In June 2004, Erica Heath, who formerly ran the University of California, San Francisco's institutional review board (IRB), got an unusual call. Douglas Fischer, a reporter at the Oakland Tribune, told her he wanted to test the blood of four family members for levels of polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) fire retardants, and publish the results in the paper. "She laughed when I told her what I wanted to do," says Fischer. "Then she got quite serious."
Fischer became interested in the levels of PBDE fire retardants in the breast milk and blood of Californians after writing several stories about the work of Kim Hooper, a toxicologist at the California Environmental Protection Agency in nearby Berkeley who had found very high levels of the chemical in breast milk. Fischer says he "got a phenomenal response," mostly from women asking: "What's in me, where did it come from, and what's it doing ...
