Consumer Products

EPA's Plan Would Allow Industry to Pollute Communities with Dangerous Persistent Chemicals without Notifying the Public

On May 21, 1992 FDA issued a consumer warning that commercial "skin peel" products, advertised to remove wrinkles, blemishes, blotches and acne scars, could destroy the upper layers of the skin, causing severe burns, swelling, and pain.

More than 10,000 people a year die from asbestos disease, 5,000 of them from asbestos-caused lung cancer. It is precisely people like these, those most seriously harmed and dying from asbestos disease, that the Senate leadership has claimed to be helping with its series of asbestos trust fund bills. Few proposals have lived up to that claim, but the current proposal is perhaps the cruelest of all to date.

The Specter-Leahy Asbestos Bill allows residents of Libby, Montana, home of the notorious W.R. Grace vermiculite mine to sidestep the Byzantine criteria for assistance in the bill, and receive a guaranteed award of $400,000. The provision is notable, not so much for its special attention to the people of Libby, who by all accounts deserve the assistance, but in the absence of such care for any of the hundreds of communities around the country that received and processed thousands of tons of asbestos contaminated Libby vermiculite for decades.

The U.S. Senate's latest scheme to limit the liability of asbestos makers would cut benefits dramatically to people dying of the fatal asbestos cancer, mesothelioma, and pre-empt laws in 12 states, and court customs in at least 8 more, that guarantee a speedy trial to terminally ill plaintiffs.

As the Texas legislature considers controversial asbestos legislation that would restrict the legal rights of people injured by asbestos, hundreds of Texans continue to die of asbestos diseases each year.

An EWG science analysis shows that EPA's tilted risk assessment for DuPont's Teflon chemical will prove a shaky foundation for future health protection policies for the more than 95 percent of the American public carrying the chemical in their bloodstream.

Despite Teflon maker DuPont's longstanding claim that there are 'no known health effects' associated with its Teflon chemical PFOA, the company today announced that in a recently-completed worker study it found that PFOA exposures among Teflon plant workers were correlated with a 10 per cent increase in cholesterol.

The phaseout of two widely used chemicals will not protect Americans from exposure to brominated fire retardants linked to brain and nerve damage, according to nationwide tests of house dust.