They’re just about in everything because they’ve made every one of these products much nicer. If you go to your kitchen sink and under your bathroom sink and look at the cleaning compounds that are there. They’re in our toys, the children’s toys. We’re constantly exposed to them.ĬOLBORN: They’re in plastics. At first, people saw her as a bit of a radical, but over a decade later the government is channeling more and more funding towards researching these chemicals and there’s a new act in Congress that will require better testing of suspected endocrine disruptors.Ĭolborn says it’s about time. Theo Colborn was one of the first to sound the alarm on endocrine disruptors and how they affect reproductive health and development when she co-authored the book “Our Stolen Future” in the late 90’s. It’s a member of a family of chemicals known as endocrine disruptors.ĬOLBORN: Well basically they’re chemicals that have been around for quite a while, we just didn’t know what they were doing.ĪHEARN: Dr. Geological Survey found intersex fish in one third of the waterways they tested across the United States.Īnd atrazine is not the only chemical to blame for causing widespread reproductive health problems. Studies on rats, reptiles and even human cells exposed to atrazine showed similar results. There’s another study that just came out in Canada showing that if you go to an environment that’s contaminated with atrazine you find more hermaphroditic or abnormally developed males.ĪHEARN: The reproductive problems Hayes is seeing in his specimens aren’t limited to frogs. HAYES: In our work with frogs for example we can go into the field. Hayes says this might be one reason that populations of frogs and other amphibians all over the world are going down. HAYES: …because they don’t have a female chromosome the females that are genetically males can only produce other males so 100 percent of their offspring would be males.ĪHEARN: And more male frogs means fewer babies down the road. Let me say that again: the male frogs are having babies. So, this is the equivalent of a man with a uterus.ĪHEARN: These frogs aren’t just behaving like females – they’re actually producing eggs and when those eggs are fertilized by normal male frogs, the babies grow up to be seemingly normal frogs. But on the inside it had large testis, so these are testis, and this is an oviduct. HAYES: This is an animal that looked like a female on the outside. But Hayes’ research showed that atrazine exposure made these frogs 7 times more prone to homosexual behavior and10 percent of the exposed frogs actually became feminized.ĪHERN: To explain what he meant by “feminized” Hayes brought me back to his office and pulled up a picture on his laptop of a frog that had been exposed to the herbicide. HAYES: So what you can see is that there’s a seven-fold difference in the atrazine treated animals.ĪHEARN: Homosexual behavior has been recorded in over 450 different species of animals – from bison to beetles. He exposed some of his frogs to the same level of atrazine that the Environmental Protection Agency says is safe for drinking water, and he kept the rest of the frogs atrazine-free. Once Hayes heard about this he started collecting data. This for example is one that has lots of gay males, homosexual pairs in it because it’s a treated tank.ĪHEARN: One morning when one of Hayes’ PhD students came in to feed the specimens at 7 AM she noticed some male-on-male copulation going on in a tank that had been treated with atrazine – the second most commonly used herbicide in the U.S. HAYES: So in this tank there are 40 brothers that are not exposed to atrazine and in this tank there are 40 brothers who were exposed to atrazine and so we can compare these two tubs and look at the number of homosexual pairs. Below the surface, fat greenish-yellow frogs swim around– their bulging eyes looking up at us through the water. HAYES: So these are the South African Claw frog.ĪHEARN: Tyrone Hayes peers into a large gray fiberglass tank like a little boy looking for critters in a tide pool. And they may be affecting our reproductive health – indeed, even our sexual preferences. They eventually make their way from our farms, households or industry into the environment – and into our bodies. We use synthetic chemicals for everything from plastics to pesticides. From the carpets in our living rooms to the liners of our canned goods we’re exposed to manmade chemicals every day. CURWOOD: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Steve Curwood.
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