The shower curtain hanging in your bathroom. The garden hose coiled on the back porch. The vinyl flooring under your feet. The deodorant on the bathroom shelf. These are not your usual suspects in infant mortality.
But the death toll is rising.
A landmark study published earlier this year in the peer-reviewed journal eClinicalMedicine makes a case linking chemicals embedded in all of them to one of the most devastating patterns in global public health: babies born too soon and many of them dying.
Researchers led by NYU Langone Health estimated that exposure to di-2-ethylhexylphthalate, known as DEHP, may have contributed to approximately 1.97 million preterm births in 2018 alone — more than eight percent of the world’s total — as well as the deaths of 74,000 newborns.
