also be costly for manufacturers as well.

Now, there is a window of hope, but this window is more so cracked than open. In 2019, the FDA proposed manufacturers retest current ingredients that were grandfathered in, like oxybenzone, after research showed some of these chemicals may be harmful to the environment and also to its users.

But the FDA has yet to finalize those rules. But if they did, it would force really a complete overhaul of the sunscreen market. That would force the additional safety testing for ingredients on the market. It would raise the bar for the UVA standard, as well as make a number of other important sunscreen changes. Right now, the ingredients in titanium dioxide and zinc oxide, which are found in mineral sunscreen,

are considered safe by the FDA. And David says that's the sunscreen the Environmental Working Group often recommends that people use. And that's actually what Annie Tomlin does. She's the woman we heard from at the beginning of the story who was diagnosed with skin cancer at 37.

Annie uses mineral sunscreen for her body and a chemical sunscreen for her face, but she buys that chemical sunscreen from another country. South Korea makes incredible sunscreens. They make sunscreens that just feel lovely on your skin. And as for applying sunscreen and practicing sun safety measures...

Annie makes sure that her husband and her kids are all on the same accord. I have two sons and when they were babies, they wore very gentle baby sunscreen and they wore all these cute little long sleeve rash guards to the beach. And I really treat sun protection as something that they should just learn how to do. It really is just part of their regular practice.

That story was reported by Nicole Curry. Coming up, there's been a panic over black plastic in your kitchen. People looked at their plastic utensils as if they were murderous items. We look at the findings of a viral study about black plastic and what it got wrong. That's next on The Pulse.

This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about exposures and what happens when we come in contact with things that may be hazardous to our health. Recently, I've avoided using some utensils that I have in my kitchen, specifically a black plastic spatula and a black plastic soup ladle. That's because I heard all of these terrifying news reports about black plastic.

It's probably in your kitchen, in toy bins, and in the bathroom. We're talking about black plastic. A new report found certain kitchen utensils and food trays made from recycled black plastic contained toxic chemicals. Experts say you want to replace your black utensils with silicone ones, metal, or wood. But it turns out the findings of the study that these reports are based on contained a pretty big error. Alan Yu explains.

Last October, The Atlantic published a story with a simple headline: "Throw out your black plastic spatula." Here's the gist of the article and many others that followed: "Black plastic, if it's not made from new materials, could come from recycled electronic waste, like old TVs, computers, keyboards, and so on. Those products contain flame retardants to prevent them from catching fire.

an advocacy group called Toxic Free Future tested consumer products like sushi trays, children's toys, and yes, spatulas for flame retardants. They

They found that these products do indeed contain varying levels of flame retardants. And that sparked a panic. People looked at the plastic utensils as if they were murderous items. Chemist Joe Schwartz is the director of the Office for Science and Society at McGill University in Quebec. Which has the mandate to separate sense from nonsense, myth from fact.

He has taught a course on plastic for many years. Joe read this study that people were frantically asking him about, and he noticed a big problem.

The researchers measured how much flame retardant was in black plastic items and compared it to what's called the reference dose. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sets reference doses to say how much of this chemical can you be exposed to before it becomes a health problem.

The researchers said if you cook with black plastic utensils, you could be exposed to a level of flame retardant that gets close to the reference dose. And it just seemed like they had the wrong number of zeros.

When they calculated the exposure to the flame retardants in this plastic, they calculated that the average exposure was something like 37,000 nanograms. And they compared that to the 42,000 and they said that it was close to the limit. Except the researchers got the limit wrong.

It is, in fact, 420,000. Of course, it's not close to the limit because they're off by a factor of 10. So Joe says don't worry. You are not at risk of eating a level of flame retardant that gets dangerously close to the EPA's reference dose. At least not unless you're cooking with and eating out of black plastic containers 10 times a day.

I contacted Toxic Free Future for this story weeks ago and did not hear back. They did publish an update to the journal article. They corrected the math error, but say that it does not change their conclusions. Now you can just dismiss this as a funny story that smug math teachers can use as a cautionary tale. When I grew up and went to school, it was before calculators and then computers and

And we actually learned how to multiply things in our head. But Joe commends the researchers for doing the study because they identified a real problem. That plastic should not be recycled into items that come in contact with food.

Now, not all black plastic containers or utensils are made with recycled plastic. But for those that are, how does the black plastic from electronics get into the mix? Joe says when recycling companies sort plastic waste, they use infrared light to separate out various kinds of plastic.

Depending on how they reflect the infrared light, they're detected and then a puff of air blows them off of the conveyor belt into different bins. I mean, it's unbelievable technology when you see this in action. But because the black isn't detected, it just goes straight through and it goes into the final bin, which ends up in landfill. Black plastic inadvertently gets sorted out of the recycling stream.

So if companies want to make kitchen utensils out of recycled black plastic, they have to find a source. And this is where electronic waste comes in. Old phones, computers, TVs and such get sorted in a different process that separates many kinds of materials, including precious metals. And in this process, black plastic is saved.

The problem is that plastic from electronic waste is not supposed to end up in food containers and utensils. That said, Joe says please do not throw out all your black plastic utensils because one, they're not as dangerous as you might have heard, and two, if you throw them away to be dumped in a landfill, that's not really great either.

But if you are thinking about buying new kitchen utensils, then consider buying ones made of steel or wood. So, of course, we have to minimize our use of plastics. In this particular case, if this whole story alerts people to being more careful about what they use and what they buy, then it will have served a purpose.

I also spoke to Gideon Myrowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist in Australia. He wrote a story for Slate with the headline, I'm not throwing away my black plastic spatula. All of my utensils currently are black plastic, except for the stainless steel ones that I use on my stainless steel pan.

I'm happy to send photos to anyone who doubts me. I can post them online. He says the other purpose this example can serve is demonstrating how to read scientific papers critically. His issue with the paper, aside from the math error, is how the researchers measured the level of flame retardant from cooking with black plastic utensils.

What they did to simulate this in a lab is boil plastic in oil for 15 minutes and then measure the amount of chemicals in the oil. In real cooking, you don't just leave your cooking utensils inside your oil for 15 minutes.

If for no other reason than they start to burn and smoke and set fire to your kitchen. But he says this study does prompt more questions about the manufacturing process of black plastic that another organization or government agency could answer. It does seem like they've identified a problem, but we have no real idea of how widespread the problem is.

He also says this example illustrates the difficulty of accurately discussing science in a way that interests people who are not scientists.

There is an inherent tension between accurate representations of scientific research and the news, the media, because people by definition are only interested in new and interesting news. That's what the news is, right? But if you communicate science with all of the nuance, it's often quite boring. Most studies add a small piece to a larger scientific question.

It is rare to have a true scientific breakthrough, so it is unrealistic to expect a constant stream of paradigm-changing scientific research.

He says in his own field of epidemiology, he suggests that people think carefully about whether a new finding actually applies to them or not. Epidemiological research is often interesting to people like me who look at entire populations of millions of people, but it's often not as important to the individual who's reading the newspaper article or whatever. ♪

That story was reported by Alan Yu.

That's our show for this week. The Pulse is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia, made possible with support from our founding sponsor, the Sutherland family and the Commonwealth Fund. Our health and science reporters are Alan Yu and Liz Tong. Our intern is Christina Brown. Charlie Kyer is our engineer. Our producers are Nicole Curry and Lindsay Lazarski. I'm Maiken Scott. Thank you for listening.

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