Persistent Organic Pollutants, or POP’s, are synthetic chemicals that are found everywhere and in everything in some form, and cannot be broken down quickly. They are found in pesticides mainly, which include insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, and rodenticides. They are also found in dish detergent, milk jugs, baby’s teething rings, the lining of tin cans, computers, Tupperware, power lines, clothes, insulation, plastic wrap, Barbie dolls, cars, soda bottles, in milk, on our fruits and vegetables and even in our bodies at birth.

The dirty dozen is a term used to categorize the 12 most dangerous chemicals. It consists of a group of POP’s, including DDT, Aldrin, Dieldrin, Endrin, Chlordane, Heptachlor, Hexachlorobenzene, Mirex, Toxaphene, Dioxi

Many people do not look past the good qualities of these chemicals to the harmful long-term effects. There are, in fact, many good uses for them. If DDT had not been used to control the spread of malaria, or to control the spread of typhus during WWII, many people would have died from disease. The question is, do the benefits outweigh the costs. This is one question that has not yet been answered. The United States government has been trying to use a cost/benefit scale, but they are not sure of all of the problems, especially on humans. Some of the biggest problems that they have seen already include bioaccumulation, reproductive failure, many types of cancer, and many other health problems.

Because striped dolphins usually live and die far from any shores, the plague that hit the dolphins living in the Mediterranean Sea in the early 1990’s was well under way before anyone realized what was happening. Examinations of the dead dolphins showed collapsed lungs, breathing difficulties, and abnormal movement and behavior. When the winter came, the epidemic slowed down and finally stopped but the next summer it returned. Researchers determined that a virus in the distemper family was again involved. More research was done, and it was determined that the PCB levels in the dead dolphins were two to three times higher than those in living dolphins.

In the 1970’s around Lake Ontario, Mike Gilbertson, a seasoned biologist, began seeing unhatched herring gull eggs and abandoned nests everywhere, and also some dead chicks. He estimated that 80% of the chicks had died before they had hatched, and the ones that were left had horrible deformities. Gilbertson remembered reading about chick edema, a problem that resulted in the same deformities that he had seen. Chick edema occurred in the laboratory when chickens were exposed to dioxin.

Author and scientist Theo Colborn questions why the effects of these toxins were not discovered earlier. In her book, Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival? A Scientific Detective Story, she writes about early signs that should have given us clues to the harmful effects of these pesticides. The following nine accounts each tell the story of a different species, from as early as 1952 to as late as 1992.

Mink fur was in high demand after WWII, and mink farmers around Lake Michigan were breeding a lot of minks. By the early 1960’s the number of minks began to decrease because of mysterious reproductive problems. The number of pups declined from four to two, then to one, and then most females stopped giving birth. The only mink farmers that did not have a problem were the ones that used fish imported from the West Coast, and not from Lake Michigan. The reproductive failure was linked to PCB’s in the fish living in Lake Michigan.

In England in the 1950’s, otter hunting was a very popular game. By the late 1950’s, hunters began having trouble finding otters. After two decades, environmentalists began to notice the population decline. Scientists depended on the huntsmen’s records for clues about the disappearance. The pesticide Dieldrin was suspected, and proved later on in the 1980’s.

Niels Skakkeback, a reproductive researcher at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, had begun to see more and more sperm abnormalities, and a drop in the sperm count. In Denmark, the rate of testicular cancer had tripled between 1940 and 1980. More research was done, and scientists were stunned by what they

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