Giving Compass' Take:

• Research from the NYU Langone Medical Center reports that exposure to lead, mercury, and other toxic chemicals, especially flame retardants and pesticides resulted in more than a million cases of intellectual disability in the United States.

• What are policymakers doing to address this issue? What are some other ways we can reduce our exposure to toxic chemicals? 

• A toxic-free future is possible, here's how. 

Furthermore, as the target of significantly fewer restrictions, researchers say, flame retardants and pesticides now represent the bulk of that cognitive loss.

Adverse outcomes from childhood exposures to lead and mercury are on the decline in the US, likely due to decades of restrictions on the use of heavy metals, they report.

IQ loss from the toxic chemicals analyzed in their study dropped from 27 million IQ points in 2001 and 2002 to 9 million IQ points in 2015 and 2016, find the researchers from the New York University Grossman School of Medicine.

CHEMICALS IN FLAME RETARDANTS
Among toxin-exposed children, the researchers found that the proportion of cognitive loss that results from exposure to chemicals used in flame retardants, called polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PDBEs), and organophosphate pesticides increased from 67% to 81% during the same study period.

“Our findings suggest that our efforts to reduce exposure to heavy metals are paying off, but that toxic exposures in general continue to represent a formidable risk to Americans’ physical, mental, and economic health,” says Abigail Gaylord, a doctoral candidate in the population health department at New York University Langone Medical Center and lead investigator of the paper in Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology.

Read the full article about toxic chemicals stealing IQ points by NYU Langone Medical Center at Futurity.