One good example might be the ongoing hazards of some of the waterproofing spray components that have been on the market. These are sprays used by consumers to treat shoes or leather, or sometimes they are used in more specialty applications, like construction. In these products the common link is various kinds of fluoropolymers, and they cause very severe lung injury in exposed individuals, sometimes with fairly trivial home use of these products. That injury is manifest within 12 to 24 hours, and so it is apparent with greater ease that there has been an association between exposure and the illness.
Why are these exposures happening? Aren't there regulations in place to protect us?
Well for one thing there is not good premarket testing regulation. For certain materials, for example drugs and pharmaceuticals, there is premarket testing. But there is nothing like that for home consumer products. The stuff comes out on the market and the consumer or the occupational user is the guinea pig, the test animal.
Secondly, the main regulatory group that is responsible in this is something called the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC), which to most consumers is an obscure regulatory body that has been extremely ineffectual. Their stated policy is to avoid almost at all costs mandatory recalls of products, and so most of what they do is work for voluntary recalls. There don't seem to be penalties associated, and I think the operative word here even in the best-case scenario is "recall," which means the material has already gone out to the marketplace.
What is the situation like in other countries?
The European Union (E.U.) has introduced a program called REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals), which introduced premarket testing. It is not perfect, and there are some things that are exempted. I think that the key change that we'll need to introduce in the U.S. is more widely applied premarket testing. And in any event, American companies that want to sell in the E.U. are going to be forced to do this.
I think everyone has been aware of the issues with importation to the U.S. of materials that are contaminated. This was the most vividly shown in the lead-painted toy fiasco several years ago, in which literally millions of lead-contaminated toys were imported, primarily from China. Again this fell under the bailiwick of the CPSC, which came to a gentlemen's agreement with the Chinese to stop doing it. Of course what we have found more recently is that instead of lead-painted toys, we have cadmium-painted toys. Cadmium is another toxic metal—its toxicity is different than lead, but it is not something you want reintroduced in the environment, especially children's environments. By the same token, we have been exporting to China electronics for recycling, which has led to very high exposure levels for the Chinese that work in recycling of these materials. So it is a two-way street.
The U.S. has also posed international treaty restrictions on the exportation of hazardous materials. In fact, historically some of the things banned in the U.S. are only banned in their sale or use, not necessarily their manufacture or export. The actual banning of a product is a very rare and underused solution to problems that are otherwise probably insoluble. For asbestos, for example, probably the only true solution to the problem is a worldwide ban on asbestos. Although asbestos use is severely restricted in the U.S., in fact it is not banned. Worldwide, there is still a great deal of exportation. In that realm Canada is the main profiteer, since the asbestos mining occurs there; it has at every step of the way tried to oppose asbestos controls in terms of international trade.
Conversely, the U.S. has been considering the introduction of a manganese additive to gasoline. Environmental and occupational experts are very worried about this because manganese is a metal that is associated with Parkinson's disease, or Parkinsonian damage to the brain, and the idea of inhalable manganese being spewed out of every tail pipe in the country is a recapitulation of the leaded gasoline disaster of the 20th century. Ironically, the same company that made its profits from tetraethyl lead has come up with this manganese product, because the market for tetraethyl lead is quite diminished, as you might imagine. So far, the EPA (which regulates gasoline formulations in the U.S.) has been studying this and has held it up—it has not yet been approved. (This is an example of something for which there is premarket testing.) But in the meantime, Canada banned, or attempted to ban, the sale and use of this product. The U.S. sued them under the North American Free Trade Agreement and forced them to import it. Basically every nation, when it comes to its own economic interests, does not particularly care what happens elsewhere.
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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.