Due to serious health risks associated with PCBs, production of the toxic chemical was banned and its uses were phased out under the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1977. That same year, GE was ordered to stop wantonly dumping PCBs into the Hudson River.

While PCB production is banned in dozens of countries around the globe, most of what was already manufactured and distributed still persists in the environment – and in our bodies.

PCBs are one of a select group of 12 chemicals referred to as Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) — affectionately labeled as the "dirty dozen" — which have been targeted for immediate response. According to President Bush, "concerns over the hazards of PCBs…are based on solid scientific information. These pollutants are linked to developmental defects of cancer and other grave problems in humans and animals. The risks are great and the need for action is clear: we must work to eliminate or at least to severely restrict the release of these toxins without delay."

Former EPA Administrator Whitman said that, "POPs have been linked to numerous adverse effects in humans and animals; those include cancer, central nervous system damage, reproductive disorders and immune system disruptions. They are, in fact, lethal."

The serious health risks from PCB exposure have long been accepted fact. Science supports and continues to track links of PCBs to cancer. For animals, PCBs are a known carcinogen. The EPA and numerous national and international health-protective organizations (including the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry of the U.S Public Health Service and the World Health Organization) classify PCBs as probable human carcinogens. Recent studies link human PCB exposure to cancers including breast cancer, and ongoing studies to confirm these causal links are currently underway.

In addition to being carcinogenic, PCBs cause a range of serious harms to animals and humans. In animals, PCB exposure is scientifically linked to damaged development and reproduction, with exposure leading to increased abortion, low birth weights, decreased survival and mating success, and embryo and fetal mortality (see PCBs and Infant Development [link/nb]). In addition, PCB exposure in animals adversely affects nervous system functions and results in endocrine disruption.

Likewise, in humans, PCB exposure has similarly been scientifically linked with developmental and reproductive abnormalities, endocrine disruption, neurological dysfunction, and compromised immune systems. For the developing fetus and the growing child, the harms of PCB exposure are the greatest. Because PCBs are stored in fat, they pass from the mother to the fetus during pregnancy, the most critical period of human development. For the developing infant, PCBs then pass through breast milk to be absorbed and stored in the developing child’s body.

According to the Academy of Pediatrics, the adverse effects of prenatal PCB exposure are permanent and there is no known treatment to reduce the body’s concentration of this persistent toxin.

Back in the 1930s, polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) was heralded as a miracle chemical due to its extreme stability. Sadly, this stability enables PCBs to persist in our environment today.

This same persistence is the cause of health dangers to animals and humans. Once consumed, PCBs are neither metabolized nor excreted. PCBs instead remain and accumulate in fatty tissue. PCBs therefore bioaccumulate, significantly increasing in concentration as they migrate up the food chain. Due to bioaccumulation, PCBs pose a greater threat to organisms at higher tropic levels, especially top predators such as humans, even when they are in relatively low concentrations in the ambient water column. For example, EPA data indicate that the concentration of a commonly used PCB compound in selected species of freshwater and marine organisms varied from 60 to 340,000 times the concentration of the chemical in the surrounding water.

PCBs may adversely affect the survival, growth, and reproduction of various species that eat organisms in the Hudson River. Wildlife such as fish, invertebrates, amphibians, birds and mammals can be directly exposed to PCBs from contaminated sediments, river water and air, and can be indirectly exposed by ingesting PCB-contaminated food sources. PCBs may also enter the terrestrial food chain through contaminated sediment deposition on the floodplain during high flow events, and through the movement of organisms between the river and shore.

The primary pathway for humans to be exposed to PCBs in the Hudson River is through fish consumption. To protect the river’s anglers, the Department of Health posted fish consumption advisories for the Hudson River, which recommend that women of childbearing age and children under 15 should eat no fish from the Hudson River. It is furthermore illegal to eat fish from the river between the Federal Dam in Troy and Hudson Falls. It was illegal to even catch these fish until 1995.

Unfortunately, many people continue to eat these contaminated Hudson River fish and share their catch with family and friends. They are either unaware of the health advisories, choose to ignore them or they depend on the River’s fish as an inexpensive protein source. In communities such as Ossining, recent immigrants catch fish during the warm months, freeze their catches for the winter, and are therefore exposed to PCBs year-round.

But it is not only Hudson anglers who risk PCB contamination. A couple of years ago, fish from the Hudson, notably striped bass, had illegally found their way into Manhattan’s restaurants, and to the Fulton Fish Market which itself supplies most of the Boroughs’ fish stores and restaurants.

Although the dumping of this toxic chemical was banned over thirty years ago, the persistent toxicity of PCBs in the Hudson River poses unacceptable health risks to the people and wildlife that inhabit the River’s Valley.