Public health should come first when regulating synthetic chemicals

Wednesday, December 22, 2010 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer
Tags: public health, synthetic chemicals, health news

(NaturalNews) A pair of prominent health researchers called for a drastic overhaul of how chemicals are regulated in the United States, during a presentation at the University of Minnesota.

Louis Guillette of the Medical University of South Carolina and Deborah Swackhamer of the University of Minnesota noted that in Europe, new chemicals are presumed harmful until proven safe. In the United States, however, any chemical is presumed safe until scientific tests show that it may cause harm -- tests that neither the government nor industry are usually in a hurry to perform, since regulating or even banning toxic substances can be very costly.

"We need to push our decision makers to really reverse this attitude," Swackhamer said.

Decades of releasing new chemicals into the environment with little oversight is taking a massive toll, Guillette warned. He was one of the first scientists to discover, back in the 1980s, that Florida alligators were not producing as many viable eggs as they previously had, an effect that was eventually traced to toxic chemicals.

"Fifty percent or more were dying, and that wasn't right," he said. "We kept coming back to what they were eating or drinking."

Even when the government does set standards for chemicals, the limitations are often inadequate and designed to favor industry. In their book The Food-Mood Connection, Gary Null and Amy McDonald quote Dr. Harold Buttram, who notes, "All the scientific literature emphasizes that the fetus and young children are far more vulnerable to toxic chemicals than adults are. And yet the government standards for limitations of pesticides are set by adult standards, which do not take into account the heightened susceptibility of children."

Guillette and Swackhamer suggest that consumers act now to limit their exposure to toxic chemicals. The easiest change to make is to avoid exposure to the hormone disruptors bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates by avoiding storing (or especially heating) food or beverages in plastic containers.

Sources for this story include: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web....