The Kid-Safe Chemical Act
Posted by Lisa Carey
Are chemicals considered innocent until proven guilty? BPA is one of the most recent chemicals discovered to be harmful to our health and baby bottles were recalled. But there are so many more out there that we don’t know about that are harmful- including those that may have a link to the increased incidence of autism.
Senator Lautenberg of New Jersey has introduced the Kid-Safe Chemical Act. The Kid-Safe Chemical Act would demand that chemicals be proven safe for kids before going on the market. You’d think we would have been doing that all along wouldn’t you? We haven’t. Our legislation on the matter, the Toxic Substances Control Act, is decades old. While the U.S. has attempted to require that pharmaceuticals be proven safe before going on the market and that pesticides be proven safe before going on the market, toxic chemicals have not been regulated the same way. As Senator Lautenberg has said, “our children have become test subjects.”
In the past it has been a matter of discovering health problems and investigating their roots. For example, the chemical TCB was used in degreasers. After a higher incidence of birth defects and childhood leukemia was found, it was traced back to water contaminated with TCB and then TCB was regulated.
Aren’t there studies to see if chemicals are toxic? Sure, but under the current Confidential Business Information laws companies don’t have to share this information about a product that hasn’t been listed so far. So if a chemical shows health risks after animal testing, the testers aren’t required to report it if it wasn’t already on a list. CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta says this is “changing, slowly.”
Toxic Baby Bottles?
Recent scientific studies by the EPA have demonstrated a link between “Bisphenol A” and an array of health issues, including cancer and reproductive problems. Guess what is made with Bisphenol A? Baby bottles and water bottles both contain it.
Toxins By The Numbers:
There are about 80,000 chemicals.
Only about 200 of those chemicals have been tested for safety.
Only five chemicals that were known of at the time of the TSCA legislation was enacted have been regulated for safety.
Another number:
Today about 1% of our population of children is diagnosed with autism.
Previously, there was great suspicion of immunizations correlated to autism that has now been disproven. On the other hand, studies have shown that the risk of autism increases when embryos are exposed to certain drugs during pregnancy and “environmental exposures experienced prenatally,” according to Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, professor of pediatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
According to Alan M. Goldberg, a professor of toxicology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, “There are diseases that are increasing in the population that we have no known cause for. Breast cancer, prostate cancer, autism are three examples. The potential is for these diseases to be on the rise because of chemicals in the environment.”
In the mean time while we wait for safer laws and EPA enforcement, parents and pregnant women are left to search labels for words like “phthalates” and plastics for number 3, 6 and 7 on the bottom. Phthalates are commonly found in beauty products and toiletries from shampoos, cosmetics, nail polish and fragrance and studies have cast suspicion on early exposure to phthalates and behavior problems later on. Plastics marked as 3, 6 and 7 are associated with potentially harmful toxins and should never be used for food.
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The potential for TSCA reform is quite exciting, but it should be done in a way that doesn’t sacrifice millions of animals (for toxicity testing) in the name of better protection for human health and the environment. The revised bill needs to mandate and create market incentives to use nonanimal methods and tests.
I agree that we should use the latest science to assess chemicals. Instead of poisoning animals and attempting to apply that data to humans — which hasn’t worked out so far — we need to make sure a reformed TSCA relies on modern human cell and computer-based methods that provide more accurate data on how a chemical acts on cells and what the impact on human health may be.