DANGERS OF TOXIC FIRE RETARDANTS

House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree grew up on the island of North Haven. Imagine her surprise when she had her blood tested last year and found 19 flame retardant chemicals in her system. Pingree began telling her story in a two-part series on the "CBS Evening News.

"If I were going to have a child in a couple of years, the child would be impacted by the chemicals in my body." Pingree told CBS News reporter Wyatt Andrews as they walked along a beach on the island. "If I have it, you have it, we all have it," she said.

A CBS News crew spent a day with Pingree on North Haven to produce the story about her work to replace toxic flame retardants in consumer products with safer options. The story focused on brominated flame retardants and the negative effects they have on people, especially children.

"Hundreds of millions of pounds of flame retardant chemicals have been embedded in furniture [mattresses and consumer products in an effort to slow down fires and reduce deaths and injures." Andrews says in the story.

Scientists are raising red flags about the widely used flame retardant polybrominated diphenylether, or PBDE.

The report shows Linda Bernbaum, a senior toxicologist with the federal Environmental Protection Agency, who is concerned because PBDEs have cause the kinds of health effects in young animals that are warning signs for infant humans. "The PBDEs can affect the developing brain and they can affect the developing reproductive system," Bernbaum said in the the CBS report. "There is limited evidence whether they can cause cancer," she says.

Maine State Toxicologist Dr. Deborah Rich once studied PCBs, toxic chemicals banned in the 1970s. She now compares them to the chemical deca, one type of PBDE still produced in America. "I concluded that deca was toxic, Rice said. she came away from the studies convinced that they cause brain damage.

Unlike other industrial chemicals, brominated flame retardants build up inside the human body. These chemicals are now in our furniture [mattresses], cars, electronics, children's products, even our food, Andrews said.

MORE ABOUT DANGEROUS CHEMICALS.