- Tons of popular and legal products/chemicals are "endocrine disruptors"[1] (fancy term for mess with hormones).
- The FDA/EPA doesn't deny that, they don't themselves even really require tests for long-term health effects in humans (too difficult). Instead they give animals a 1000x+ dose and look for immediate drastic effects (this is abbreviated "LOAEL"). That's the reason we have a xenoestrogen in the lining of soda cans (BPA), because we're trusting that tiny doses must be negligible, which isn't necessarily a valid assumption [2].
- The attitude on a lot of chemicals is "Safe until proven guilty," but when some of these chemicals are suspect (e.g. pesticides) instead of a public announcement they are pulled from public use quietly prior to the point of definitive evidence. New/similar ones can be introduced with presumption of safe until proven guilty. (Search PFOAs if you want to get a sense of how ineffective our protection mechanisms are)
I came to the conclusion a radically new model is necessary, the EPA/FDA need to design models to test for fertility effects, perhaps multigenerationally, in their studies (fruit flies?) quickly.
My bet is within 20 years we'll see it as the more immediate problem than global warming.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.2203/dose-response....