By Scott Streater

Kyle Counts slides in his socks across the new hardwood floors of his North Richland Hills home and jumps into his mom's lap. Kyle, 10, has a blond Labrador named Titan and a handwritten sign on his bedroom door: "Keep Out. No girls allowed."

He also has at least 39 toxic chemicals in his body.

His older sister, 16-year-old Kimbra, has a brown Chihuahua, Princess Tea Cup. The walls of her room are painted pink and orange; clothes are strewn all over the floor.

She has at least 37 toxic chemicals in her body.

Angelia Counts is home-schooling Kyle. She has a garden out back where she grows tomatoes, herbs and peppers. Her husband, John, is a telecommunications manager who works mostly from their quaint three-bedroom house on a leafy cul-de-sac.

Each parent has at least 47 toxic chemicals coursing through his or her blood.

And scientists say they're just like you.

The four members of the Counts family are among 12 Tarrant County residents who volunteered for a Star-Telegram newspaper of Forth Worth, TX research project in which their blood was analyzed for more than 80 of the many man-made chemicals in products widely used in homes and offices.

The goal: Determine how many of those substances are in their blood.

The Star-Telegram study found trace amounts of dozens of the chemicals in everyone tested.

This is a story about a trade-off: Products that make our everyday lives convenient, comfortable and safe contain potentially harmful chemicals that can remain in the body for decades.

It's a story about the flame retardants in many car seat cushions, computer wires and the dust on your desk.

It's about the pesticides in the imported fruits and vegetables you eat.

It's about the coatings often found in your microwave popcorn bags and fast-food wrappers, and the stain-resistant fibers in your carpet.

"Everybody in the U.S. has many chemicals in them," said Dr. Arnold Schecter, a public-health physician and researcher at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Dallas, who helped guide the paper's effort.

But what does that mean?

The amount of any given chemical found in the Star-Telegram study was small. But their presence highlights what health experts fear is an emerging threat, spurred by an ever-increasing use of chemicals.

In the 12 volunteers, the Star-Telegram study found:

The overall results mirror those of national studies.

None of the chemicals were at levels considered to be an immediate health concern. But they build up in the body and the environment.

Health experts aren't sure how each chemical individually affects people's health, to say nothing of the mixture of the numerous substances.

"If you knew the answer, you'd be way ahead of the game," said Larry Needham, a research chemist at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's environmental health lab in Atlanta.

But in general, experts believe that the mixture that builds up can weaken the body's ability to fight off illnesses. At high enough levels, some of the chemicals have been shown to cause cancer and birth defects. Some are also known or suspected to cause developmental problems.
"There is a difficulty in understanding -- what does the soup of chemicals mean?" asked Dr. Nachman Brautbar, a medical toxicologist at the University of Southern California's School of Medicine. "Is it good for the body? Probably not."

Banned But Not Gone
Many of the chemicals the Star-Telegram measured have long been banned from production and use. They include the pesticide DDT, a cancer-causing agent, as well as an extremely dangerous form of dioxin that was found in the Vietnam War-era defoliant Agent Orange.

Both were found in the study participants, even in some who hadn't been born when the chemicals were banned in the United States.

That's because they take many years to break down. PCBs, for example, were banned in the U.S. in 1977. But "about 70 percent of what was ever made is still out there," said Linda Birnbaum, an EPA toxicologist at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina and a leading expert on the health effects of toxic substances.

That's why, when researchers look at the growing levels of other persistent toxic chemicals, they fear they'll encounter the same type of problems they've battled for years with dioxins, PCBs and pesticides.

Other chemicals the Star-Telegram measured aren't subject to much regulation. They include the controversial compound used to make DuPont's popular Teflon nonstick cookware, as well as the flame retardants in many mattresses and television wires.

They were found in study participants.

Questions about the potential health effects of those chemicals have sparked an increasingly contentious debate over whether the government should do more to protect people. The outcome could have a huge impact. Those chemicals are used to make products that generate billions of dollars a year for U.S. manufacturers. Evidence of harm could force companies to change how they make many common household items and open them up to multimillion-dollar lawsuits.

Some chemical manufacturers are taking precautionary measures. In the last six years, companies including DuPont and 3M have voluntarily withdrawn or committed to phase out and replace the chemical compounds used in nonstick pans, stain-resistant carpets and flame retardants.

Industry officials, however, say the concentrations of chemicals measured by the Star-Telegram study and others are so low that they're harmless.

An example: perfluorooctanoic acid, used to make Teflon cookware. Of the study participants, John Counts had the most: 5 parts per billion.

Some of the amounts found are so small that the technology to detect them did not exist until about 15 years ago.

"These are tiny levels of compounds which now suddenly we can detect," said Sarah Brozena, a senior director at the American Chemistry Council, the industry trade association. "Finding a chemical in our bodies is merely finding evidence of an exposure. It doesn't tell you anything about the source of the exposure or how big the exposure was that caused it. And it especially doesn't tell you anything about what risk it might pose at that level."

Brozena and others say having low levels of toxic chemicals in your body is part of the trade-off of being part of such a technologically advanced society with a standard of living that would have seemed impossible a century ago.

"Humans have never had it so good," said Roger Meiners, an economics and law professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, who says the federal government overregulates environmental pollutants. "I tend to think we ought to be a little bit careful before we start saying, 'Oh, everything we ingest is horrible, and it's killing us.' We're living longer and longer, so overall it seems to be working pretty well."

In many ways, the Counts family agrees.

Angelia Counts said she's not surprised that pesticides were found in their blood. The family eats tomatoes her father grows, which he sprays with pesticides.

They also eat a lot of fast food, Angelia says; many of the wrappers for burgers and chicken sandwiches have a nonstick coating that contains perfluorooctanoic acid. And this year, the family ripped up the carpet that had been in the house since they bought it, 11 years ago. John Counts believes that the stain-resistant chemicals in the carpet could be the source of the perfluorooctane sulfonate found in him and the rest of his family.

John also sprays his camping gear and shoes using an old can of water-repellent spray that contains a chemical found in his blood. He doesn't regret pulling up the carpet. And he has no plans to stop spraying his camping gear.

"It keeps my hiking boots from getting soaked while I'm hiking in the woods," he says. "It's worth it to me to keep my feet dry."

Rising Fast
Nowhere is the issue of trade-off more obvious than with polybrominated diphenyl ethers -- flame retardants -- that are found in virtually every U.S. resident at levels that are far and away the highest in the world. This type of flame retardant is commonly found in the air and water, and has been measured in lake sediments, fish and other wildlife worldwide.

Animal studies have shown that at high-enough levels, the chemicals in flame retardants harm the nervous system and cause reproductive problems including spontaneous abortions.
They also save lives.

"Certainly there would be a much higher fire risk without flame retardants," said Ron Hites, a chemist in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University who has studied the spread of flame retardants in the environment.

"On the other hand, you'd rather not eat fish in which these compounds are in there. So, you know, you're living in a modern world, there's chemicals all around us. You've got to pick and choose the risks that you want to take and the risks that you don't want to take."

The problem is that not enough research has been done to know whether the levels of flame retardants and other persistent toxic chemicals found in people are safe.

But what health officials do know concerns them.

They know that once those chemicals get into the body, no pill or treatment can remove them. They can be passed to a fetus in the womb through the placenta and to a baby through the mother's milk.

They know that levels of flame retardants and nonstick chemicals measured in people, though low, are rising so quickly that they are now nearing concentrations that have been shown to cause harm in animals.

What scientists don't know is the exact levels at which health problems begin in humans.

"If they're causing health effects, they're not low levels," said Dr. Lynn Goldman, a pediatrician at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a former assistant administrator in the EPA's Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances.

That's enough to concern Charlotte Landon, 59, of Fort Worth, in whose blood 47 toxic chemicals were detected.

"I'm not an environmentalist," Landon said, "but it makes me a little concerned a lot has been overlooked, and we have not been educated as to all the hidden chemicals and exposures that are going on around us every day, and we have no idea it's happening."

Other study participants aren't so concerned.

The study found 39 toxic chemicals in the blood of Lamar Calvert, 35, of Euless.
Does it bother him?

"Not really, because I wouldn't know any way of getting it out or getting rid of it," he said. "The only way not to be toxic would be living in a bubble."