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StumbleSUN EDITORIAL:
Ensuring product safety
Why chemicals on the market should be tested for potential health risks
Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2010 | 2:01 a.m.
Americans over the years have witnessed the dangers of relying on understaffed, underfunded federal agencies to regulate the safety of our workplaces, the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the toys we purchase for children. Fatal accidents, food poisoning and diseases could have been reduced, if not eliminated, had this country provided more funding and clout to agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Consumer Product Safety Commission and Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
As a consequence, we are confronted with chilling reports such as the one in May from the President’s Cancer Panel, which found that agencies haven’t done enough to protect Americans from toxic and cancer-causing substances because little is known about many of the nearly 80,000 chemicals on the market.
In a follow-up story Monday, The Washington Post focused on one of those chemicals, 2-methylnaphthalene, for which the FDA lacks scientific data. This is disconcerting because that chemical is suspected to be the cause of a strange taste and odor — and even cases of nausea and diarrhea — that forced Kellogg this summer to recall 28 million boxes of cereal.
The EPA also lacks information on the chemical in question, which is used in cereal packaging, even though the agency has been seeking that data from the chemical industry for 16 years, the Post reported. To wait that long for the industry to respond with information that could be used to better protect consumers is absurd.
Erik Olson, a food and consumer product safety expert for Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington, which advocates an overhaul of chemical laws, told the Post: “It is really troubling that you’ve got this form of naphthalene that’s produced in millions of pounds a year and we don’t have some of the basic information about how toxic it is. In so many cases, government agencies are missing data they need on even widely used chemicals about whether they pose a health risk.”
Although Republicans in Congress often complain that big business in this country is over-regulated, the virtual lack of information about the toxicity of chemicals found in food packaging and other everyday products is yet more proof that the opposite is the case. The reality is that the FDA, the EPA and other agencies don’t have the authority to require manufacturers to test the toxicity of all their chemicals.
This dates to 1976, when the Toxic Substances Control Act was passed. As the Post reported, this legislation exempted 62,000 commercially used chemicals from regulation, including 2-methylnaphthalene. Chemicals introduced to the public since then do not have to be tested for safety. In the case of the EPA, manufacturers with proof that a chemical poses a health or environmental problem are required to inform the agency. But manufacturers can simply refuse to test their chemicals, allowing them to claim that they do not have information on toxicity or cancer-causing potential.
This is a huge and troubling loophole that the Obama administration and Congress should close immediately. As the Post reported, pending legislation would force manufacturers to prove that new chemicals are safe before using them and would require health and safety assessments of existing chemicals. Until lawmakers approve such legislation, consumers will remain in the dark about whether many of the items they purchase for everyday use are truly safe.
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Foreign countries don't have to comply with our regulations and that's where most of our products come from these days.
That's what you need fusimmons is some whacky pills and whacky weed to cure you even if it's from a left wing nutty.
We used to have testing labs that would test everything that was to be sold on our economy. The fact is the Bush Administration defunded our testing labs and there were layoffs of technicians. Now these labs don't have the technicians to do the proper testing.
We lost these people when China started shipping crappy, no good, unsafe items, ha ha, just when we needed them most. The feds keep underfunding so it will get worse before it gets better.
In many cases what are good intended laws, such as the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, really just make a mess in the market. They create onerous requirements that crush small businesses who cannot afford the testing that is required. That law was responsible for millions of dollars of goods that 2nd hand stores had being destroyed (or maybe given away) because they could not afford to test things for children that they had for sale. But the laws are written as overly general and often with the help of large company lobbyists so that Mattel or Hasbro feels little impact but a small company has to stop producing due to the cost of compliance. And the Chinese can continue to send their heavy metal laden trinkets over here for our kids. They have the jobs and the money and we have the heavy metals. Seems like fair trade to me.
During the miserable failure administration of covert president cheney and his puppet bush regulatory agencies were gutted by non-funding and reduction in size to please that negative segment of the business community that wants to eat it's cake and have it as well.
They do not want to accept responsibility for their actions that do much harm to the American citizens and to the Environment.
Labor to them is just a product and has very little human value. They use their fancy algorithms to calculate how many deaths will occur and the costs of those deaths versus their increase in their greedy bottom line.
Over 100,000 people were killed by Vioxx because the manufactured faked the results of drug testing. That is just one example.
During the corrupt cheney/bush mis-administration drug companies were allowed to sell drugs for more than one cure, even though the data was not there to support such allegations.
The SEC funding was so drastically reduced and packed with political/business cronies, they could not do their job, or did not want to do their job. Just to copy some of their documents they had to go to Kinko's to copy documents when their copiers stopped working.
There was so many political/business cronies placed in governmental agencies that the agencies stopped functioning.
The problem still exists today within the Obama administration.
There needs to be a house cleaning to get all these corrupt and incompetent "Moles" out of "We the People's" government.
Not all corporations are bad. They are run by people,r, howeve and people, as we know, can behave well or poorly. The reason we have countless laws on the books limiting human behavior--laws prohibiting murder, theft, kidnapping, robbery, embezzlement, torture, etc.--is because we realize that some people cannot be trusted not to harm others.
The same is true for corporations. Cigarette corporations denied that their products caused death for decades. Now that the govt has raised taxes on cigarettes to discourage their use and have banned advertising in the U.S., sales are down and cigarette corporations have sought out new countries in order to sell them their addictive product that kills millions around the world.
http://www.biopsychiatry.com/tobacco/fir...
http://www.prwatch.org/node/9039
Other corporations might not go to that extreme, but the whole point of having regulations for products is the same as having regulations to limit harmful forms of human behavior--not all corporations can be trusted and unfortunately, a certain number of them are willing to harm us if there is a profit to be made or if their profits can be increased. Clearly, we cannot rely upon corporations to protect us or to regulate their own products.
Nor can we citizens do that--as we don't have the time or resources to test anything.
Only the government can do that.
And it should.
AP
This is a problem with the US. It is way behind the rest of the world in insuring chemical safety.
The EU has stricter chemical regulations than the US that requires testing of chemicals.
Other countries have exposure limits for over 6,000 chemical. The US only has 500 exposure limits.
Blaming foreign countries is stupid, because our import regulations limiting toxic imports don't exist.
US greedy corporation fight any type of chemical regulation in the US so they can continue to poison us and make lots of money.