Physicians must start becoming louder activists about the deleterious impact of toxic chemicals found in such things as plastics, pesticides and pollutants, a leading reproductive endocrinologist said Tuesday.

Dr. Linda Giudice, professor and chair of the department of OBGYN and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, said mounting research is showing the harms of endocrine-disrupting chemicals triggering adverse health effects like obesity, Type 2 diabetes and some cancers. Humans everywhere are being exposed to them through food, energy production, industrial emissions, garbage landfill sites, transportation and the production, use and disposal of consumer and personal care products.

Giudice told delegates attending the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) conference in Vancouver that science is even showing that babies are coming out of the womb “pre-polluted” and parents are desperate for advice about how they can possibly avoid exposures to chemicals. Her featured talk was accompanied by an official FIGO statement — the first of its kind — calling for global action and policies meant to prevent exposure to toxic environmental chemicals. There are 7,000 gynecologists/obstetricians, midwives and other reproductive health experts attending the conference.

“The prenatal period is highly vulnerable and so is the pre-conception period,” Giudice said, adding that once babies crawl, they are exposed to many pollutants and intoxicants, since the dust and dirt on the ground or floors is full of them. Chemicals enter the body via breathing, eating, drinking and through the skin. In pregnant women, they cross the placenta. They are also found in breast milk.

“But everyone has measurable contaminants in their body and there are mixtures of them in every body,” she said.

Chemicals — and there are about 100,000 in production — are not subject to the same rigours of research and safety evaluation as drugs, so they can be seen as “uncontrolled medicine.”

By 2030, it is estimated that over 50 per cent of chemical manufacturing will take place in Asia and the Middle East, so global action and policies are essential. “We need regulations for commercial and industrial chemical use as well as for disposal and recycling, both in developed and developing counties,” she said.

While it’s a tall order given the universal nature of the problem, Giudice said getting lead out of gasoline was also a monumental task that took about four decades of advocacy, but finally happened.

“We can’t just shop our way out of this, we need policy change,” she said, referring to the fact that simply avoiding products with chemicals like phthalates or PCBs won’t be too helpful on a global scale.

While food is a major pathway for exposure to chemicals, mercury pollution from coal burning is a source of pollution in many countries and three billion people in low-income countries are exposed to indoor pollution through cooking and home heating with fire pits, according to an article co-authored by Giudice in the International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics. The co-authors include a dozen other FIGO experts, including Dr. Jennifer Blake, CEO of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada.

The article says environmental chemicals affect people at all ages, impacting fertility, pregnancy, fetal growth, cognition and behaviour. FIGO says it is impossible to ignore the “accumulating robust evidence of exposures and adverse health impacts related to toxic environmental chemicals.”