The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Université Paris-Sorbonne, must be a dangerous place to work, because scholars there have found that almost everything is a so-called "endocrine disruptor".

They may be correct. If you drink a cup of coffee while reading this, your hormones changed, they were disrupted. If you got angry knowing that the most anti-science country in the developed world, France, put out yet another article that has gone essentially unchallenged by anyone in their whole school much less a co-author with some common sense, your hormones changed. And because they changed, they can be called "disrupted" - if you have an agenda that does not involve science or public health. 

And like Pete Myers or Fred vom Saal in the US, Barbara Demeneix does have an agenda that does not involve public health. It is instead an anti-science mentality that borders on pathology, but they have wrapped themselves in the flag of wholesomeness for their political allies by claiming they are really anti-corporate instead. No one outside their conspiracy circle is fooled.

In Endocrine Connections, a quasi-predatory journal which exists to promote endocrine disruption hysteria, they updated a review where the methodology itself was created to link numerous common chemicals with changes in normal thyroid hormone actions essential for normal brain development in fetuses and young children.

Low dose endocrine disruptors - the astrology of toxicology

It is essentially a trial lawyer call to action masquerading as a science editorial. They create their narrative by starting off with the real world and then linking their environmental fable to suggested dangers. Maternal thyroid hormones are essential for normal brain development of children  - and that is where the science stops. They immediately invoke other studies which share their biased conclusion and declare that is weight of evidence. Astrologers can do the same thing, by doing a "review" of authors claiming astrology works, and suddenly the paper is peer-reviewed.

So they write meaningless sentences such as "previous human studies have indicated" that disruption to thyroid hormone function in pregnant women may affect cognitive development and increase the risk of brain developmental disorders in children.  No kidding? The paper goes off into gibberish by claiming that the trace levels of chemicals and pesticides that we can now detect - down to parts per quadrillion in some cases - and that this "chemical contamination" is dooming us all.

Homeopathy is alive and well among the endocrine disruption fringe

There is just one problem with their belief. Birth defects have gone down, not up. Though activists torturing data until it confesses have linked endocrine-disrupting chemicals to every possible negative outcome, the real world shows no increased harm. 

Nonetheless, Professor Barbara Demeneix and colleagues don't do any experiments of their own, they simply rehash claims by others and claim that everything from pesticides to chemicals used in the manufacture of drugs, cosmetics, furniture and plastics, can all interfere with thyroid hormones and should be banned. 

Prof Demeneix claims, "Many experts in the field, consider that the current testing guidelines for thyroid-disrupting chemicals are not sufficiently sensitive, do not take into account recent findings and do not adequately consider risks to vulnerable populations, such as pregnant women."

Citation: Bilal B Mughal, Jean-Baptiste Fini, Barbara Demeneix, Thyroid disrupting chemicals and brain development: an update, Endocrine Connections, 2018; EC-18-0029 DOI: 10.1530/EC-18-0029