As an Alaskan fisherman, Timothy June, 54, used to think that he was safe from industrial pollutants (污染物) at his home in Haines—a town with a population of 2,400 people and 4,000 eagles, with 8 million acres of protected wild land nearby. But in early 2007, June agreed to take part in a (36)_____ of 35 Americans from seven states. It was a biomonitoring project, in which people’s blood and urine (尿) were tested for (37)_____ of chemicals—in this case, three potentially dangerous classes of compounds found in common household (38)_____ like face cream, tin cans, and shower curtains. The results—(39)_____ in November in a report called “Is It in Us?” by an environmental group—were rather worrying. Every one of the participants, (40)_____ from an Illinois state senator to a Massachusetts minister, tested positive for all three classes of pollutants. And while the (41)_____ presence of these chemicals does not (42)_____ indicate a health risk, the fact that typical Americans carry these chemicals at all (43)_____ June and his fellow participants.
Clearly, there are chemicals in our bodies that don’t (44)_____ there. A large, ongoing study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found 148 chemicals in Americans of all ages. And in 2005, the Environmental Working Group found an (45)_____ of 200 chemicals in the blood of 10 new-borns. “Our babies are being born pre-polluted,” says Sharyle Patton of Commonweal, which cosponsored “Is It in Us?” “This is going to be the next big environmental issue after climate change.”
