Issues Survey: Chemicals in our Kids
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 11. 9.07
Now that we are in the American election spin cycle, what would we ask the candidates if we could? What would we expect to hear? For the next few days you can do it at 10questions, but we will use a survey per week to look at issues big and obscure that we might want our candidates to think about.
We recently noted that the FDA has a long list of "grandfathered" chemicals that have been around for so long that they are assumed to be safe, and they go into stuff that we use on our kids, even though some are associated with brain and nervous system damage, hormone disruption, allergies and cancer. Many are common ingredients in baby shampoo, lotion, diaper cream, and sunscreen.
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i choose option 1, not because i think they should continue using the chemicals, nor because the increased price is an issue, but because they have been using them for generations with, to my knowledge, no negative effect. in essence, our parents and our selves were the tests.
i'm fine. my sibs are fine. my parents are fine. my kids are fine. everyone i know has used common products that contain this stuff and everyone is fine.
with EVERY product, organic, all natural, or not, there will be a percentage of people who react negatively. but, i've never heard of a negative case with baby shampoo.
so, if they choose to stop using this stuff, to create cleaner, more organic products, cheers to them, but if not,
The reality is that we are not fine. In children raised during that period...
sperm counts and motility are down in males
Thyroid disease and thyroid cancer are up.
type two diabetes has increased dramatically
obesity has increased
Many of these seem to be associated with persistant bio accumulative chemicals that are in all of our bodies such as PDBE's, mercury, PCBs and Dioxins. Our way of legislating in this country is to not ban anything unless it can be found to be the sole cause of a problem when adjusted for all other possible variables. This makes it very hard to pin down specific chemicals.
I believe in the Precautioary Principle. That if there is a chance that a chemical might affect our bodies, a sensible precaution might be to keep it out of our lives until it is proven safe. This is more in line with how Europe treats chemical and drug approval.
Otherwise, we are doing an human experiment on ourselves with no control group. Oh wait........ That is what we ARE doing.
Liz, you'll notice the rate of cancer and birth defects continues to climb. Someone gets cancer and dies, they don't always know WHY the cancer occured. Avoiding repeated exposure to carcenogenic chemicals is one way to better health, lower health care expenses, cleaner environement (food chain).
Plus, the FDA is corrupt. Trusting them is trusting the companies producing the chemicals.
I think it is interesting that the winner in this poll is "natural, organic, completely safe" which seems to disregard the fact that natural, organic chemicals can also be really unsafe... the precautionary principle must be applied equally to natural, organics.