Mix of endocrine disrupters a dangerous cocktail

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which are harmless individually in small doses, can together be a dangerous cocktail. Concurrent exposure to several endocrine-disrupting substances may, among other things, result in malformed sexual organs. Risk assessments of chemical substances should therefore take potential cocktail effects into account. These are the findings of research conducted by the National Food Institute, Technical University of Denmark.

Many young men have a low sperm count and more and more boys are born with malformed sexual organs. A little less than five per cent of all Danish boys are, for example, born with hypospadias, where the opening of the urethra is on the underside of the penis. Substances disturbing the hormonal balance during the foetal development have long been suspected of being one of the causes of such birth defects.

"Several animal tests have shown that endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which have an effect on the male sex hormone testosterone, can result in such malformations in young male rats. In vitro testing and short-term animal testing have also suggested that concurrent exposure to several chemical substances can result in endocrine-disrupting effects even if exposure to each individual substance does not show any effect. We are now able to document that this is actually the case," says Ulla Hass, senior scientist at the National Food Institute, Technical University of Denmark.