POISONOUS PRODUCTS?: Physician Paul Blanc discusses how seemingly harmless, everyday consumer products may be bad for health.
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We are continually exposed to a mélange of potentially toxic chemicals through the air we breathe, food and water we consume, and products that come in contact with our skin. Some of these chemicals are suspected of interfering with hormone function; causing cancer, asthma or other respiratory harm; damaging the brain and nervous system; and promoting reproductive disorders or negatively impacting developing embryos. More than 83,000 chemicals have been registered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) of 1976 for use in U.S. commerce. Most of these substances have not been thoroughly tested for their effects on human health. What's more, we are often exposed to chemicals in various multiple combinations that may produce unpredictable effects.
Some critics say the EPA fails to do enough to protect health and are pushing for reform of the 34-year old TSCA. In recent moves that suggest reform may be closer, the EPA in 2009 issued action plans for compounds that pose serious health or environmental concerns and announced as well the establishment of a "Chemicals of Concern" list. Furthermore, the Safe Chemicals Act of 2010, a bill that would strengthen TSCA, was introduced in Congress this past April; it may be taken up for consideration later this year.
In the meantime, seemingly harmless, ubiquitous products such as glue, weatherproofing sprays, household cleaners and gasoline additives have been causing illness in both workers and the general public for many decades. Paul Blanc, a physician who holds the endowed chair in Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, discusses the health risks associated with hazardous chemicals found in common consumer products. He is the author of How Everyday Products Make People Sick: Toxins at Home and in the Workplace (University of California Press, 2007), which addresses the following topics, along with many others, in more detail.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows. ]
How do everyday products make people sick?
There are two main issues: how people are exposed making everyday products, and how people are exposed using everyday products. But I think it is also important to remember an important third phase, which is what happens to these products after people are done using them and they are disposed of, recycled or put into the environment. The take-home lesson is that everything is connected to everything, and there is no magic wall that separates or protects consumers from hazards that are otherwise considered industrial hazards or the environment downstream. We have to think about things from cradle to grave.
How are these illnesses discovered? How do you link an exposure to a health outcome?
It gets progressively more difficult because, generally speaking, as you have lower levels of exposure stepping down from the industrial site to the home, and then from the home to the environment, it is more difficult (but not impossible) to make the connections. Often the connection between exposure and illness is made quite quickly and quite obviously early on in the life cycle of these materials. It is not simply that now we're clever enough to identify these things. If you look back in time you can see that often the lag time between the introduction of a new process or product and the recognition of a health risk was pretty rapid, within just a few years in many cases—even for sophisticated new materials. If it is an acute or fairly immediate effect following exposure, it is easier to identify the link.
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10 Comments
Add CommentNo!!! Are you trying to tell me that all the chemicals we have around our house and in our environment can make us sick or kill us??? I hain't gonna believe that for an instant. You're just one of em'tree-hugers trying to pull the wool over our eyes again and make us believe that we should stop using chemicals that betters our life styles.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat are you going to do next; start telling us to start using em' plant extracts to keep us healthy? I hain't going to fall for that one.
I fully agree with this article. In the name lifestyle, advancement, consumerism (bedrock of capitalism) we are committing suicide and genocide for all fellow living creatures. Basically we are not living in harmony with nature.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe only solution to this to take a slow but steady u-turn. If we make a product we must first learn to envision its impact on environment. This will not happen because we live in a selfish society (for profit only) with no consideration to environment (including our self). We are destroying the balance at a very rapid rate.
We must redefine our objectives to a more balanced sustainable approach rather then just be a corporate model based profit maximization only. Please note we (all living creatures) are based on the same planet earth. What is point in talking about advancement in science and technology when it cannot help us to live in harmony with nature? It can but GREED and EGO blocks it.
Please note that pollution on this planet is also globalised, chemical leak in the ocean can reach across the planet on the back of ocean currents. This is happening as of now.
I am not against advancement provided full care is taken to ensure the benefit for all humans and all living creatures. What goes around comes back?
We are all using the word I and me more often but the fact is we come with nothing and go with nothing. In reality we all want more comforts and to live life in a healthy and less stressful manner.
But this is in reality is not happening, so our wisdom is actually much less then animals? So we are like a beast who is trying to eat itself to death.
There's a lot of good in highly rehulated social democrat capitalism, European style, and even in the kind rather naively envisioned in THE WEALTH OF NATIONS--although over time it collapses into tyranny as easily as communism, and a LOT faster than Medieval mercantilism did. I'm a Medievalist by education, and would I love to see the greedos of Monsanto, for example, sentenced to a month in the stocks, or even better in the pillory where you had to stand up or you'd choke.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJustice for all of is is long overdue. I wish Obama and his thuggish advisors understood that. Geithner is one I'd love to see in the downtown pillory!
I appreciate the authors caution when linking diseases of multifactorial origin with environmental exposures to chemicals of concern. However, A great fallacy in this area of research is evaluating risk in a vacuum. The 59 different naturally produce herbicides in cauliflower have significant biological effects when measured individually but when ingested as the vegetable they are good for you. Such are the limitations of toxicological testing. Further, we happy little humans love to enjoy our preferred risks all the while denigrating those we hold lower value for. If you have ever enjoyed a half liter of wine at any point in your life, you have already exceeded the health risk of ingesting the maximal permissible dose of our worse pesticides for an entire life time. If you enjoy caffeic acid in you morning cup of Joe, order the casket now! That is if you fail to understand the application of modern toxicologic data. Finally, we do not make most products just because we are bored. We make them to protect ourselves from things in our environment that are far worse. As in all thing however there is no free lunch. The question is, how much asthma do we tolerate creating in exchange for reducing the risk of other more severe and immediate conditions. While searching for products with the least adverse impact is all well and good, it must be balanced against those other risks we usually fail to consider.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFailure to read and follow instruction is the cause of many illnesses.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWoodrow C Monte, PhD, Emiritus Prof. Nutrition gives many PDFs of reseach -- methanol (11% of aspartame) puts formaldehyde into brain and body -- multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's, cancers, birth defects, headaches: Rich Murray 2010.05.13
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://rmforall.blogspot.com/2010_05_01_archive.htm
Thursday, May 13, 2010
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/1601
Other formaldehyde sources include alcohol drinks and
tobacco and wood smoke, while adequate folic acid levels protect most people, but not for brain and retina harm.
sweeteners (aspartame), methanol (becomes formaldehyde),
and premature babies in Denmark, TI Halldorsson et al
2010.06.30 AmJClinNutr: Erik Millstone: Betty Martini: Rich Murray 2010.07.08
http://rmforall.blogspot.com/2010_07_01_archive.htm
Thursday, July 8, 2010
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/1609
Without being accused hereafter of being paranoid, would someone please explain to me what is being sprayed in our skies by unmarked planes? I'm serious. Normal contrails, as I understand it, dissipate from a jet plane within seconds or at the most minutes after being expelled from the engines. These things, some people call contrails, hang around all day. I've watched them for at different periods for hours. Upper aircurrents sometimes whiff them around until they start to look like a thin layer of clouds...others stay fairly straight for hours. I've got an open mind, I just need to understand this phenomena.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe've never had a truly laissez-faire system and you know it. The false strawman of "robber-barons" is a myth...it wasn't even near a true laissez-faire system. Politics was then and still is meshed with the free market.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe only way to have true liberty would be the separation of business and state the same way we have separation of church and state. The economy would explode with productivity if that were done and lobbying was criminalized for both the lobbier and the legislator that is being bought.
Ever since I researched parabens and how many products have parabens in them my entire family has switched to mostly organic household items such as shampoos and conditioners, deoderant, and toothpaste. Overall its probably a good idea to stay aware of these random chemicals that have never been tested in a long term study.. no one really knows how certain things interact with the checks and balances of the body. Plus if we have all these chemicals mutating our DNA.. imagine the epigenetic destruction down the road... scary!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe bald eagle didn't have any say about the lead in our gasoline and we almost killed them off. The kid playing in the lead paint chips didn't have any say about that either. Like it or not we are resposible for the health of the whole planet because our decisions and actions have global consequences.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't trust corporations to consider the global impact of their operations. I expect them to earn a profit regardless of the risks. That is why I expect our government to regulate corporate greed that could endanger the viability of this rock. If we trash this rock, we don't have another one to move to.
Any adult injured because they failed to read and follow the label falls into the "Darwin was right" category. Fortunately, this is an instance where corporate greed and gov't regs come together well. The corporations don't want to get sued and the gov't requires that they tell us how to use the product safely. I would like to see all the ingredients in the products I use. There are still too many 'other ingredients' of 'propietary nature' that aren't listed.