ABSTRACT
Humans carry body burdens of a wide array of environmental chemicals, including persistent organic chemicals. These chemicals may be found in different compartments of the body, including blood, adipose tissue, organs such as the liver, and for women, in breast milk. Despite the fact that the presence of these chemicals in breast milk was first reported about 50 years ago, and hundreds of papers on this issue have appeared in the scientific literature, with a few exceptions it is only relatively recently that the popular press and others have focused on this issue. Past qualms about discussing the issue of environmental chemicals in breast milk were due, in part, to a reluctance to contribute unnecessarily to a decline in breastfeeding rates. With the increased visibility of this issue, some have raised new questions regarding the safety of breast milk as a nutrition source for infants. While the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and others strongly support breast milk as the preferred nutrition for infants, their statements on breastfeeding only indirectly address questions regarding safety/ risk for specific chemical contaminants (AAP, 1997, 2001). The AAP statements address the issue indirectly because its conclusions are based on examinations of infants breastfed milk that likely contained a mixture of environmental chemicals. Despite this, benefits to the breastfed infant were numerous.
