A BANNED pollutant may be damaging children’s immune systems before they can properly develop.
Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) have long been known to cause a variety of illnesses, from skin irritation to cancer. Now a study suggests that the chemicals, which were commonly used in electrical equipment and heavy machinery until the 1970s, are also causing immunodeficiency in children living in the Faroe Islands.
Carsten Heilmann of the National University Hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark, and his colleagues measured the response to tetanus and diphtheria vaccines of 119 healthy Faroese children aged 18 months and 129 7-year-olds. They found that a high…
