DUST in American homes contains such high levels of flame retardants called PBDEs that young children could be ingesting up to 6000 nanograms of these chemicals a day.
“We cannot say what these levels will do,” says Heather Stapleton of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland, whose team carried out the study. “But laboratory studies with rats and mice have shown that exposure to PBDEs can affect development.”
The team found PBDEs in dust from all the 17 homes they sampled in Washington DC and Charleston, South Carolina. Concentrations ranged up to 30,100 nanograms per gram,…
